The Importance of Rules

As I stood on over-crowded platform this morning waiting for the late-running train, my attention was wrenched away from my Monday morning newspaper by the sight of a chap marching along the very edge of the platform, ignoring the Yellow Line we are implored not to cross, in order to get himself in front of all those other poor sods who had prudently turned up early to get a prime spot. Rude? Definitely? But that is hardly the point - after all, as had been observed many times before, commuters were not put on this Earth to be nice to each other. But surely we should respect and abide by the rules - it's not like we're French footballers.

On getting on the train, I discovered a full size bicycle taking up most of the vestibule, despite clear signage forbidding the carrying of non-folding bikes. Then when I arrived at the opposite extremity of my journey, dismounting the Tube at the designated station, I found myself buffeted by people pushing past me to head up the wrong side of the staircase (it quite clearly says "Right Side Up"). "Can't you read?" I felt like shouting. But I didn't, obviously. Instead, I made my way through the melee, pondering the importance of rules, and why we should follow them.

Bill Bryson once wrote that Americans treat rules with the kind of reverence British people reserve for queues. Now as anyone who has waited in line at a cash point recently will attest, this statement may not mean as much as it used to. But the point he was making was that his fellow Americans, when they see a sign like "This side up", would dutifully comply in using that particular side exclusively to travel in an upward direction, even though they may do so with much shouting, swearing and maybe even a bit of shoving. Whether this holds true for American commuters I could not say, but it definitely is not the case for their British counterparts. On encountering any sort of regulation with regard to where they can sit, stand, queue or jostle, the instinctive reaction of the British commuter is one of suspicion - born of the unshakable conviction that everybody else, and especially those in authority, is out to get them. "What" we wonder "is in it for the train company here? What are they really trying to pull on me? What lies behind this rule?"

And of course we know that what lies behind it is the conspiracy, in which all are complicit - men, women, children, animals, even ticket collectors - to ensure that everyone else gets a better seat, gets off the train and eventually gets to work, more quickly and comfortably than us.

A Sure Thing? I don't think so.

An early start for me this morning, as I had a "breakfast meeting" (more meeting than breakfast, sadly). I might have expected my early bird efforts to be rewarded with a quieter train but no, it turns out I have been a comparatively late bird for all these months - the train was packed with the kind of hardy commuters I had all but forgotten since the arrival of The Litle Commuter - the type that in days past would get up before dawn's first light and battle through sleet and snow in order to get to school ahead of anyone else.

The truth is I do now leave the house half an hour later than I used to - it's not because I'm staying in bed, but because I like to see my boy in the morning, and it is not in his interests to get me out of the house promptly (he hasn't quite cottoned on to the whole "major breadwinner" thing yet).

So, as I was stood shoulder to shoulder with my fellow sardines (there's an analogy that doesn't work) my attention was drawn to a poster advertising a certain brand of deoderant. Now, I have been quite impressed with the quality of cleverness of on-board ads recently, so I can only assume that this was some clever self-parody. Honestly - it was like I has suddenly been transported back to the 1950s, when ads for washing powder used slogans like "For the wife who loves her husband."

What we had was this - a smart-looking guy in a shirt and tie standing on a train with his hand up in the air (it was head and shoulders only so you couldn't actually see the hand, but I assume he was holding on to something to steady himself). His armpit was utterly dry, and the copy said something about how the product kept you dryer than any other. This has been a popular theme over the last couple of years amongst manufacturers of personal care products like this (originality? No thanks). But for one thing, the guy was, to use football parlance, in acres of space, rather than being hemmed in by hordes of bad-tempered commuters. As any experienced commuter knows, the issue of sweaty armpits only becomes a problem, nay a social stigma, when you have somebody's face shoved up against it. I thought gritty realism was the thing these days?

The other thing that got was the guy's expression. He had a kind of lop-sided smile, suggesting that either he'd had a stroke or he was feeling incredibly pleased with himself because he had bought a deoderant that would stop his armpits from sweating and therefore cause hundreds of women to throw themselves at his feet. Assuming that it was not the former, the art director (or whoever it is who makes these sorts of decisions) must actually have chosen this expression from a selection of others). What is going on here? Even Lynx aren't being that unsubtle any more.

Delayed Reaction

I was going to write about my trip to Paris and the relative merits of the Eurostar and Paris Metro commuting, but something terribly exciting happened this morning which demands due attention. My train, having hitherto swept gracefully through the tranquil Hertfordshire countryside, ground to a halt somewhere in the vicinity of Haringey. What, we wondered, could be amiss? Had a tree up ahead shed its leaves on the line in honour of this week's launch of the "leaf fall" timetable? Could Sharon Shoesmith have decided to hijack the train in revenge for Haringey Council's treatment of her? No, announced the driver, with scant respect for narrative drama, it was that old chestnut "overhead line problems."

So far, so uninteresting, you might think. And you would be right, except that the driver then decided that he really needed someone to talk to and spent the ensuing forty-five minutes using his passengers as a kind of sounding board, giving us a rambling commentary on the progress of the delay (if you'll pardon the contradiction), and even at one stage treating us to a snippet of his radio communications with HQ ("Romeo 1, can you hear me, over?" - that sort of thing).

We were all listening with some amusement to his ongoing explications of nothing very much ("Just to keep you updated, I've not had an update" - Sky News would have been proud). But then things got really trippy, when he gloomily informed us that he had been instructed to get out and "check our pantographs." Say what? No one knew what he was on about, obviously, but it sounded jolly exciting, like something out of the Da Vinci code, maybe. Naturally I've done my research, and can reveal that according to the totally-reliable Wikipedia, the aforementioned pantograph is "the device that collects electric current from overhead lines for electric trains or trams." Had we but known that it was just a grand way of saying "overhead line problems" we would none of us have been so impressed, but as it was, my fellow passengers and I passed the rest of the journey in a ferment of excitement over what on Earth the driver could be about.

Things got weirder still. The brakes started to groan - not just that momentary groan you get when the train stops but a long, whining, pained groan that seemed portentous, like the Hades chorus in one of the classical Greek tragedies. Then the excitingly-named Hustle Alarm (that beeping you get when the doors close) started to sound intermittently, despite the fact that the doors remained motionless throughout. Was the train possessed? Were the Gremlins attacking (I realised, guiltily, that I had eaten after midnight)?

After three quarters of an hour, the train lurched back into life and our new best friend, the driver, whom we all felt we had got to know on a deep and meaningful level, apologised profusely for the delay. Suddenly we were pulling into Kings Cross and free to get on with the day, as if the whole surreal incident had been but a figment of the imagination, a dream. We looked and one another and found reassurance that it had all been real.

Adonis feature

I've just been watching Lord Adonis (whose name must surely be some sort of joke, right?) telling the Labour Party Conference about his vision for high-speed rail links between London, Birmingham, Leeds and Kircaldy (or something). He got quite worked up about the fact that we're so far behind every other country in Europe (well, France) when it comes to high-speed rail. Strangely enough, he blamed the Tories, despite the fact that it's been, ooh, eleven years since they were last in government, which is just about long enough to get a high-speed rail project off the ground, you'd think. Still, the important thing is, that now there's an election looming, the government have decided that enough is enough. No more excuses, this time it's really happening. High speed rail is roaring up the tracks, and it's going to put all those nasty low-cost airlines (particularly Ryanair) out of business. So yah boo sucks!

Zooming from one end of the country to the other in less time than it takes a Ryanair flight to get on to the runway is all very well, but if when we get to the other end we can't actually move because of gridlock it does rather defeat the point. I took a bus with some colleagues from one end of Baker Street to the other for to get some ice cream (I kid you not - give them a treadmill and they'll run all day long, but actually ask them to walk somewhere and they're struck by an aversion to using their legs). Wouldn't you know it, there were roadworks, and we got stuck at some traffic lights, and then some more roadworks. There was still some ice cream left when we got there, but it was a close run thing.

Driving me crazy (again)

News over the weekend that the government is to impose a price hike of two pence on a litre of fuel has caused outrage amongst the motoring community. Some outraged individual (actually I think he was something to do with the RAC Club) went on the radio to grumble about further persecution of the motorist, as seems to happen every time there's a rise in prices at the pump, pedestrianisation of a major town centre, roadworks, or bad weather.

The gist of what the guy said was that motoring is the dominant form of travel in the country (he actually said "not many people use the train" which I thought frankly laughable), and therefore drivers should be a protected species, coddled and cossetted and generally afforded preferential treatment whilst the rest of us pay the price.

It's hard not to feel a touch of schaudenfreude here, what with the announcement that, for the first time in many years, rail fares are not going to go up next year. Indeed, I'm pretty sure that the price of petrol has come down significantly over the last twelve months. The idea that the poor hard-up motorist doesn't get looked after the the government is ludicrous - the sheer amount of roadworks is testament to that. Have you see the M25 recently?

Now I'm hardly an eco-warrior - I drive a car (at weekends), own a big flatscreen telly and sometimes overfill the kettle. But surely there is an environmental argument here - viz cars cause more pollutions than trains or buses (on a strictly per-head basis) so motoring shouldn't be the cheapest option. Surely we should be encouraging more people to use public transport, or some other alternative form of transportation, and we all know that the way to a motorist's brain is through his/her pocket.

There was an outcry a couple of years back about a proposed "pay-as-you-throw" tax to try to tackle the volume of waste (specifically foodwaste) that people were producing. I thought it was a nifty idea - it would really have forced people to reappraise their behaviour and values. But it got canned because it would cause a storm of protest.

It just goes to show that people are very willing to jump on a bandwagon as long as they aren't the ones paying to keep it rolling.

The face of the free press

So Mr Murdoch has sounded the first bugle in what looks set to be the mass retreat from the sordid and frankly degrading mire of London's freesheet wars. Okay so I am getting a bit ahead of myself here: after all it's only theLondonpaper that's actually being canned, with the equally-derisory London Lite(weight) showing no sign of running out of steam just yet. But it's surely just a matter of time before that too is consigned to the fish and chip shop of history. After all, they were only ever vanity projects, two playground bullies trying to outdo each other in plumbing new journalistic depths, while proving that no matter what the more optimistic politicians may say, celebrity still matters. So the media landscape shifts once more. But just as significant for London's commuters could be the disappearance of the freesheet hawker, a hardy breed of pest that has gamely stalked the streets of the capital since the appallingly trashy comic books entered circulation around the time I started this blog.

I am prepared to admit that I may be being a little blinkered here, but it seems to me as if the freesheet hawkers do get an easier ride of it than their counterparts the chuggers. But I certainly always make the effort to make eye contact, and respond to having one of the ghastly things shoved in my face with a polite "No thank you." Is everyone so nice to them? Perhaps not, but there's none of that forced cheerfulness which the chuggers feel they have to display. Not for the freesheet hawker the extravagant gesture or the waving arms. No, the freesheet hawker mantains a sullen disposition, hugging his (or her) arms to his chest and firing a curt imprecation at each would-be customer as he juts a folder paper towards the hurrying figure. You get the feeling that the freesheet hawker really doesn't care whether the figure takes the paper or not - accept his offering and he will have one less to dispose of, but reject him and it is of no matter, there will soon be others to take your place. The freesheet hawkers are indifferent to you. To them, you are just a face in a crowd.

I for one intend to admire them while I still can.

Underground in Barcelona

I was on holiday last week, spending a few days in the wonderful city of Barcelona with The Family (that's The Wife, The Little Commuter and my parents-in-law, on this occasion). It was great and all that, but the most exciting aspect of the trip, at least from this blog's perpective, was getting up close and personal with Barcelona's very own version of the Tube.

If I was a bit underwhelmed at the prospect of travelling beneath Barcelona's narrow streets and spacious squares, relative veteran as I am of London's Tube system (not to mention a New York subway afficionado), I realised early on that I was in for a treat. My introduction to this mysterious netherworld came when we suddenly found ourselves confronted by an elevator which appeared as if by magic in the midst of a busy road intersection. It was a bit like that bit in Harry Potter when they go into a phone booth and - oh I can't remember, but you get the idea). Anyway, down we went in this lift, and found ourselves in a brightly-lit antechamber, before us a set of mechanical doors, sliding noiselessly back and forth like some portal to another world. Or something like that. I have to say that at this point my memory becomes somewhar blurred, not because of any myterious or nefarious goings on, but because I was trying in vain to fold up The Little Commuter's vehicle.

These things always cause me trouble, not having a natural affinity with mechanical devices. The Wife, with barely a hint of exasperation, had taken me through how it should be done a couple of times, but for some reason when I tried to duplicate her method, the vital clip just didn't seem to want to click into place, which meant that no sooner had I managed to fold the legs in towards the seat then the whole lot popped apart again, like a set of magnets which suddenly find their polarity reversed. Eventually, and with no help at all from The Wife, I'm pleased to say, I managed to subdue the thing, and proceeded through the mysterious portal, The Little Commuter perched on my arm.

We made our way on to the platform, without having to trek halfway across the city, as sometimes seems to be the case in London, and boarded the first train to find all manner of people practically begging me to take their seats, because I was holding a toddler. Again, this seemed strange to someone who travels regularly in our capital, where even heavily pregnant women are left standing because nobody looks up from their freesheets for long enough to notice them.

Oh, and when we got to our stop, we didn't have to go through that tiresome process of fumbling around for tickets to put through the barriers on the way out, the authorities having cunningly grasped the idea, which seems to elude their English counterparts, that we couldn't have got in without tickets, so there is no need to ask for them on the way out.