Hunting in packs

Is ther rhyme or reason, I wonder, behind the delpoyment of ticket inspectors by train companies and stations? It would be nice to think that there was some kind of strategy, some guiding hand that brings groups of ticket collectors together at a certain station to do their ticket-collecting thing. The fact that you never see just the one ticket collector anymore suggests that there must be a plan behind it all. But it's hard to credit that any coherent plan could be so seemingly random in they way it manages deployment. You can go for months (honestly) without seeing hide nor hair of a ticket inspector on any train. But then, all of a sudden, a group of them (And what is the collective terms? Gaggle? School? Herd? Who knows?) turn up out of nowhere and start "giving it the big I Am", demanding to see tickets which they never look at properly, giving out erroneous platform information and generally making nuisances of themselves.

This happened the other morning. I bounded joyously off the train at Finsbury Park (new job, you see) and charged down the steps to descend to the Underground station, only to encounter a Group (or perhaps a Gaggle) of burley TCs waiting at the top of the staircase. Why it needed five of them I don't know, because they seemed to function according to the well-known "coffee shop law" whereby the greater the number of staff, the longer it takes to perform the task. But it meant we all had to stop in our tracks and fumble around in our pockets for tickets we didn't normally need to show at this point in our journey, causing a bottleneck at the foot of the steps down from the platform and clogging everything up just in time for the next train to arrive and dispatch it's cargo of rush-hour traffic.

The following day, they were nowhere to be seen. Maybe they've been deployed to another station. Maybe, in fact, they are the only ticket inspectors on the whole network, and they get shunted around en masse every day, just to remind commuters that the Authorities are keeping an eye on them. No wonder you never see them in the same place twice - that's a lot of stations to get round.

200 years of progress

PROLOGUE - INT. RUSH HOUR TRAIN, LONDON – MORNING
ALFIE AND BERT, TICKET COLLECTORS, ADDRESS THE
CAMERA.

ALFIE:
Rail travel was one of the greatest
inventions of the Nineteenth Century. It
transformed British society from a
reactionary, class-ridden corner of the
Old World into the leader of the
industrial revolution, socially mobile and
ruler of half the globe. Rail travellers
were sophisticated, intellectually-elite,
and always got where they wanted to
go.

BERT:
Where did it all go wrong?

CAMERA PANS OUT AND WE SEE A PACKED COMMUTER TRAIN,
WITH ROWS OF NEWSPAPERS HELD ALOFT LIKE SHEILDS.
MOVES ALONG THE CARRIAGE ALIGHTING ON
THOMAS, 29, A WORLD-WEARY WELSH CONSERVATIVE,
WHO IS TRYING TO SIP COFFEE FROM A STYROFOAM CUP
WHILST STILL HOLDING UP HIS NEWSPAPER. IT SLOPS
OUT OF THE CAP AND HE NARROWLY AVOIDS GETTING IT
ON HIS TROUSERS, SHOWERING HIS BRIEFCASE INSTEAD.
HE MOPS IT WITH A SECTION FROM THE ‘PAPER.

CREDITS

New beginnings?

I've always maintained that my next job would be outside London. I maintained throughout my first proper job, and I've maintained it ever since, even to the extent of never buying an annual train pass just in case I found myself in some new, extra-capitular (new word that I've just made up and am quite proud of) job that would require me to cancel it and go through torture by red tape. I maintained it throughout the job I've happily held for the past four and a half years, telling anyone who cared to listen that once I was a family man I didn't want to be spending three hours a day on a train full of strangers.

Yesterday I started a new job. It will, I suspect, surprise no one to know that it is just over the road from my previous one. It isn't even a different bus stop. It's actually quite comforting - no matter what else changes, the commute remains constant. The Happy Commuter Rides Again. Or something.