A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall

After the conditions we’ve had so far this winter, I think I can safely say that I’m not one of those fair weather cyclists who gives up at the first hint of drizzle. (This is despite the fact that practically the only thing I can remember from A-level maths is the proof that you get just as wet, if not wetter, cycling or running in the rain as you do walking as long as the distance is the same. I can’t remember the precise details, but the gist of it was that you pass through the same volume of rain either way.) This morning I thought it was drizzle as usual, but it was only after I had donned all the kit, extricated my bike and set off that I realised that it was sleeting. By the time I’d arrived at Vauxhall there was more snow mixed in than rain and by the time I was walking in to work there was one, brief, magical moment when the rain stopped falling and started floating and I thought we were going to have proper snow …

It wasn’t to be, of course. Just sleet. There’s no excuse for sleet, really – it has absolutely no redeeming features whatsoever. It’s nature’s way of telling us that it could have snowed, if it wanted to, it just couldn’t be bothered. I think it’s my punishment for making scathing remarks about blizzards yesterday. I would put up with it all: the chaos, the cancelled trains, being stranded for two hours in West Hampstead, the complete grinding to a halt of the entire city, just to see a bit of snow – proper, settling, snow, the kind you can toboggan on.

Something for 2006, maybe?

Do you have a Reservation?

There’s nothing like a nice delayed train to take the edge off that post-holiday relaxed feeling. In our case yesterday’s GNER service from Berwick to London which managed to be 68 minutes late (sounds so much less delayed than 1 hour 8 minutes) without once mentioning the ‘S’ word. Yes, for as blizzards* repeatedly swept the east coast of Britain, GNER was falling back on old fashioned ‘train with technical problems’ and the old chestnut ‘awaiting a member of the train crew’ to account for its lateness.

But that wasn’t the real problem, nor was it the fact that wthey wanted to charge us 80 quid each to change our ticket to an earlier train so we ended up spending almost two hours in the Berwick station waiting room with only a poster apologising for a ‘phantom train’ that has been haunting the GNER Website to amuse us. Nor was it the blocked toilet (now statutory on long distance services) nor even the lack of catering services until Newcastle which – as the train ground to a halt in the thickening snow outside Morpeth – left me wondering if we were going to spend the rest of the holiday season waiting for rescue having to eke out a meagre existence on the pieces of chocolate Orange left over from our Christmas stockings.

No, the really bad part about this particular train journey, the thing that cut right to the heart of my timid British soul, was the fact that they hadn’t put out the little reservation slips on the seats. And this meant that when we climbed on at Berwick and attempted to claim our rightful places we found a mouthy northerner and his two daughters sitting in them. And we didn’t even have righteous indignation to come to our aid and stiffen our backbone, because he claimed that someone was sitting in their seats so that because he was too spineless to tell them to move, and we were too spineless to tell him to move, we ended up sitting in someone else’s seats as well. The end result was an entire train full of suppressed indignation and an anxious frisson at the approach of every station as everybody waited with bated breath to see if this was the stop where the one person who would actually insist on having their reserved seat would get on, resulting in one enormous game of musical chairs. Fortunately everybody was either too nice or too scared to insist and eventually the train crew announced that there were no reserved seats on this train and we could all relax.

Anyway GNER definitely gets my nomination for the least apologetic apology of 2005 as they announced – three minutes before the train was due to arrive at Berwick, having previously been shown as ‘on time’ – that the train had not yet left Edinburgh and ‘obviously, GNER apologises for this delay’. Not obvious from where I’m sitting, mate.

* Note to US readers: a UK blizzard is any snow shower in which the snow actually manages to settle. Note to UK readers: anywhere else in the world, a blizzard is an extreme snow storm with visibility reduced to about zero, with howling winds and where afterwards you have to find and then dig out your car, pets, and even your house from the resulting ten foot drifts.

‘Tis the Season …

… to get seriously worried about the rising tide of fairy lights threatening to engulf our land. Possibly literally. Everything I read about global warming these days seems to go like this:
Scientist: you know how we said that according to our models if we don’t cut carbon dioxide emissions by [insert some date comfortably in the future] we would all die in a pit of our own making?
Public and politicians: Yes…
Scientist: Well, it turns out our models were wrong
P & P: Phew
Scientist: It’s actually much much worse than that. It’s already too late. We’re all going to die. Possibly tomorrow.

Small islands in the Pacific have already disappeared. All the scary tipping points – melting permafrost, drying out peat bogs – are beginning to happen. The US has run out of letters to name hurricanes after. So what do we do? We go out and buy strings of flashing bulbs and musical snowmen and run the things all night outside our houses, where we can’t even see them. Archaeologists of the future dissecting the last dying days of our civilisation will shake their heads and murmur about death wishes. Kyoto protocols and tax on aviation fuel and encouraging people to use their cars less and building wind farms – those things are difficult and complicated and involve compromise and long negotiations and we don’t have time for them. But banning electricity-wasting Christmas decorations would be easy. Nobody would be inconvenienced, the fairy light factories could be converted to make low energy lightbulbs and we would save (according to the Institute of Physics) 1.6 million tonnes of carbon dioxide every year. And as an added bonus, I wouldn’t have to walk past the wretched singing santa outside the cafe at Vauxhall Cross every morning.

Anyway, there’s one set of flashing lights I wouldn’t mind seeing a bit more of at any time of the year – the jolly little orange ones on the sides of cars. This evening about half a dozen drivers took one look at me waiting to cross the junction at Kew Bridge, decided I was clearly psychic, and turned left without so much as a single flash of their indicators. How hard is it to turn on your indicators? Or does the little ticking noise interfere with your enjoyment of the music? Next time, just think how much more annoying it would be to have to stop, get out, and scrape bits of pedestrian off the front of your car.

This is my last blogging day before Christmas. Tomorrow I go up to Scotland in a convoluted journey involving trains, tubes, a taxi, picking up keys and a car at a secret location in Scotland and rendezvousing variously with a stray cousin, a crate of beer and the rest of my family. Happy Christmas to all my loyal readers and I shall be back after the festivities are safely over.

Classless Society

No sooner had John Prescott reignited the class war – in the Sunday Telegraph, no less – than he was joined by an unlikely ally: SouthWest Trains. The guard came over the tannoy this morning at Clapham Junction and reminded us that ‘the First Class carriage on this train has been declassified’, meaning that ordinary ticket holders could use it if they wished. This seems fair enough – I’ve never really understood why the commuter services even bother with first class carriages – but I suppose it would be a bit of a bummer if you had actually shelled out the extra wedge for the first class ticket and were looking forward to being able to spread out your Telegraph and harrumph in peace without the company of the rest of us proles.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Our reveries were disturbed on the train home this evening by the train coming to a rather abrupt stop outside Clapham Junction and, after a few minutes wait, the honeyed tones of the automatic train announcer saying, ‘will the guard please contact the driver’. (Amazing what they thought to record for these things …). This was followed up shortly afterwards by the slightly less honeyed tones of the driver asking the same thing, twice and, after another minute or two, the train gliding smoothly into the station and nothing more being said about it. Of course this meant I spent the rest of the journey wondering what was going on and, more importantly, why the driver and the guard didn’t have a better means of communication than shouting at each other over the tannoy.

Despite all this, the train was only three minutes late on arrival at Vauxhall and I learned yesterday that this counts as ‘on time’ as a train has to be five minutes late to be officially late. According to the Guardian G2 yesterday, using this measure (and counting the first three months of this year) Silverlink was more punctual than SouthWest Trains – 84% of trains on time versus 81%. I find that hard to believe. What I remember most clearly about Silverlink was its persistent, grinding, jaw-dropping lateness – there were weeks when I never caught a train that got in on time and even after they rejigged the schedules to give them a bit of slack after Willesden Junction the train was regularly late in the morning and reliably late in the evenings. I can only suppose that SouthWest trains has improved massively in the last few months, or that somebody, somewhere, is fiddling the figures.

Paranoia…

Am I the only person who is a bit paranoid now about doing anything on public transport that might be perceived in any way out of the ordinary? This morning I had to be in Earley, early* and I thought I had left enough time to catch the 7:20 from Waterloo (calling at just about everywhere) but I had forgotten that, this being a Monday, the queue at the ticket windows would be out the door. I managed to find the one ticket machine that had neither an out of order sign nor a queue but which wouldn’t take cards and found that its idea of a ten pound note (freshly pressed and delivered crisp and clean from a cash machine) and mine (crumpled rag found stuffed in my pocket) differed. With 30 seconds to go and the queue for the next machine four deep, I gritted my teeth, mentally apologised to all of the people I’d ever told off for not buying tickets, and sprinted for the train. Whereupon my bag flew open and everything in it fell out. With the pips going, I only had enough time to scrabble my possessions back together and leap through the nearest door, ticketless, flustered, in a hurry and fiddling with my backpack.

Which is when I remembered that I had confidently arranged to meet my colleague, who was joining the train at Twickenham, at the front of the train. And that I had 9p credit on my mobile, not even enough to send a text. The train was long enough that I couldn’t walk up the whole way on the inside and so this meant waiting for the next station, getting off, walking up the platform and then getting on again. Which is where the paranoia kicks in. I have another colleague at work who regularly misses his connection at Clapham Junction because he doesn’t want to be the bearded swarthy bloke sprinting through the station with a backpack on his back. And an article in the Guardian a couple of months back highlighted the story of someone who was arrested for such suspicious signs as ‘ignoring the armed policemen in the station’, ‘fiddling with his backpack’ and (I may be paraphrasing a trifle here) ‘looking a bit French’. I don’t know where getting on and off the same train rates in the suspicion stakes but it’s probably up there with being a Brazilian electrician…

Anyway none of this was helped by (or indeed excuses) the new, seasonal, and entirely patronising security announcement that they were playing on the Kew Bridge platform this evening. For one horrified moment I thought they were now playing adverts over the tannoy but no, it was just a reminder to remain vigilant and report to staff ‘if you see anything at all suspicious.’

Like what, exactly?

* Sorry, had to be done

Drunk in Charge

Stepping out into the cold air this evening, I was reminded that while it may be amusing to bring a novelty liqueur to the office Christmas party, it is not advisable actually to drink it. Those things are stronger than they look. Ah well, made for an interesting (as in the old Chinese curse) cycle ride home.

But I wasn’t the only one who’d had a few too many. I don’t know what automated train announcement voices drink, but the one on our train had reached the boringly repetitive stage and was still insisting to anyone who would listen that the next station was Clapham Junction even as we were pulling into Vauxhall.

Small Outbreak of Common Sense, Nobody Hurt

I was pleased to notice the other day that the last Routemaster, the 159, has been replaced by a proper double-decker bus, and not a bendy monstrosity. Does this mean somebody out there is listening?

And the train this evening came in with a window that was entirely shivered into fragments. Did they take the train out of service and disrupt the whole evening schedule? They did not. Somebody had carefully taped up the crazed glass with black-and-yellow striped tape so it couldn’t fall out and the train was able to continue. It wasn’t even running late.

What is going on? It must be Christmas … Normal service undoubtedly to resume tomorrow

Trapped!

As I got onto the platfrom this morning I was startled by a loud knocking noise coming from the train that was standing idly at platform 4, the platform no train ever seems to leave from. Someone was stuck on the empty train, unable to open the door. Fortunately one of the platform staff heard him and went down to the front of the train to alert the driver to let him out. Here he had a bit of a dilemma because the minute the doors became active, other passengers would try to get on, because we’re conditioned that way: see a train, try to get on the train, just in case it’s the last train we ever see (you never know). So the platform guy had to jog all the way back to the carriage where the passenger was trapped, with passengers beating themselves against the doors of train like moths around a candle all the way, wave his white plastic lollipop (I always wondered what those were for) at the driver until the doors were opened, let the guy out, and then get the doors closed again, all before any more passengers noticed and piled on. This time, taking no chances, the train pulled away before any more stowaways got on board.

But how did the first passenger get trapped on the train in the first place? And how long had he been stuck in the back sidings and byways of the SouthWest Trains network? You could spend a week in the environs of Clapham Junction and never be rescued, because in South London nobody can hear you scream …

More Haste Less Speed

Now that I’m back on the bike in the mornings I am beginning to wonder whether it is really saving me any time at all. Certainly when I was doing the long and weary trudge on foot each way it felt like the bike ought to be faster, but that wasn’t taking into account the following morning routine:

Hunt down various bike bits (gloves, jacket, lock, lights, bag) from the places where they were so carelessly strewn the night before

Remember to change batteries on front light. Find batteries. Open light. Break nail. Curse designer of light for not considering how the bottom row of batteries might be removed (remember when battery cases came with a little ribbon to pull the batteries out? Ah, happy days). Attack batteries with butter knife. Tip batteries over floor. Replace with new batteries. Remember to pick up old batteries before other half breaks neck.

Go outside, unlock bike. Drop bottom half of lock which falls into area with a clang to waken the dead. Curse. Wrestle bin out of the way. Down the stairs, trip over ‘To Let’ sign which letting agents haven’t picked up after three months, find bottom half of lock, reunite with top half of lock, drop on foot, put in bag.

Get left arm into bilious yellow jacket. Partially dislocate shoulder getting right arm into jacket. Half way through, at the point where it looks as though I’m escaping from a badly fitted dayglo strait-jacket, see neighbour. Cheerily greet neighbour. Neighbour ignores me apart from the startled look that says ‘Oh my God the madwoman’s talking to me’. Zip up jacket. Put on gloves.

Fit lights to bike. Find the one light setting that isn’t an annoying (and not technically street-legal) flashing. Attempt to close bag. Take off gloves. Close bag. Put on gloves. Realise I still have my keys in my teeth. Attempt to get keys in jeans pocket with gloves on. Fail. Put keys back in teeth. Take off gloves. Put keys in pocket. Put on gloves.

Pick up bike bodily and lift it out of the gate, attempting not to knock mudguard. Knock mudguard. Get on bike. Try to set off. Realise mudguard is jammed up against wheel. Almost fall over. Get off bike. Kick mudguard back into position, set off.

Cycle to station. That was the easy bit.

Do it all again at the other end. Check watch. I reckon I’m saving about three minutes each way…