How the other half lives (part 3)

Civilised experiences are few and far between these days but they haven’t entirely been driven from these shores. The restaurant car on GNER is one of the last holdouts. The other half and I decided to escape London and its armed policemen and terrorists for a long weekend. We’d left it a bit late to book the train so we decided to shell out the extra wedge needed to lower the tone of the first class carriage, but you don’t need to be travelling first class to eat there (although we did get first dibs on the seats). We were sipping our first cup of coffee as the train glided out of Kings Cross so smoothly I thought at first it was the station that was departing instead of us.

The food doesn’t cost that much, if you’re used to London prices, and I have certainly paid more and eaten worse in restaurants that didn’t simultaneously take me to Scotland. The service is always excellent – cheerily brisk, but not quite veering over into annoyingly chipper. The coffee let the side down, but you have to admire the sight of someone not only pouring it on a moving train, but then going on to dish up a full English breakfast using silver service.

So anyway, there just wasn’t much to be disgruntled about, for which I apologise but I am on holiday. The only little cloud on the horizon is the sneaking thought that it’s just too good to last. Surely in the days of McStarbucks and TescoJet, china and glass and silver service and decent food cannot survive on trains. So, if you’re travelling up the east coast, forget driving or – heaven forbid – flying and get yourself onto GNER and have a meal before somebody notices and tries to ban it.

Total time wasted today: 0 minutes
Total time wasted today: 8 hours 6 minutes

If it’s Thursday, this must be London

So another Nervy Thursday successfully negotiated. There were police everywhere – including an armed one at Highbury and Islington this evening. That must be the first time I’ve seen anyone openly carrying a gun in this country since I was in Northern Ireland at the height of the troubles (where I found the army’s habit of using their rifle sights as telescopes to keep an eye on passing pedestrians rather disconcerting). Fortunately the guy at Highbury was just doing the ‘relaxed but vigilant’ standing around pose that they must teach them at Hendon and not pointing his weapon at anyone.

I was expecting the train to be a bit busier, full of tube refugees, but it was if anything quieter. The only difference was twice the number of bikes on the train and more than twice the number of cars on the road. I wonder how many extra cyclists have been killed on the streets of London since the bombing campaign began? It shows how bad we all are at judging risk that a bike seems safer than a train, even a train with a one-in-however-many trains there are in London risk of having a bomb in it. In the whole of my life in London I’ve known no-one – not one person, not during the whole of the IRA terror campaign or this one – who’s had so much as a hair ruffled by a terrorist bomb. But I’ve known two people killed and several seriously injured on their bikes. You do the maths. If the terrorists can’t get us by blowing us up wholesale, maybe they should just buy a load of old white vans and start picking us off one by one on the zebra crossings. The sad thing is, nobody would even notice.

I suppose I’m lucky. I’m taking the overground, not the tube most days. The terrorists are aiming to strike fear in the heart of London, so a half-forgotten train line that dribbles aimlessly round the north of the city is not going to be a high priority. My most overriding concern this evening was keeping track of what station we had got to without catching the eye of the garrulous drunk opposite who was trying to engage people in conversation about, variously, colour therapy, the IRA ceasefire, and the sayings of Thucydides – the latter a bit of a challenge to pronounce with a skinful. Maybe the reality hasn’t sunk in but I’m not yet frightened enough that a bicycle looks like a sensible alternative.

On the other hand, Silverlink and I passed a small yet important milestone today – a full working day wasted over the course of the last three months. It would matter more, I suppose, if I ever did anything productive at work.

Total time wasted today: 7 minutes
Total time wasted to date: 8 hours 6 minutes

Suited and Booted

A curious sight on the westbound platform this morning – a little knot of commuters all waiting inside the waiting room – albeit hovering just inside the door, no doubt trying to overcome the mysterious force that usually keeps people from entering.

A second glance solved the mystery. It was as miserable a cold wet July morning as you could ask for and not one of them was wearing a coat. A dilemma we are all wrestling with these days – whether to wear the coat and risk looking like a terrorist or forego the coat and catch hypothermia. It’s not particularly helped by having the station guarded again this morning by what looked like the world’s most bored policemen, just itching for someone to come in wearing a puffa jacket and a heavy beard. Don’t they know that puffa jackets are so last century? This year, we will all be wearing these.
(And boy is that the last time I will be typing ‘transparent plastic macs’ into Google… people get up to some funny things out there)

Total time wasted today: 4 minutes
Total time wasted to date: 7 hours 59 minutes

More Bobbies on the Beat

I’ll say one thing for the bombings, they’ve finally got Hackney’s finest out and about on the streets in numbers smaller than mob-handed. It used to be that even a routine ticket inspection at Hackney Downs was treated like a major drug bust*, with Police arriving in buses, and when you did see officers on foot they were generally moving around in groups of five in the sort of defensive formations you associate with Roman legionaries, except with more up to date body armour.

But all week there have been police-people dotted about. This morning there were three at Hackney Central (two large main policemen on the eastbound platform, one small emergency backup policewoman on the westbound) and there were two outside Dalston Kingsland this evening being jovial to small children. As they’re not actually on the trains, I’m not sure exactly what they’re for apart from providing a reassuring presence** and maybe looking out for people in unseasonably bulky winter coats***. So we’re all safe until autumn.

Meanwhile, a little paradox to ponder for police-people, Silverlink and bloggees alike. How come it is no longer safe for our platforms to have clear plastic bag litter bins, whereas the trains, which are confined and generally crowded, still have bins, and ones which you can’t actually see through? OK so they are so small one coke can and a copy of the Metro fills it up but there’s a shed load of space behind the bin where pretty much anything could be concealed. Consistent? I think not.

Total time wasted today: 8 minutes
Total time wasted to date: 7 hours 55 minutes

* although given the fragrant smell that emanates from the station at times, maybe it was
** as long as you’re not Brazilian
*** making them the fashion police

What I did in the summer holidays…

Walked onto the train this morning and sat down. On a seat. Of my choice.

Suddenly, without all the school children and teachers and half the parents, it was all a bit more civilised. I could get used to this.

Train was still late though.

Total time wasted today: 19 minutes
Total time wasted to date: 7 hours 47 minutes

May I have your attention please on the Eastbound Platform…

Radio 4 have just broadcast a classic little documentary on the people behind the automated voices that currently rule our lives. They didn’t interview the Silverlink woman although they did talk to the man who does most of the train station announcements. He seemed a mite offended that people had complained he wasn’t apologetic enough when cancelling their train, pointing out that he, too, had to take the train occasionally, and that he did feel sorry for people who were delayed. That isn’t quite the point of course. The point is that he’s just an actor, and having him apologise for a late running or cancelled train is not exactly what we want. It’s hardly his fault. What we want is the people responsible apologising – if not Japanese style with the company directors prostrating themselves full length on the platform (although that would be nice) – then at least in the name of the company rather than the slightly insulting ‘I’m sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused to your journey’. You’ve got to love the mealy-mouthed may in that sentence. Not only are we being apologised to by an ‘I’ who doesn’t exist except as an actor animated by a computer, but in the same breath they are doubting whether there’s anything worth apologising for at all. (My other half has just suggested an alternative wording for the late and cancelled train announcements but this is a family blog, and there’s been enough death and destruction in the last few weeks so I won’t repeat it.)

I didn’t mind too much when they put in automated announcements at Hackney Central because prior to that they just let us stew in silence. But I did feel sad when they replaced the live station announcements in Slough a few years ago with a robot voice. The woman who did the station announcements there seemed to take a real pride in her job and she did it beautifully. She had the cadence absolutely right – rising up at the name of the penultimate station, then down for the final destination – and I could (and did, sometimes though not voluntarily) have listened to her for hours. It’s not often you can witness someone doing their job well day in and day out, and there wasn’t much else to enjoy in Slough I can tell you. She also had the nous (which a computer will never learn) not to start a crucial station announcement just as a freight train was rumbling through. They missed a trick when they didn’t use her to record all of the announcements for the network but obviously some psychologist has worked out that the British respond best to a woman with a cut glass voice and a faintly bossy manner, just as BMW had to re-issue its German in car navigation system with a man’s voice because German drivers won’t take orders from a woman, even a virtual one (another gem from the Radio 4 programme).

And they say national differences are breaking down in the new Europe.

I packed my Bag, and in it I put

The essential survival kit for any London commute these days:

Fully charged mobile phone and the phone numbers of anyone you’ve ever met (for sending out all those ‘I’m alive’ text messages – don’t forget to put ICE in yours)
A to Z (for navigating yourself home from whatever god-forsaken spot you’re stuck in when the trains stop)
Comfy shoes (ditto)
Two pairs clean underwear (one pair on, in case they get you, one in the bag in case you have to actually take up one of your work colleagues’ kind offers of a bed for the night)
Work files (in case you’re stuck at home – optional)
Stout paperback (for those long delays – come back Harry Potter, all is forgiven)
Bottle of water and bar of chocolate (because you can never have too much of either in an emergency)
Torch (for getting out of tunnels)
Camera (in case you’re caught up in something interesting)
Piece of string (because you never know when a piece of string may come in handy)

Oh, and a bullet proof vest in case the police decide to start playing death tube with live bullets.

That’s a lot to lug around for a 45 minute journey. No wonder every single person on the train now seems to be carrying a backpack.

Now, where was it I left mine? …

Total time wasted today: 11 minutes
Total time wasted to date: 7 hours 28 minutes

History repeats itself …

…the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

It was deja vu all over again at the office today. The television on at work, clusters of people round computers, repeatedly refreshing the BBC news site as news filtered in of the carnage and disaster unfolding in Central London.

But that’s enough about the cricket.

Silverlink managed to stay upright this time, although trains were cancelled and running slowly. Their usual tactic of turning the late trains around when things get tough was unravelling a bit under the strain – at one point the live travel news site bore the cryptic message ‘NR forgot to turn the train around at Dalston’. NR – whoever or whatever you are – we commuters salute you.

I actually gained from the turnarounds this time – got off the District line at Gunnersbury and straight onto an empty, waiting eastbound train, past all the poor westbound commuters who had been evicted to make room for us. But things went downhill from there as the train slowed from its usual brisk walking pace to a deliberate crawl. The problem, apparently, was congestion in general and a freight train in front of us in particular. Bombs or no bombs, those rush deliveries of gravel (or nuclear waste?) still must get through.

Total time wasted today: 23 minutes
Total time wasted to date: 7 hours 17 minutes

Nothing to see here

So I’m getting off the bus this evening thinking, that’s funny, I could have sworn I had a cast iron blog subject to write about today but the trains were back to normal, little bit late, bus ride was uneventful, tube was … ah yes, the tube. You see I was back on the tube for the first time since the bombs went off (and no, I am not going to start calling it 7/7). And I was expecting a little something, you know some frisson, some sense of alertness, some moral dilemma (do I sit next to that sweating bearded gentleman of middle-eastern appearance clutching the big backpack or not?).

Nothing. Apart from the minor inconvenience of not being able to get my usual Picadilly line train to Russell Square, I’d almost forgotten about the whole thing. And in the heaving morass that is the Northern line any idea that you might be able to choose who to sit next to is laughable. That would require things like more than one spare seat, and the time to decide which one to sit in.

There were five of us meeting up; one came on a bike, one on a motorbike, the rest of us on the tube. So which of us was taking the greater risk? Well, put it this way, you don’t generally need a helmet to ride on the tube…

Total time wasted today: 4 minutes
Total time wasted to date: 6 hours 54 minutes

It started with a door …

… on the 7 am Richmond train, which was still sitting at the platform at Hackney Central when I got there at ten past. This time the door was jammed open, so everybody got out and we were treated to a master class in Silverlink door repair.
Step 1: stand there poking around saying into your mobile phone ‘I can’t press it because the door’s jammed open’.
Step 2: unscrew the panel at the top of the door and poke around inside that for a few minutes to no effect.
Step 3: Get an enormous crowbar from the cab and discover it’s no good for levering doors shut.
Step 4: gather all your Silverlink buddies onto the now empty train and sail off into the sunset leaving all the passengers on the platform because one open door on one carriage puts the whole bloody thing out of commission.

What we missed, while we were watching the fun and games with the door, was that Silverlink had now quietly cancelled both the 7:15 and the 7:20. By now the platform contained the entire contents of the broken train, plus the Hackney passengers for the next three, minus those people who had the sense to bail out at that point. It was so crowded that moving along the platform was like moving around inside a rush-hour train but with the added excitement of the open platform edge to contend with.

By the time the 7:30 arrived I was sitting on the steps in the early morning sun, blogging away furiously in my head and not yet all that bothered. I thought I’d let that train take the strain of the extra passengers, and get the next one. But the 7:30 was already packed, and greeted with a laugh of disbelief from the waiting crowd. It took ten minutes just to close the doors, and when the train pulled out there were still more passengers on the platform than I’d ever seen at the station before today. The 7:45 was the same – late, packed, and made later by the determination of people to get on the train any how they could. Two of the passengers had to be sharply shoved onto the train by people on the platform, and the doors pulled shut behind them – it’s not surprising so many of them stop working. By the time the 8 am arrived – ten minutes late – I was not the only person who had been waiting for a train for an hour and by now the mood was getting nasty. The crowd at the door I was waiting at degenerated into a shoving match, with people forcing themselves in regardless of whether people were trying to get out – one man using a rugby scrum move to butt himself into the crush. People started shouting and swearing and the only thing preventing a fight breaking out was that everybody’s arms were pinned to their sides, and I decided to bail out before the biting began.

I know when I’m beaten. The trains weren’t getting any less crowded and neither were the platforms and I didn’t want to be around when tempers were really lost and the shoving became dangerous. Because – as far as Silverlink was concerned – the trains were running normally again, there was no option to use my ticket on other services, always supposing there was another way to get to Kew from East London. So I called up work and took a Silverlink day – back into the fray tomorrow.

Total time wasted today: 1 hour, without even moving an inch
Total time wasted to date: 6 hours 50 minutes