Gack

Can anyone explain why someone might want to eat a prawn-cocktail flavour Snack-a-Jack? And, having eaten one, go on to eat the rest of the pack? I’ve never got this whole low-fat snack thing in general – didn’t anybody’s mother tell them simply not to eat between meals if they want to lose weight? – but I had assumed that they worked by tasting a bit like the real thing, or at least enough so that you didn’t immediately run off and buy a multi-pack of Walkers crisps and scoff the lot to get the taste out of your mouth. But then this woman sat down next to me on the train and opened a packet of the dreadful things and this smell wafted across my nose – a smell so nasty and chemical that my first thought was that the train was on fire and that someone had tried to put it out with a bucket of Dettol. She was eating them by picking one out of the packet and staring at it in horror, then putting it in her mouth with an expression of disgust on her face. Having choked that one down she paused to let the trauma recede, steeled herself, and reached in for the next. It took from Barnes Bridge to Clapham Junction and all the while I was having to restrain myself from turning round and checking to make sure that the train really wasn’t on fire. Clearly the way these things work is as some sort of snack aversion therapy.

Anyway she finally finished the bag – and I hope she collected on her bet – folded it up, and then went to sit somewhere else. Presumably because the smell was still lingering round our seats and she didn’t want to have to breathe it in. And now I’ve had to go and eat a whole bag of full fat crisps to get the smell out of my brain.

What if They Held a Strike and Nobody Came?

So I sat on the platform at Vauxhall today reading all about the strike and the supposed chaos facing commuters and wondering where, exactly, all this disruption had got to. Admittedly my train was showing running a minute late but that was hardly going to form a death blow thrust into the very heart of the forces of capitalism, especially as it managed to make up the time again between Putney and Kew Bridge. And it wasn’t just me – in the spirit of this blog’s deep commitment to wasting time at work – sorry that should read in-depth research – I checked the SouthWest trains online departure boards for Waterloo and Vauxhall and couldn’t see so much as a single delay, let alone cancellations, disruption, wailing, gnashing of teeth or similar. According to the SouthWest Trains site, the dispute did go ahead, but they ran a normal service anyway. Which makes you wonder who was driving the trains. One scary answer would be nobody and the trains were just wandering back and forth along the rails of Southern England through sheer force of habit. But the really scary answer would be that they’d brought the managers in to drive the trains instead …

Any sightings of either disruption, driverless trains or a hapless personnel manager sitting in a cab wondering which button to press next gratefully received … meanwhile I’ll have a few more strikes like that, please.*

* yes, yes, I know, famous last words …

Vote Early and Vote often

What to do on a sunshine-and-showers bank holiday? It’s 11:30, it’s just stopped raining, the other half is downstairs trying to explain the rules of cricket to his parents. Even that, though, is not going to occupy the entire day …

Personally I think we should go play with the tube’s opinionmeters. As usual I’m behind the curve on this – I’ve seen them around but have always been in enough of a hurry not to have time to go play. Apparently last month they were asking about security – this month they are asking about the temperature*. We had a go with the one in Lambeth North yesterday on our way home – how did we feel (slightly warm). How would we like to feel (slightly cooler) and what were we wearing (a jacket – the machine refrained from telling us to take the wretched thing off then).

Now this is dangerous. Basically we’re putting decisions about our transport system into the hands of people who have the time and inclinaiton to go press buttons on a machine in a tube station. Do you really want the temperature in your tube to be determined by a bunch of tourists, bored teenagers and five year olds fired up from a trip to the Science museum? I didn’t think so. Obviously none of us real commuters has a chance to put our two pence worth in on a normal day, but now’s our chance. Go out there and vote, before they raise the fares, cut the service and air condition the hell out of whatever’s left. All based on what the public want, you understand …

*I never knew London Transport was to blame for the weather as well, but there you go

Never on a Sunday

What could be more annoying than arriving at a train station to discover that you have missed your train by one minute, and the next one is in an hour?* Well, having half your party – crucially, the half carrying the picnic – being swept off to Reading because they rashly went back onto the train at Maidenhead to fetch a jacket one of them had forgotten would be quite annoying, but fortunately they leapt off again in the nick of time. And missing our connection to Marlow due to a last minute dash into the ladies due to the inevitable consequences of drinking a bucket-sized cup of coffee to pass the time at Paddington would also have been pretty irritating (am I the only person in London who would be willing to drink a slightly less jumbo sized cup of coffee – say something slightly smaller than my head, or my bladder – in return for not having to pay three quid for it?) although fortunately we avoided that too, just.

No, what would be really really annoying, annoying enough for me to blog about it on what is after all my day off, would be if the ticket inspector on the Marlow train – being the second ticket inspector who had looked at (and, more to the point, stamped) our tickets – looked at them for a very long time, looked at us, and then pointed out cheerfully that had we got a groupsave ticket it would have saved us twenty quid, but that now they had been stamped, we couldn’t get a refund.

Yes, that would be very annoying indeed.

*Any answers involving the words ‘two hours’ are disqualified on the grounds of obviousness.

A Nightmare Journey

I had to get up to Edinburgh by train this morning so I took the coach to King’s Cross and, as we drove into the station, saw the incoming train which was just arriving was being towed in by a large tractor – which was not a good sign. I had a huge backpack with me, and by the time I’d manhandled it off the coach and got to the platform the GNER train had been transformed into a Silverlink and only staff member on the platform – who bore an eerie resemblance to the mad Scottish woman from Green Wing – merely burst into peals of manic laughter when I complained. Then, of course, I woke up and realised that I’ve either got to start eating less cheese or I’ve got to find more interesting things to worry about.

The nightmare may become a dream come true next week (although probably not the bit where you can get a coach right onto the concourse of Kings Cross, because that would actually be useful) as SouthWest Train drivers from Waterloo are planning industrial action on Tuesday and Thursday. I’m only working three days that week, and they’re striking on two of them. Fan dabby dozy. I can’t find any explanation anywhere of what the strike’s about so I shan’t say anything more about it than that – but it had better be something serious…

Have a jolly good Bank Holiday weekend one and all and don’t get washed away in the drought.

A Little Perspective*

Disgruntled as I am, it’s starting to bug me when people go on about the UK having a third world transport system, and not just because that’s my job. It usually comes from people who have never been near the third world, or if they have the closest they got to any public transport was having their shiny safari vehicle cut up the local bus service on the way to the game park. Bad as the trains might be even in London, before reaching for the lazy cliche’d comparison, just ask yourself when was the last time you had to travel on the roof of the train? Or share a carriage with livestock that didn’t, on closer inspection, turn out to in fact be a bunch of teenagers with bad facial piercings? Or get thrown off the train – that’s thrown off not as in ejected from the train while it was standing in the station, but thrown off as in fatally thrown from a moving train by gangs who also set light to trains as they leave the station. At least, that was what I was going to write about today, having seen the reference to the last incident in the papers yesterday. But then I read about this, at the station my brother-in-law regularly uses on his way home from work and I began to wonder just how different we really were …

* not too much, obviously. Let’s be sensible here. As soon as I, personally, am inconvenienced I shall be back frothing at the mouth as usual …

Reclaim the River

One of the nice things about having overseas visitors is that you get to do things you normally wouldn’t be seen dead doing. Today, for instance, I swapped my usual train ride for an altogether more touristy form of transport. Don’t worry – not an open-topped bus (I’d rather have hives) but a river tour down to Greenwich and the Thames Barrier, something I’ve always had a sneaking yen to see. My heart sank when I realised we were going to get a commentary but this was very much the unofficial version of London (sample snippet: ‘Tate Modern, which is absolutely free to visit and if you’ve ever seen any modern art you’ll know why’) – mostly a catalogue of the various millennium construction disasters from the teething problems of the London Eye to the wobbly bridge and beyond, interspersed with cynical asides about Mayor Ken and some genuinely interesting bits of information. Very much the taxi-driver school of tour guiding and worth the price of admission alone. The Barrier itself is pretty impressive and as an added bonus the looming black clouds from the ‘drought’ made for some dramatic lighting. Altogether the best way of spending a wet Wednesday in May that I can think of and certainly better than work.

On the way back our guide was silent and the whole thing began to feel more like a real bus journey and less like a pleasure trip. There was even the statutory mad woman bending the ear of two hapless tourists while everyone else desperately stared out of the window to avoid catching her eye, or buried themselves in their books. And I even got a discount with my season ticket so it wasn’t that expensive – 7 quid return, not much more than my regular journey to work. The various piers are London Transport branded and look as much like bus stations as they possibly can. And it got me thinking. I’ve lived in London, on and off, all my life and yet this was the first time I’d ever been on the Thames here. It’s time to take our river back from the party boats and the tour trips, and use it for getting around once more. After all – as I remembered as we stepped onto Westminster Bridge to walk home – the tourists have taken over everywhere else.

Conversations with my Mother (in Law)

I don’t know. Other people seem to be able to have perfectly normal conversations in pubs. You know, discussing the football, or Big Brother, or whether David Cameron really is a twerp or just comes across that way, or the implication of Wittgenstein’s Private Language argument on the semiotics of modern cultural theory; ordinary stuff. But we have conversations that go like this:

‘So you just use the oyster card and it’s guaranteed cheaper than buying individual tickets.’
‘How about one-day travel cards?’
‘Well, you see, the oyster is capped so if you use it enough in one day that you would have been better off buying the travel card it will just stop deducting from your balance.’
‘So travel after that is free?’
‘Yes, unless you go out of the zones you were travelling in, then it will recalculate what the travel card for that zone should have been … but basically, yes.’
‘So the oyster card is always cheaper or the same as the one day travel card?’
‘Most of the time it is, but not if you take the overground trains. You can’t use the oyster on them so if you travel almost up to the limit on your oyster and then get on the overground train and have to buy a ticket for that, then you would have been better off just getting a travelcard in the first place. But you probably won’t want to use those trains.’
‘What about if we get the train to Dover?’
‘Well, Dover’s outside the zone 6, so you wouldn’t be able to get there on a travelcard anyway – although you can buy your ticket from the boundary of the travelcard if you already have one, which makes it cheaper …’

… and so on and so on. You see, as part of their ‘welcome to London’ pack (to accompany the anti-drought umbrellas) we’d got our visitors a couple of pre-pay oyster cards and we were now trying to explain the intricacies of the Oyster system to them. Next time I’ll probably just let any visitors we have figure it out for themselves - semiotics and the private language argument would have been a breeze in comparison.  How on earth have we managed to end up with a public transport payment system that requires a PhD and an accounting qualification to understand? Answers on a postcard please*

* you may continue on a separate sheet if necessary.

Rain, Rain, Go Away…

…come again when we don’t have the in-laws to stay.

I know, I know, we’re supposed to welcome the rain due to the ‘drought’ we’re having and all, but I wonder if the water companies can call off their rain dances at least during the weekends and if possible during the morning rush hour as well? How much more rain do they need? I promise to stop running the tap while I brush my teeth, if that’s any help. The problem is not so much the getting wet and cold while cycling in, which is bad enough, nor the sitting on the train in damp clothes, which is worse, but it’s the journey home that’s the real killer. If anyone knows of a nastier sensation than trying to put on a pair of still-damp cycling gloves that have spent ten hours in the pocket of a still-damp cycling jacket, can they please keep it to themselves.

Meanwhile, any suggestions on how to explain to our visitors that even though we’re suffering the worst drought since records began/the last one*, the other half had to meet them at the airport with matching his’n'hers umbrellas?

* delete as applicable

Help, I Need Somebody

The guards on SouthWest Train are a chatty bunch – at least when the trains are running normally. Even when the automated announcements are going the guards still like to come on when they can get a word in edgeways and add a few pithy comments of their own. Sadly, while undoubtedly up to date in their key job skills of whistle blowing, door opening and Sudoku completion, nobody seems to have trained them in public speaking, so the announcements tend to be rambling at best. The one who came on this evening to warn us about a possible continued suspension of the Victorial line due to a person on the line (‘this update is now at least two hours old’) decided to end with ‘And a reminder to all passengers that the Waterloo and City line … (loses thread for a moment) … calling at Waterloo, obviously, is closed until September’, which at least got a laugh.

Normally they close with the telling us where they are on the train and urging that should we need any assistance ‘any assistance at all’ – just to ask. I suppose they’re just reminding us of their existence – or even reminding themselves. It can’t be easy being made more or less obsolete by a shiny new train and a computerised voice. One of these days I may just take them up on their offer of help: Any assistance at all, you said? Really? Would you tie my shoelaces for me? How about carry my bag? And things are busy at work, you could help out there. Or there’s the ironing … I could always use help with the ironing…

If you see someone on Monday being bundled off the train with a pile of shirts and an ironing board, that will be me, discovering the limits of helpfulness of SouthWest Trains

Have a good weekend, one and all.