meish dot org: life, unfolding

[I recently upgraded to a new phone. In the process of scrubbing things off the old handset, I found this word sketch of a tube journey home from an evening out a while back.]

Men on the northern line coming from the awards dinner I’ve just come from. I’m sober(ish), but they’re drooling on each other, discussing the best satellite porn channels and the acts they’re going to perform on their wives when they get home. It’s charming, in a ridiculous, pissed, shouty, colleaguey machismo bullshit obnoxious kind of way.

The bald northern one calls everything and everyone a cunt. The fat one apologises for him repeatedly, explaining “he’s from Leeds”, before leering at girls on adjacent seats and trying to persuade the other to stop off for a final pint at Charing Cross.

This, I feel, would be a bad move.

It seems that several pints, absinthe and champagne in (their words) “less time than it takes to have a wank” are a recipe for lurching, leering and idiocy.

“Have you got a mirror?” Baldy asks every female on the train. No-one has.

“Have I got bloodshot eyes?” he demands. He does, but no-one will tell him, because no-one wants to get involved. Wisely, it seems.

“You’re an ugly, fat cunt,” drools baldy.

“Yeah,” says fatty, “but at least I’ve still got hair”

Thank heaven for small mercies. And my stop.

For as long as I’ve lived in London, I’ve lived under the flight path.

That’s not saying much, of course - most of central, west and south-west London is affected by plane noise, as they circle over the suburbs, make a languid turn over Tower bridge and then approach to Heathrow along the Thames.

I remember standing on the school playing fields (when I should undoubtedly have been chasing a hockey ball or hustling to class) and looking up at planes not so far overhead, trying to identify the airline from the tail fin design. Alitalia. BA. Pan Am. SAS. Lufthansa. Countries in the sky.

For most of the last decade, I’ve lived directly under the flight path, in Mortlake by the river, which is the point where the wheels come down on the landing approach.

When we first moved here, I was hyper-aware of the planes. I’d wake up as the first flight droned overhead around 04.30, before dropping off again. And then, throughout the day and evening, every thirty seconds, they’d rumble over on their way to landing: loud enough that you’d miss a few seconds of important dialogue in the film you were watching, or have to pause your conversation for a spell. Before Concorde stopped flying, the air would be thunderous for nearly a minute as it slid overhead.

Yet most of the time, I didn’t mind the planes. They reminded me that up above, people were about three minutes from landing - homecomings, holidays, greetings and meetings. Three minutes before landing, everything is put away and switched off. There’s nothing to do but look out of the window at the huge expanse of London below and anticipate the moment when you’ll touch down. It’s nice to sit in my study, or in the back garden, or lie in bed and think of people in a suspended, anticipatory, excited state above, just moments from an arrival.

And I’ve been in those planes, too. I purposefully sit by the window when returning to London, usually on the right of the plane, so I can drink in the sparkling city. And what a welcome home.

Greenwich. Tower bridge. Cannon Street. Waterloo. Green Park. Hyde Park and the Royal Albert Hall. The Empress building. Queen’s Club. Hammersmith bridge. Leg o’mutton nature reserve at Barnes. My house, by the bend in the river. Dukes Meadows driving range. Brentford. Hounslow. Heathrow. Home.

In the months after September 11, 2001, the sound of planes took on a different edge. More menacing. Despite the fact that they were still just tootling along toward the landing runway, sometimes the noise sounded surprisingly loud - Too loud? Too low?

And there were other concerns, too - we can’t shop in our local Sainsbury’s without thinking of the tragic tale of the man who fell to earth - a story that sounds apocryphal, but horrifyingly, happened. More than once. Knowing that certainly lends an edge to doing your weekly shop. We glance nervously at the passing planes sometimes, too.

I woke yesterday morning to the sound of birds in the trees outside the window, and wondered what was missing. It took a while to realise the absence of planes made this place feel different.

It’s been a strange combination of eerie and delightful these last few days having no plane noise at all.

No contrails. No regular rumble overhead. Because there are no planes.

The atmosphere over most of Europe, they tell us, is full of dangerous ash. And yet the skies seem so beautifully, strangely empty.

Not to underplay the serious inconvenience caused by inclement meteorological conditions to some parts of the UK, but I’d just like to take a moment to reflect on this typically calm and understated headline from yesterday’s London Evening Standard:

A few points.

If you’re still measuring the snow in inches rather than feet or yards, it’s not an “extreme” weather event, it’s a “bothersome” one. The words “extreme weather” should apply to total snowmageddon, not tobogganing & a bit of a whinge about slippery pavements.

“Extreme weather” seems like a rather odd overstatement by the Met Office. It brings to mind scenes from The Day After Tomorrow. Epic, unbelievable, unusual weather with catastrophic effects.

Hurricane Katrina was extreme. The 1988 ice storm in Quebec was extreme. The heatwave + drought + bushfires in SE Australia in early 2009 were extreme.

In this photo, taken during last night’s snow, you can still see the cars.

This is a good indication that it’s not an extreme weather event. Yet. Whatever the hysteria from media and transport providers may otherwise indicate.

OK, it doesn’t snow often in London, but it does snow in southern England in winter sometimes, and in northern England and Scotland more often. So it’s not that weird.

We can be forgiven for being underprepared for a long stint of cold or inclement weather (hot, cold…) because most of the time, this country is just a bit middling, weather-wise. But we have no excuse for over-reacting and creating blanket hype and pointless coverage about extreme hardship and crisis caused by some seasonally-expected wet white stuff. Breaking news: snow happens in winter.

Snowpocalypse by antimega

(My favourite example of this was yesterday, when my local train service provider, SouthWest Trains, cancelled a number of services for today in advance because of the weather, which I thought was particularly brilliant considering it hadn’t even snowed yet. It was almost like they were saying “we know that however much it snows, we’re not going to be able to cope”)

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Sorry for the recent silence: I’ve been on the road a bit - or rather, on the rails. First, a dash around the country, taking in Cardiff, Leeds and Edinburgh in the space of 4 days, and then a week later, I took the Caledonian sleeper to Fort William, which was a first for me, and highly recommended.

Oh it’s very pleasant when you have found your little den
With your name written up on the door.

And the berth is very neat with a newly folded sheet
And there’s not a speck of dust on the floor.

There is every sort of light - you can make it dark or bright;
There’s a button that you turn to make a breeze.

There’s a funny little basin you’re supposed to wash your face in
And a crank to shut the window if you sneeze.

Then the guard looks in politely and will ask you very brightly
`do you like your morning tea weak or strong?’…

[Poem: TS Eliot's Skimbleshanks, of course]

And this is what you wake up to the next morning:

[The following is from a mail I wrote to someone who asked how I'd booked it and what it was like]

There are four sleeper services to Scotland that I know of, between London and:

– Glasgow
– Inverness
– Aberdeen
– Fort William

The Glasgow service leaves London very late - 11.15pm or so, I think - and arrives into Glasgow around 6.40am. This is a bit of a problem because then you’re stuck in Glasgow before breakfast, so if that’s where you’re going, I’d recommend taking a daytime train. London - Edinburgh is about 4 hours, and Lon-Gla is about 5 during the day.

But if you’re going further north, then the sleeper is a good option, in at least one direction (I took the sleeper up and then a daytime train back down - it’s possible to do the journey from Oban - London in a day, but it’s a lot of sitting on trains!)

The sleeper I took left London at 9.15pm, and arrived in Ft William about 9.45am. Clearly it didn’t take that long to do the journey, but the train was moving (slowly) for most of the time, stopping a few times in sidings for 30 mins or so. It’s one big long train until Edinburgh when it splits into the three sections - Aberdeen, Inverness, Fort William. I was asleep for most of it, though I was vaguely aware of waking up at one point, peering out of the window and finding myself at Edinburgh Waverley station.

I think the route is something like: London Euston - Watford - Crewe - Birmingham - Preston - Carlisle - Edinburgh - Crianlarich - Rannoch - Fort William.

I woke up about 8am with breakfast being delivered to my cabin, which I ate looking out over Rannoch Moor - a stunning bit of the world.

In terms of photos, I took most of the pics through the (rather grubby) window of the carriage, either in my berth or in the seating car a little further down the train. The secret is to take lots and lots and lots of shots, and one is bound to come out well eventually.

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Given that I currently spend a minimum of two and a half hours in transit every day, I’ve been pondering for a while whether there’s a particular thing that would improve my commute.

Certainly less time on public transport would be a boon, but would unfortunately mean living somewhere either entirely unaffordable or unsavoury, neither of which I’m keen to do.

So in the absence of cutting the time spent down, I’ve been wondering whether the addition or removal of anything specific might actually make the whole thing more tolerable.

The short list so far includes:

• Air conditioning on the tube: not a big thing at the moment, and I understand there’s work under way, but some of the lines - the Victoria, mainly - do seem to get ever so fetid in summer rush hours
• Turning off the heating on London bus services: I know that it’s probably related to the engine of the bus, but there’s been times on my twice-daily bustrek that I’ve been sure I could smell something singeing. Like human flesh. Forty years ago, we managed to put a man on the moon. Are we seriously unable to stop grilles pumping out heat on buses during the hottest part of the year?
• People shutting up on the tube: I know it’s a bit anti-social, but on the longest bit of the tube journey, I generally try and read, and if people are shouting at each other in English, Spanish, French or German, I find it enormously distracting, no matter how loud the music in my ears is. So sometimes I wish they’d SHUSH or (better and less grumpy) that there was a dedicated reading/quiet carriage, like on long-distance trains.
• Less human chaos in and around King’s Cross Underground station: I know they’re redeveloping it at the moment, but the fact that there’s only one main entrance/exit which is around a hairpin corner from the ticket gates means that every day - without fail - is a seething mass of bewildered tourists and idiots dragging suitcases behind them and tripping people up while looking for the right exit for the Eurostar, all bottlenecked into a pretty narrow space.

  Plus don’t get me started on the poor escalator and platform etiquette I observe daily - standing still in the “fast lane” or in the doorway to a platform is still one of the quickest ways to get punched in the back of the head in London. Fact.

  In fact, I feel that a general reduction in human idiocy between stepping off the tube and stepping into the office would be a massive (but unlikely) improvement: the main problem here is that I work close to a major transport hub, so all human life is there, albeit mainly just standing about gormlessly and smoking.

  And on a related point, whose bloody stupid idea was it to put a major bus stop on a bit of pavement just around the corner from the station on York Way? The pavement is so narrow and there are regularly 100+ people waiting for the next bus to trundle along, and since they’re not as well-versed in the art of queueing as their W/SW London compatriots, that makes it impossible to actually walk down the pavement, which instead means anyone wishing to do so needs to make a detour into the (three lane, busy) road, which can’t be a long-term good idea.

All of these things are irritating, and removal/refinement/improvement in each area would doubtless improve both the experience of commuting and the state of my mood when I arrive in the office or back at home.

But after much consideration, I must conclude that the single thing that would improve my commute - and, I’m sure, that of countless other poor souls in London - is some sort of ASBO preventing people in branded T-shirts from handing out free commuter newspapers while standing in the middle of the pavement.

I appreciate that their job is to hand out free newspapers, but standing in the middle of a busy public thoroughfare, desperately thrusting free sheets into the hands of harassed commuters may well be an effective way of dispensing resources but it’s a remarkably piss-poor strategy for making people feel well-minded towards the companies who instruct their minions to do so.

Every evening is like a gauntlet of dodging the eager profferings of these branded thrusters. It’s not enough that I don’t actually want to take one of their papers - I still have to dodge and swerve around them as they slow traffic by standing directly in front of the entrance to the station, or in the middle of the pavement, or at the point at which the pelican crossing disgorges onto the main pavement from the road.

I don’t blame the individuals, but I do wish I could get a message to their shift supervisor, or whoever instructs them in the tactics of their tasks.

So here’s a message, specifically to whoever’s in charge of distribution training at thelondonpaper and London Lite, in the hope that this mention will get picked up by their social media signal filters:

Tell your uniformed distributors to stand beside rather than in the flow of foot traffic around major stations and busy areas.

If you don’t, I’m going to report them - and you - for causing an obstruction and endangering safety on the public highway, and start a campaign to get your antisocial tactics banned altogether.

Here endeth the rant.

On the tube, they cannot let go of each other. There must always be something touching - thighs; fingers; shoulders; lips.

When a single seat becomes available, he urges her to take it and then hovers in front of her. She reaches out; they touch.

Father is reading a battered HP Lovecraft. His hems hitch up to mid calf when he sits down, exposing an inch of pallid flesh between black sock and trouserleg. He forages in his hand luggage and extracts a pair of expensive sound-cancelling headphones from the depths. Snapping them over his ears so the soft pads flatten the white whiskers of his beard, he announces to his travelling companions: “excuse me while I disappear into sonic isolation.”

They roll their eyes at each other, as if this is the kind of thing he does all the time.

Daughter is dressed for work, and reading the inflight magazine for Andromeda Spaceways. Her neat work bag and casual shoes contrast with her parents, who are kitted out for a journey. She is in commute mode: unmoveable, unflappable, undisturbable.

Mother is a rummager. She ferrets in the big blue bag for a while, then (having retrieved a pen), hands it to father across the aisle. He grumps from within his cone of silence and bundles it on his knee, balancing the rear weight of it on his leather bumbag. She continues fossicking deep within the black bag with the corporate travel luggage tag. Whatever she’s looking for, it’s in there somewhere.

For two stops she roots about in the overstuffed knapsack, feeling her way for the prize.

Glancing around the carriage distractedly, father’s eyes light on her quizzical rummaging and offer an eyebrow of help. She shakes her head and switches hand.

Just….maybe…..aha! From the bowels of the bag, she draws a tatty lime green exercise book, complete with a printed table of mathematical and computing functions on the back cover. Then she has a micro-rummage for the pen again, before using it to make a note in the book. Then book is slid back into the coccoon of the black bag, and she taps father on the knee and beckons for the blue bag again. Pen is returned to the depths of the blue, and all is calm.

Distracted from HP Lovecraft, father glances to check the safety of the suitcases, then fingers flit to breast pocket of his crisp white shirt to feel for the tickets, check that they are where they should be.

They are safe. Their journey is under way. The train rumbles them towards departures.

I’m not a hugely crafty person, and I’m rubbish at finishing massive projects (no time!), but I can’t resist tinkering with things, and I’m a huge map fiend, so I came up with a little crafty project a little while back that even someone with limited crafty talent (i.e. me) would be able to manage: a cross-stitch version of the tube map.

My love/hate relationship with public transport is well documented which made this even more attractive. But if that wasn’t enough, my reasoning was this:

1. It’s all straight lines
2. and blobs for the stations
3. and easy angles
4. it’s already laid out on a grid structure
5. Beck’s simple graphic design means it uses set angles, thicknesses and colours
6. Instantly recognisable, even without any words on it
7. I live in London and take the tube every day
8. It’s just mindless enough to be able to do without full attention i.e. while watching a DVD box set or something on telly

So, here’s how I did it:

1. I got a tube map from the TFL site
2. cropped it to the central zone (basically zone 1 + a chunk of zone 2)
3. in photoshop, erased all the station names
4. still in photoshop, increased contrast
5. used mosaic filter to transform image into 5×5 blocks
6. added a 5×5 grid over the top
7. blanked any squares with partial colour in them (this meant shifting some stations slightly to the left or right)
8. simplified the pattern by filling in boxes with block colour (e.g. stations)
9. went to local craft/knitting shop and selected some embroidery silks based on tubeline colours (not exact, but I can live with approximation)
10. sewed a purple perimeter border which looks decorative but which actually made it easier to count off stitches inside the grid
11. annotated a printed version of the map, with square counts (between stations, for example)
12. started in the bottom right hand corner with the H&C (pink) line and then worked my way around the map, line by line
13. I left all the stations until the end

So here’s the pattern, in case anyone else wants to have a go:

And here’s the (nearly) finished result:

For reference, it’s roughly A4 size, using 14-count Aida fabric (which I got from John Lewis).

It’s not perfect - there are some small counting errors in there, so I had to get a bit liberal with some of the joining angles, especially towards East London, and the stations are a bit square - but it’s not bad for a freehand thing, and a first attempt.

All in all, I’m pretty chuffed.

You can see I’m in the process of adding a border to it, to secure the edges, and I’ve still got to fill in the Thames before I can frame it or turn it into a cushion, but it’s too nice outside today…

From the top of the bus this morning, I saw

• A couple wearing suits, canoodling hungrily within the dark cave of a speeding cab on Waterloo Bridge. He holds her face tenderly as he laps at her upturned mouth; her fingers splay on his pinstriped knee; a phone sits on the seat behind the distracted flap of her sensible skirt.
• A german tourist bus rounding the corner near the Strand and, from the shiny windows which bank the sides, twenty round lenses peering up at Somerset House roof while a bored guide in lemon transfers the mic to her other hand so she can point, and gives her commentary in the background.
• A family with parents in jumpers and children in neon-bright shalwaar kameez holding hands and elbows and clutches of documents as they skitter together across the road at Aldwych.
• Three men in pink striped/checked/plain shirts and spiky overgelled hair hovering near a turnstile lobby entrance on Kingsway, each propped against a wall or pillar, independently comtemplating their morning smoke, overlooked by a bank of CCTV cameras, impatiently blinking.
• A bald man in a striped t-shirt with his belly poking out, a ten-o’clock shadow and a half-burnt cigarette smouldering tight between his fingers stopping mid-pavement at Red Lion Square to devote his full attention to the front cover of the tabloid he’s reading. Behind and before him, a current of crotchety commuters tuts and splits around him, rejoining the flow on the other side, but he is oblivious, transfixed.
• A girl in soft shoes, exercise tights and jersey top, smoking on a step near the ballet school off Grays Inn Road. As she talks, she picks distractedly at the nape of her neck, releasing painful strands of mousy hair from a tightly scraped-back, regimentedly high bun, and flexes her toes in the sunshine

One of the things about taking a train into central London rather than bus/tube, is that I’ve noticed certain cultural incidents which pass poor tube-travellers by. Namely: there appears to be some sort of pissing contest going on (not literally) (though it’s possible, of course) between rival estate agents in South West London.

How do we know this? Well, on the SWTrains route into Waterloo, there’s a succession of stations sponsored by estate agents all adopting slogans bragging about how innovative they are, each trying to out-do the last.

Leaving aside for the moment the issue of whether “innovation” in the context of estate agents is another term for “underhandness” “deviousness” or jus plain “lying”, I wonder what petty feud might have erupted to cause this outbreak of marketing.

The series reads thus:

Putney
Home of ____: London’s most innovative estate agents

Wandsworth Town
Home of ____ estate agents: more innovative than the rest!

Clapham Junction
Home of ____: Call that innovation? You oughta be ashamed

Queenstown Rd
Home of ____ estate agents: We SHIT innovation

Vauxhall
Home of ____: Innovating all over YO MOMMA

On reflection, it’s a jolly good thing that Waterloo is the end of the line, otherwise I fear things might have erupted into violence (or the dead-eyed, nylon-suited, hairgelled equivalent).