Teenage Crush

What’s worse than having three teenagers drinking beer in the three-by-two seats opposite you on the way home? Answer, four teenagers, the female one having perched herself winningly on the knee of the least freakish and pizza-faced of the males. (sample conversation: ‘did you get my message?’ ‘nah, me phone’s off just tell me.’ ‘Look it’ll be in my out box I’ll just show it to you.’ OK, so those squeaky voices sound painful, but have they really lost most of their powers of speech?)

And what’s worse than that? when they lose track of one of their cans of beer and start groping about under the seat for it, with their dandruffy heads practically in your lap. And you realise while they are doing this that you have reached the age of teenage invisibility – too young yet to be feasibly one of their parents (except on certain selected council estates), yet too old to be considered as anything other than an inanimate object to be manoeuvred around when hanging out with their friends…

Anyway, I thought I might be getting into work on a rusty old train this morning, or even in a handcart, having half heard a story on the radio about SouthWest trains having to withdraw their rolling stock due to the automated train systems having letters too small by 3mm for the latest disability regulations. However my train, complete with dot-matrix display was as shiny and new as ever and having followed up the story I found it’s only a few trains and they were going in six months anyway. There may have been more but I have a rule: I never read past the point where someone says ‘it’s political correctness gone mad’ in any story. I find my blood pressure prefers it that way.

Des Res

Peering down from the top deck of a 59 bus last night the other half and I noticed a ‘for sale’ sign which some wag had left on top of the bus stop.

‘I wonder how much they want for that?’ I asked.
‘Good location.’
‘It’s a bit close to a busy road, though.’
‘Yeah, but great transport links…’

We could have gone on in that vein – in fact we probably did – but as the bus pulled away the guy in the front seat could bear it no more, turned round with a cheeky grin, and added, ‘Yeah, I went to look at it myself but found it was overlooked.’

We laughed, but for a moment I was disconcerted. He was breaking all the rules and he wasn’t even foreign, or a northerner. And then I remembered. We were talking about house prices. And that’s one conversation no Londoner can refrain from joining in …

Pint Sized Peril

It’s not just the policemen who are getting younger these days – it’s the commuters too. And by younger I don’t mean that they’re looking younger – I mean they are younger. I’ve got used to the secondary school kids that use the trains in the morning, and I suppose in a place like London it’s inevitable although it seems a shame that these kids not only have to suffer an additional five or six commuting years – something they’ll get enough of in their adult life – but that they have to do it on my train. But secondary school kids are one thing, primary school kids another. Surely the local primary schools can’t be so bad that your little Jemimas or Jacks have to get themselves a season ticket and a Metro habit aged five or six? Is it really worth it just so they can use a better brand of finger paints or get their phonics taught with Received Pronunciation instead of Estuary English? This morning I found myself colliding with an apparently invisible fellow commuter. I looked around and saw nobody until I heard a tiny voice say ‘Excuse me’, looked down and there was a little girl all dressed for school trying to follow her mother up the stairs to catch the train. At six you should be learning how to do French skipping or Scoubidou, not where the best place is to stand on platform three to get a seat.

I offer parents the following rule of thumb: if your child is small enough to form a trip hazard then he or she has no place among the thundering herds of London commuters. And if you really must drag them across five boroughs to get to school then on Health and Safety grounds alone you should make them a bit more visible to the rest of us. Wrap them up in that black and yellow tape they use at work to warn us of dangerous loose wires or torn carpet. Or better yet, tie a helium balloon to their wrists with ‘Danger! Look out, child below’ written on it.

That would cheer us all up.

This Train is Formed of …

…what? Chopped liver?

I hereby officially fail to understand the SouthWest Trains train-length policy. For the first few months I thought that whether we got a four-carriage or eight-carriage train was entirely a matter of luck and so was forced to listen through the entire endlessly drawn out announcement at Kew Bridge until it got to the bit where it told us how long the train was going to be. This is the important part because it means the difference between standing room only and room for everyone to sit down, spread out, and even tapdance in the aisles, so of course they like to prolong the agony – first we hear where the train is going, then we hear where it will stop, then we get a great long list of stations where the train is not going but which we could get to if we were prepared to change at Barnes. Only then does the automated voice announce with a happy little pre-programmed lilt up (if it’s eight) or a solemnly aplogetic inflection down (if it’s four) what our fate will be.

After prolonged study and experimentation I have now worked out that the long and short trains alternate and it’s not done purely on the whim of some minor deity, but just because there’s some pattern doesn’t mean there’s any logic to it. The short trains seem to carry no fewer passengers than the long ones (except when they physically can’t get on, as was happening yesterday). I can see that they can’t make all the trains eight cars long, nice as that would be, but I did wonder why they don’t just do the logical thing, average it out and give them all six carriages. No doubt there’s some deeply technical reason to do with rolling stock configuration and power units and axle loading ratios that I wouldn’t understand even with diagrams. And there’s another obvious solution, which is to get rid of the first class sections and make more room for everybody to sit down (including the poor sods you see every day standing in the first class sections – how galling must that be?) But since when did logic ever have anything to do with running trains?

Looking on the Bright Side

Things I love about getting up at 6:15 am to go to work after a week-long holiday:

1. The daylight seeping through my curtains and the gentle hiss of the rain against the windows wakes me naturally in tune with rhythms of the day

2. Coming to my senses standing in the shower with no real memory of how I had got there or whether I had washed my hair yet or not, is a bit like being on drugs although without any of the fun parts

3. er…

Who am I kidding? There is no bright side. I got out of the house this morning and realised that a whole week of lie-ins made only more piquant by the sound of small children downstairs murdering each other had been undone by one single oh-god hundred start. And there’s four more of those before the next weekend. It is clearly not possible to stock up on sleep. All that remains is for me to find some way of buying it …

Steal This Book

Ah, no, just kidding – buy this book:

Why? Because it’s got a story by me in it. Of course it’s published under my real name, not Disgruntled, so you’ll have to guess which one is by me (hint: I’m not Lynne Truss) which could mean reading all of them to work it out. But that’s not too terrible a chore because they’re all good stories and all worth reading anyway.

As a special incentive, if any of you do buy the book and email me the name of the story you think is mine (and get it right) I’ll personally sign your copy thereby halving its value. No guessing from people who actually know my name though – that would be cheating. You lot can just email me instead and tell me how wonderful it is…

I’m Sorry We Havant a Clue

There are many reasons why you wouldn’t want to fly a short haul trip to somewhere in Europe. Short of taking up aluminium smelting as a hobby there’s little you can do as an individual that’s more polluting than flying added to which there’s the whole strap-you-into-a-tin-can aspect of it and the fact that the only thing that’s keeping you up is the laws of physics, and we all know how much attention we paid to those in school. So when we planned a brief Easter break in the Pyrenees, the other half and I decided to go overland – or rather over sea. We could have spent 10 hours on the train going via Paris but decided instead to make the journey part of the holiday and took the ferry to Bilbao, rented a car in Spain and drove along the coast playing ‘guess which way this toll booth works?’ as we went. The boat was fine, we saw whales and dolphins and even some sunshine on both legs of the trip and managed to work out how to get from the place that the ferry companies call Bilbao to the place that the rest of the world (including our hire car company) considers to be Bilbao. We even, on the way back, escaped from the toils of the Bilbao one-way system unscathed – a system designed not so much to discourage driving in the town centre as to act as a sort of one-off course of driving aversion therapy: Jeremy Clarkson himself, having attempted to return a hire car to the handily central Bilbao train station car park, would probably have been found registering his oyster card and hopping on a bus the very next day. Anyway, thanks to a nice man called Javier who interrupted a lively discussion in a Bilbao disability employment office (don’t ask) between those who knew the way but spoke no English, and those who spoke English but didn’t know the way, and not only climbed into our car and gave us directions but also dispensed touristic advice and gave us his mobile phone number in case we had any further problems, we caught the train and the boat and arrived back at Portsmouth tanned, rested and ready for action.

Which was lucky. Because SouthWest Trains had decided to celebrate Earth Day (and a major home Portsmouth football game) by not running any trains between Portsmouth and Havant over the weekend. We and several large, loud, but fortunately happy football fans were forced onto replacement buses which took half an hour to grind back past the ferry terminal and a further half hour to get to Havant a whole four minutes after the London train had left. Feeling slightly less tanned and a whole lot less rested we finally got home four hours after arriving in Portsmouth. All this for 46 quid – that’s just the Portsmouth-London train – the price, I have no doubt, of an EasyJet flight to Toulouse. But then if we’d flown we would never have seen a Pilot Whale … we’d only have seen a pilot.

Breakfast of Champions

Due to a slight pre-holiday quantity surveying error in the disgruntled household, neither I nor the other half had any cereal left this morning. I’m not sure what the other half did, but I suspect it may have involved a Full English. As for myself I decided to avail myself of one of Vauxhall station’s two breakfasting opportunities.

Two? No, three, because recently a third breakfasting option has unveiled itself. Prior to its arrival there was the regular newsagent and coffee stand which offered unhealthy type breakfast pastries, and the Fair trade coffee stand with its unfeasibly complicated queuing system and its you-want-how-much-for-that? unhealthy type breakfast pastries (and something that claims to be a fat-free muffin which has got to be unhealthy just on taste grounds). The young upstart is a temporary looking stand offering healthy breakfasts called things like ‘Dr. Bircher’s Swiss Tradition’ and because of that (and the fact that it sells no coffee whatsoever) seems to have been completely shunned by the Vauxhall passenger body. Having had a closer look, despite being absolutely ravenous, I have to say I agree with them. When it comes to food the Swiss should have quit when they were ahead after inventing Toblerone. And besides I only had two quid which would have got me a small pot of yoghurt mixed with oatmeal (would that be a crunchy smoothie? or a smoothy crunchie?) whereas even at the fairtrade, organic, non-animal tested stall I could get a whole almond croissant for that and still have change for the Guardian. And even with my non-healthy breakfast I was still doing better than the guy opposite me on the train, who had a can of lager for his breakfast. Class.

Tomorrow is my blog birthday (yep, I’ve written a whole year’s worth of this drivel), but I won’t be posting because I will be all at sea. Back in a week, to fill you in with the details. Meanwhile, please chat amongst yourselves.

‘What is the point?’

Asked a colleague of mine as she stormed into work this morning half an hour later than usual, with a face like thunder, ‘of taking the District line down for a whole week only to make it worse?’ A good question, and one that ranks up there with ‘why am I here?’ and ‘Is this a dagger that I see before me with its handle to my hand?’ All I can surmise is that some time on Sunday evening a bunch of District line Engineers gathered to admire their freshly reassembled signals and then paused to wonder what all the leftover screws and other parts were that were lying around beside them. Before chucking them in the Thames before anybody else noticed. The end result is a black cloud hovering over the desk of any District line users who have suffered from non-appearance of Richmond trains and unexplained waits outside Gunnersbury. And as for the Silverlinkers, that hardened band, one of them had to get a taxi into work on Tuesday – surely the sign of a complete breakdown in a public transport system – and the other one had his wife ring up about three hours after he’d left home to see if he’d arrived yet, only to find that he hadn’t. Of course there could be other reasons for that …

All pertinent matters, and ones I would be raising with Bob Thorogood if only the email he helpfully sent me to warn me about the District line closures hadn’t had a return address that went something like ‘donotreply@sodoff.commuters.com’…

Getting the Hump

Someone’s been drawing on one of the roads on my route to the station. Either Lambeth has got the world’s least imaginative graffitti artists, or the surveyors are up to something – something that involves drawing lots of straight white lines across the road. My guess, given that the road contains a school, is that we’re about to be traffic calmed, whether we like it or not.

As a cyclist I’m agnostic about speed bumps. Of course anything that slows cars down around children has got to be a good thing, even if it does mean turning my formerly flat route into one with lots of hills albeit tiny little ones. But speed bumps only slow the average speed of the traffic: at any given moment any car you encounter will either be braking or accelerating furiously – and probably hitting (I chose that verb with care) a speed well over the speed limit between bumps in an attempt to make up for the time spent slowing down for the actual bump. Especially if there’s a cyclist around. When I used to cycle between Ealing Broadway and Kew there was a long long stretch of really vicious speed bumps. The cars just had to overtake me in between each bump (because that’s what cars do) never mind that I was cheerfully overtaking them every time they had to slow down for the humps or risk cracking their exhaust.

But the main problem with putting them on this road is that nobody speeds on it anyway. For a start it’s only about 100 yards long, and besides it is already pretty effectively calmed by dint of having lots of nice but narrow houses on it filled with nice people with nice but long cars so parking is at a premium and there is barely room enough for one car to pass through at a time. The only place a driver can speed without effectively de-wing-mirroring their car is … outside the school. For about 30 yards. Which, if I’ve read the runes correctly, is the only bit of the road they’re not planning on filling with bumps.