Sizzling

Perhaps the biggest surprise of London's week in the Sun - bigger than Andy Murray losing at Wimbledon, bigger than the girls at work getting sunburned at lunchtime and then expressing surprise themselves because "we're not on holiday or anything", bigger even than Tim Henman's reasoned analysis of Michael Jackson's "status in pop history" - is that the trains didn't have the central heating on. As I have observed before, the heating on the trains seems to follow a calender all of its own, not bothering much in the colder months of Winter, puffing away enthusiastically in Spring and generally achieving peak performance sometime in May. With such an idiosyncratic sense of timing, I went into this week half expecting the trains to be full of hot air during my commute. But happily common sense seems to have prevailed - or perhaps the heating just broek down. Not that it hasn't been hot on the train. It most certainly has. Due to a couple of important business engagements, I've actually had to wear suits a couple of times this week, and let me tell you it was not pleasant.

Actually I avoided day one of the big scorcher, by going to Wigan on Monday. I hadn't ever been before, so that's one to cross off the list. I was half-tempted to follow the road to Wigan Pier, but there was traffic queueing to get on to the roudabout so I went to Skelmerdale instead. On Wednesday I had arrnged to go to Olympia for a trade show, so I had to put the suit on again along with the shoes that make a funny noise when I walk. It was uneventful, as these things go. Why are all these big conference venues so hard to get to? You could travel to the Midlands in not much longer than it takes to get from Marylebone to Kensington. And for Kensington High Street, one of the most fashionable and, let's face it, pricey, retail areas of London solely dependent on the District Line is surely someone's idea of a bad joke.

I decided on the way back across town to avoid the Tube, mindful of media speculation about the brain-meltingly high temperatures it might reach. I got on a bus, and what an interesting journey it proved. I went and sat up top, and settled down for an hour-long journey across London, passing Harrods, Harvey Nicks, the Albert Hall, Hyde Park, Marble Arch and Oxford Street, with the result that I now know WHY it takes so long to get to Kensington - it's really quite a long way. I had always put it down to the inefficiency of the transport network. I did manage to pick the only seat on the top level on to which the Sun shone directly, which was a shame and didn't do much for my perspiration levels. But at least that meant that, when I did get on the train home, people seemed not to want to crowd me.

It's been so hot this week that I even resorted to wearing a pair of shorts on Thursday. I'm not really one for hot weather, although after last Summer's gloom it has been a nice change. But can we got back to dull and overcast with occasional Sunny spells now, please?

An unplanned evening in Hertford

Having publically hailed the new train timetable as "genuinely innovative", it was only a matter of time before it caught me out. And as it turned out it wasn't very long at all. As I mentioned when last we spoke, you see, those scamps at First Capital Connect's Operational Headquarters, hidden away in some secret location in the Hert of Heartfordshire (see what I did there? Ho ho) have been adding extra stops, apparently at random, to individual services. It really does appear to be somewhat arbitrary, almost as if they've dropped the names into a hat and picked them out one at a time, rather like the old-fashioned FA Cup draws back in the early-90s before they went all Blankety-Blank, when Bert Milliichip and Graham Kelly would sit there self-consciously in front of an oak-pannelled wall and awkwardly rummage around in the velvet bags without so much as a smart one-liner. The thing is, what I hadn't noticed was that on some services they've really gone to town (so to speak) by sending them to totally new places that aren't even on the same route. I discovered this last week, on the way home from a pleasant evening in a pub near Kings Cross, when I found myself quite unexpectedly, pulling in to Hertford North at 10:20pm. And, equally unexpectedly, getting off there.

I had, as I mention, been to a pub, and had enjoyed a couple of drinks - nothing excessive and certainly nowhere near enough to render me less than compos mentis. I did get a dirty look from some guy in the seat in front of me on the train, which I thought at the time was down to me shouting into my mobile phone. When I got home, however, The Wife sweetly informed me that I smelt "like a brewery" which though most unfair, because firstly as I say I hadn't had much to drink, and secondly because breweries actually smell quite nice. I know - I've visited a couple. But I digress. When the train pulled in to its first stop, I was just coming off the phone and as I hung up I glanced out of the window and was rather surprised to find that we had stopped at Hertford North. Hertford North, you see, is (or was) on a different branch of the line from the beautiful market town where I reside, involving (or so I thought) a substantial cross-country detour. So I quite reasonably assumed that I must be on the wrong train (I hadn't checked the electronic boards before getting on, as I was running a bit late). I hastened to my feet, somewhat unsteadily (much to the amusement of the chap who had given me the dirty look, who clearly seemed to think I was under the influence), grabbed my bag and bounded for the door, leaping from the train just as the excitingly-named Hustle Alarm started to sound.

Glancing up at the electronic board (a quick learner, you see) I was dismayed to discover that I had falllen victim to the train company's ruse, and that the train I had got off, which was even now chugging out of the platform, was in fact headed for my home town. And as it turned out, there were no trains, either going back into London or headed to my destination, for almost an hour.

The only good thing to come out of it all is that I can now state definitively that Hertford is not a twenty-four hour town. That hour passed very slowly. And the toilets were locked.

Hooray for Common Sense

Summer is truly upon us. There are signs all around that barbecue season is about to take hold, but the most compelling of these has nothing to do with the weather. To a commuter, the surest sign of the changing of the seasons is surely the coming of a new train timetable. I don't actually know what fancy name they have dreamed up for the Summertine schedule. The timetable that comes into operation in the Autumn is known, charmingly, as the "Leaffall" timetable. But for its counterpart which hails the arrival of the Hayfever eeason there is no such moniker, nor does it get the big build up as happens at the end of September, when posters start appearing in odd places on the station concourse (just far enough away from the stairs that you don't actually notice them) fortelling the great and seismic change that will shortly be upon us, throwing all journey plans to the winds and causing a total of five commuters to be late for work.

The thing is, the reason nobody bothers to read the posters and signs is that, invariably, the new timetable is no different from the old one. Possibly a few trains may be several carriages shorter, or just that little bit slower, but in practice, as long as you are not one of those reckless types who times his arrival to the nanosecond that the train appears around the corner and chugs into the station (but nonetheless always manages to get a seat, natch, often due to a scant regard for the rules - the yellow line is there for a reason, you know), in which case, frankly, you deserve all you get, the new timetable makes not a jot of difference.

You know what's coming next, don't you?

Yes! You've guessed it. The new train timetable on the GN route is genuinely innovatively different. The thing is, whereas previosuly all trains stopped at exactly the same stations, so that the fast ones went straight from Stevenage into London and any poor bugger who happned to live at one of the calling points in between had to get on one of the appallingly overcrowded stoppers, the new timetable allocates one intermediate station per fast train, so that anyone living in Knebworth or Welwyn North gets the chance to actually get a seat. Brilliant. It will make me feel so much better on those occasions when I miss my own train and have to catch a slow one, where previously I have always been racked with guilt about taking up space.

A break from the norm

This isn't really on-brief for a commuting blog, but commuting has been uneventful recently so I'm going to take the opportunity to get something off my chest that's bothered me for a few years. That something is Shakespeare, or to be more precise, one of his lesser-known plays, Hamlet.

(Incidentally, it might be speculated that Hamlet was in fact a commuter, travelling regularly between Elsinore and his hairy-arsed student digs in Wittenberg, where he and his mate Horatio smoked dope and compared the size of each other's philosophy. His favoured mode of transport for these trips is not made clear, although the train hadn't been invented).

Coming through a conventional education for priveleged young boys, I had the (mis)fotune to study Hamlet at various different stages. What this of course meant is that any pleasure I might otherwise have taken in it was suffocated by hours of tedious analysis, picking over every single detail and every line,and then repeating as if by rote every stock cliche the teachers could come up with in answer to the heavily-trailed exam questions. One of those questions concerned the character of Gertrude, Hamlet's mother, and the object of lust and jealousy for (arguably) three of the main characters. The question was, was Getrude a scheming, power-crazed, two-timing hussy, or simply a weak-willed, rather pathetic little woman at the mercy of outrageous fortune?

The answer, so we were told, was that she was definitely the former, as revealed in a scene midway through the play when the mask slips a little bit as she gets frustrated with the pompous old fool Polonius and tells him to come to the point with her sharp rebuke "More matter with less art." The way she then goes on the grass on her son for killing the self-same pompous old fool (or "Good old man" as she refers to him), having just before been expressing he devotion to him, is further evidence, supposedly, of this Machiavellian, look-after-number-one approach.

Now aged seventeen I didn't know much of life beyond the confines of my sheltered, mollycoddled existence, and I certainly didn't understand people. As I have got older and progressed through a career which so far has been largely unspectacular with occasional peaks and troughs, I have come to appreciate the truth of one of Shakespeare's other observations, about men and women being merely players. So surely Gertrude doesn't have to be either a rat or a mouse. Is it not plausible to suggest that she may in fact have been just human, subject to the visscitudes of life and buffeted by fotune to the point where the difference between right and wong became blurred. To be fair, her husband, the King, had just died, and quite apart from the grief, she was in danger of being out of a job. Let's assume that the after-dinner speaking circuit in Denmark was not well-developed, and it becomes clear that the opportunities for an ex-Queen to forge a new career look somewhat bleak. Faced with the prospect of losing her home, her job and her status, and presumably feeling somewhat vulnerable anyway as a result of being newly-widowed, jumping into bed with the new King must have seemed a sensible thing to do. That he just happened to be her brother-in-law was neither here nor there, because no matter what Hamlet might think, it isn't incest.

There is of course still the problem of whether she knew the identiy of the murderer or not, and indeed whether she and Claudius were up to anything they shouldn't have been before the King died. Were she to be revealed as not only an adulterer but also an accomplice to a murder, that would paint a very different picture. But I would argue that her conduct throughout is not suggestive of a woman whose calculating, cold nature enabled her to be so in control of events. Getting her son's hairy-arsed student mates to spy on him seems unneccessarily complicated for someone so ambitious. And frankly if she wanted to cling on to power and start a new dynasty with the new king, why keep Hamlet around anyway? Surely he was just an inconvenience? Given the level of antipathy between Claudius and Hamlet it seems unlikely that the king would be keen fo his stepson/son-in-law to succeed to the throne anyway,so it would make sense to just get Hamlet out of the way.

That bedroom scene, where Queen and Prince get intimate enough to have academics eveywhere rubbing themselves with undisguised relish, doesn't exactly portray Gertrude as the cold, calculating type. She's forgotten that her son is going into exile, for one thing, which isn't what you would expect of someone manipulating events to her advantage. And dobbing Hamlet in for killing Polonius, well, after everything else that had happened she was probably just a bit fed up of unstable men in her life, not to mention a bit upset at having witnessed a stabbing in her bedroom (well, who wouldn't be?), so it probably seemed like the right thing to do.

My point is that there are few people, even in Shakespeare, who don't change direction according to the prevailing wind. When emotions run high, rational behaviour is hard, so I have made my peace with Gertrude, and refuse to condemn her either way for being carried along by the force of momentous events.

Top five commuting characters

1. Mobile phone woman:

A peripatetic agony aunt, this benevolent repository of relationship advice can often be found on early-eveing trains, tuttting sympathetically at intervals of five seconds or so, as her correspondent (so we assume) pours out her troubles on the other end of the line. Occasionaly interjects something more substantial along the lines of "Well he doesn't desrve you." or "Yeah but no but" etc

2. Ipod man:

I'm making a bit of a sweeping generalisation here - I'm sure many of them are bog-standard MP3 players and not over-priced gadgets from a certain computer company. Ipod man, though, is above generalisations. In fact, nothing makes much of an impression on him, because his senses have long since been dulled by the sheer thumping volume of the music on his headphones. Takes great pleasure in catching the eye of a fellow passenger and pretending not to be aware that his personal choice of tunes cn be heard three carriages away.

3. Crisp-eating person:

Crisp-eating person is, as the name suggests, not an individual of fixed gender. Rather, he/she is an archetype, whose role can be easily filled, and with a delicious sense of inevitability is usually filled, as soon as the person in the row in front opens a book and starts to read it. A distant relative of Popcorn man, that well-known denizen of the cinema.

4. Freesheet reader:

Freesheet reader is the fastest reader anywhere in the wolrd, who has taken skim-reading to another level. Freesheet reader doesn't so much skim as pass over, bouncing very occasionally on the surface like a seaplane about to land. Possesses an unhealthy interest in inane thirty-second interviews and star signs.

5. Bike man

One cannot forget or, alas, ignore Bike man, for the simple resaon that his bike manages to get in the way of every single passenger in the carriage. Bike man's bike never folds, as according to compsny policy on bicycles, and is therefore wheeled into the vestibule so that other people's legs and ankles can be assaulted.

Look, it's a lift okay?

I've signed up to a kind of self-help for bloggers course, and the first task I've been set is to come up with an Elevator Pitch (so-called because it should be concise yet persuasive enough for you to convince a buyer in the time it takes to share a lift with him) for my blog. So, here goes:

The Happy Commuter takes a sideways glance at the daily commute on an average suburban mainline railway, celebrating its customs, its unwritten rules and rituals, and most of all the cast of characters with whom I share my journey. My aim is to provide commuters themselves with a brief respite from their unremitting gloom by gently reminding them of the absurdity of fighting over an uncomfortable seat on a crowded train.

Hmm. Needs a bit of work. I'll come back to this. It's late. You see, in a twist both ironic and strangely fitting, I was delayed on my journey home tonight. There was a fatality at Finsbury Park, and everything was backed up coming out of Kings Cross.

"Valued customer"

Excitingly, I received my first proper grown up piece of direct mail from my rail company this week. It's a significant moment. It feels like our relationship has finally moved on to the next stage, after a courtship of seven years (I never was one to rush into relationships). We have both, it seems, accepted the inevitable, and recognised the symbiotic bond that links us, I the passenger, they the transport providers. After all, what is a transport provider without passengers to transport? If a tree falls in a deserted forest and all that. The point I'm somewhat clumsily making though (and this in fact follows directly from my last post about privatisation, which is not deliberate) is that I am no longer a faceless commuter. I am now a Valued Customer. I know, because it says so on the letter.

It is of course nice to be valued. However, I have to say I am not made to feel absolutely and completely valued by the rest of the text. "According to our records," it says, "you are a FCC Monthly Season Ticket holder or have been very recently." Now, most of that sentence I'm fine with. Indeed I applaud them for the perspicacity of their record-keeping (although as I say I have been a monthly season ticket holder for seven years, with the odd break for holidays, so its not as sharp as all that).

But "or have been very recently"? No, I'm sorry but I'm not having that. I am a FCC Monthly Season Ticket holder right now, FCC, and you should know that. How is this relationship going to work if you don't keep up to date with what's going on in my life. You expect me to stay abreast of what you're doing, developments in your world, and I do, but it can't all be one way. Is this not an equal relationship?

The letter then goes on to tell me about the Seats For You programme, which is apparently going to add 4000 more seats at peak times "from May" - I'm sure that deadline has moved. Which is all well and good, except that the train I regularly get in the mornings (again, see my previous post), which was a very handy time that allowed me to have breakfast with The Little Commuter and still get to work on time, has recently without warning been cut in half, reduced form eight coaches to four. It's not too hard to figure out why, because clearly having a train running at peak times that doesn't get completely full is clearly a waste of capacity that would be welcome elsewhere on one of the exceptionally crowded services. But it's the way they've just gone ahead and done it on the sly, without so much a tannoy announcement, as if this was always part of the plan, that gets me. They make a big song and dance about how well they're doing and how great we should all be feeling ("You've never had it so good" to quote that politician bloke) and then try to sneak little things through on the sly. I feel slighted.