What Not to Wear

I saw a couple of reminders today that it’s the little finishing touches to an outfit that can make or – crucially – break a look. Take Kevin*. Kevin works in sales, where he has risen to the dizzying heights of ‘Sales Specialist’. I don’t know what Kevin sells or where he does it but I’m guessing it’s over the telephone because Kevin does not look much like a salesman: Kevin looks like a man-mountain topped with a crew cut. He drew my attention through the thrash metal that his iPod headphones were transmitting tinnily all over the train. He had a couple of facial piercings and a strange plug in one earlobe that suggested he was going for the Masaai warrior look, and enough tattoos peeking out from underneath his band t-shirt to suggest a world of colourful illustration lurked beneath. So how do I know so much about Kevin? Because he was also wearing his staff pass complete with job title and department. It’s kind of hard to believe in a genuine rock-n-roll, what’ve-you-got rebellion from someone wearing their company ID. No amount of facial piercings are going to cancel that one out.

And then take the three lads on the train home this evening. They were twenty-somethings, with tattoos, sunburn, beer cans, lairy laughter – and a shark. An enormous, cuddly orange shark so big that I couldn’t really begrudge it its own seat even on a busy train. Yet, ever the gent, the shark’s owner pulled it off the seat and onto his lap to let someone else sit down and, when the beer and the heat had taken their toll, fell asleep safe within its furry orange flippers, with his head on its shoulder. Awww. It wasn’t very rock’n'roll. But I liked it.

Have a good weekend one and all and if you’re going out tonight, please remember to take your security pass off first. And leave the shark behind.

* possibly not his real name.

An Apology, and a Reminder

The apology is to anyone who had to buy a ticket in a hurry at Kew Gardens Station this afternoon at around 5:15. I was trying to top up my oyster, you see, and I was using my switch card and it seemed to turn into the most complicated thing since the Beagle 2 got lost somewhere on the approach to Mars. There is a shiny new card-taking touchscreen ticket machine at Kew Gardens but it’s a Silverlink shiny new machine so it regards oyster cards as devilish not-invented-here foreign nonsense and won’t have anything to do with them. People wishing to top up their oyster cards have to do it at the ticket office and people with any sense who wish to top up their oyster cards do it with cash, but I had forgotten this. After about two minutes of watching the ticket girl type random numbers into the machine I had missed one tube and the queue was growing behind me. After she had typed more random numbers, swiped my card a number of other times and printed out any number of ticket-shaped receipts with meaningless words on them, the queue was growing restive. When she finally enquired if I had another card, I gave up, liberated my switch card and my oyster, walked two yards to the cashpoint, got cash out, rejoined the queue which had built up while the random-number typing and swiping was going on, and finally topped up my oyster ten minutes after I had first attempted it.

The reminder is to all you chaps out there about deodorant. Yes, please, do use it in this hot and sticky weather. But apply it in the privacy of your own home. Not on the tube itself. I shouldn’t need to say this, yet it seems I do…

Litter Lout

CAUTION: Grade A, full on, rant ahead. Readers of a nervous disposition may wish to look away now

Hmm, I thought to myself this morning as I spied a young man carrying a banana skin in an oh-so-nonchalant way, I wonder what you’re going to do with that? Sure enough, when I emerged from the underpass having locked up my bike, there was the banana skin, sans young man – not lying spread out on the floor a la classic comedy sketch of the 1930s – but neatly placed on top of a bin. The bin in question belongs to a local cafe who quite understandably like to have room to throw their own rubbish away at the end of the day, so they wedge the lid of the bin down under something heavy. Of course that doesn’t stop people putting things on top of it – or specifically it doesn’t stop those people who consider that their obligation not to litter ends as soon as it has been made inconvenient for them to throw things away properly and who think that putting litter neatly on top of something is somehow better than simply chucking it over their shoulder

Maybe it’s my age but this is beginning to get my goat immoderately. Consider the banana. When you pick up a banana to eat on your way to the station, were you really thinking that you might eat the skin afterwards? Or did you think that the banana skin might somehow conveniently evaporate from your hands the minute you no longer had any use for it? London does not have a lot of litter bins, granted, but that’s not some sudden new policy. It’s been like that for almost a year, longer in some cases. Meanwhile, I would bet that every single household in London has a surplus collection of plastic bags big enough to hold most of the litter currently floating around in our streets, or neatly placed on top of bins outside long suffering local businesses. Surely one or two of them can be pressed into service as containers for your own litter temporarily until you do find a bin to put it in? Sure banana skins are horrible smelly objects to carry around with you – but how do think the person who picks it up after you feels about it? You were happy enough to carry it when it had a banana in it. It’s not as though it has suddenly turned into toxic waste.

Grrrr. I recently climbed up a mountain to a beautiful remote lake surrounded by mist and heather, a place so quiet you could hear the sheep eating. And when I got there, all I could see were discarded tissues – along the last part of the path and scattered about the grassy bank where I had planned to sit and admire the view. Yes, there are no litter bins up mountains. No, that doesn’t make it okay to throw your disgusting snot rags there. And no, just because they are biodegradable doesn’t make it any better. Even a tissue takes an age to rot down. And meanwhile other walkers in search of peace of mind and tranquility are left instead with a faint sense of nausea. 

The thing that really bugs me about this* is that the people doing this sort of littering are exactly the kind that tut when they see other sorts of littering, blatant littering like things thrown from cars or kids dropping sweet packets as they walk along. But the minute they have something in their hand which they no longer want to carry, and there’s no bin, or no bin in sight anyway, or there’s a bin but they’d have to cross the road to get to it, down it goes. Neatly placing it doesn’t make it not litter you know. Taking it home and disposing of it properly makes it not litter.

Phew. Rant over. Can you tell I’ve got a bit of a headache?

* And as you can tell it really, really bugs me.

Knock Knock. Who’s there? Isobel …

While we’re on the subject of pedestrians getting knocked over by cyclists (and what do you mean, we’re not?) does anyone reading this remember the Green Cross Code? And specifically the bit where you looked both ways before crossing the road – or did I just make that part up? I’m losing count of the number of pedestrians who amble across the road or even along the middle of the road as I’m riding down it on my stealth bike, completely oblivious to my presence, relying on the fact that they can’t hear any cars coming to tell them they’re safe. Obviously I don’t mow them down, or at least not on purpose; I try and ride round them although pedestrians can’t always be relied upon in my experience to walk in a straight line. Today I encountered three – not counting the two in the park who of course have a perfect right to saunter along without looking out for cyclists – one crossing without looking and two using the road as a pavement.

I could get a bell, of course, but they sound so ridiculous and girly and I don’t want to end up as a sound-effect in a rural sitcom about bicycling vicars. I could get one of those whistles that the scary cyclists have but I’m always worried I’d swallow it in the excitement of making the lights at Vauxhall Cross. What I really want is something I once heard about – one of those urban legend, friend of a friend affairs – a handlebar mounted air horn that makes the same noise as a Mack truck. That would blast the pedestrians out of their i-Pod induced stupor and might even wake up the odd dozy van driver as well. Whether it would shift the pigeons or not, I don’t know. But I suspect I would have fun finding out.

Firmly Wedged

Here’s a sight to cheer a cyclist up on a rainy Monday morning – a lorry whose driver had misjudged its ability to negotiate one of the tight bends in the back streets around Vauxhall and was now blocking four roads in one go. As I threaded my way past, the driver was climbing out to assess the situation, which appeared to be roughly that of the sofa in the staircase at Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency: not only was it going to be impossible to get it out, but it appeared to be only through some subtle warping of the space time fabric that it had got itself there in the first place. I could see there was about to be a prolonged episode of delicate manoeuvring, possibly with the ‘help’ of any passing male with time on his hands who fancied standing in the street shouting ‘left hand down a bit’ for half an hour, before anything wider than, say, a bike was going to be able to get past that particular obstacle. And I suddenly felt a whole lot better about being on a bike instead of in a nice dry car, wet knees or no wet knees.

Another Terror Strike Averted

Well I hope you lot realise how I suffered in order to get my fancy-schmancy new banner image on the top of this blog. Not only did I have to dice with death on the railway lines, dodging trains and trying to work out how to write ‘disgruntled commuter’ while hanging upside-down over a bridge, I also got spray paint all over my new top…

…No, no, of course that is NOT TRUE. I don’t have a new top. Oh all right, I admit it, I just photo-shopped the graffiti in. Vandalism is wrong. And also quite nerve-wracking, I would imagine. But I did get some rather wierd looks as I wandered about in Lambeth taking photographs of trains. And as I stood waiting in a back street for a train to come along over a particularly fetching looking viaduct, a van pulled up beside me and a voice demanded to know what I was doing.
‘Are you photographing that bridge?’ he asked. I looked over (missing the train I’d just waited five minutes for … story of my life) and saw a Lambeth Council van.
‘No, just a train,’ I said, neglecting to point out that bits of the bridge would be in the picture too.
‘Oh, well that’s all right then,’ the guy said and drove off.

What did he think I was doing? I always thought my mild paranoia was just that, paranoia. Now I know. Act at all oddly and they really will think you’re a terrorist…

How to Lose a Couple of Pounds

Has anyone reading this ever actually made change for a stranger who asks them on the street and it not turn out to be some sort of a con? I ask because once again my basic good nature and in-built gullibility has left me down to the tune of one quid (but up to the tune of one blog entry). I don’t know why I do it, I really don’t. This time at least it was cheerfully and neatly done – guy approaches me as I unlock my bike with a two-pound coin and asks if I’ve got change. I reach into my pocket and find a pound coin and a handful of useless shrapnel. As I’m digging around to see if I’ve got enough five pence pieces to make up the other pound I seem to have somehow given him my quid. He hangs around to see if I’ve got anything more and as I realise my error and ask for my pound back he backs away, grinning widely. Then, in a bit of a twist to the scam that I haven’t encountered before, he pleads with me to take a chunk of hash instead – a couple of spliffs’ worth of what was probably the finest chocolate – and then swears blind he’ll pay me back ‘if I see you around’ (he spoilt this last offer by looking dismayed when I told him I was there every day and then grinning disarmingly at being caught out). By this time I’d written off the pound and was cycling away, feeling a complete idiot, as he bids me farewell with a shouted ‘I owe you one!’. Too right you do, mate. But I don’t think I’ll get it back.

So for those of you like me who still occasionally do favours for their fellow human beings (I lose count of the number of 20ps ‘for the bus’ I’ve given out when I’m drunk enough to let my guard down), beware a grinning black guy with a plausible manner in the Vauxhall station underpass. And for the rest of you – I know, I know, call myself a Londoner, I should never give even the time of day to a stranger without getting a receipt first.

I told you it was going to be a long week.

Rubber Ducky, You’re the One

1. And on the Eighth day, the advertising people came to God and said, ‘God we have a problem’

2. And the advertising people also said, ‘God, while you were resting, we’ve been busy filling every available surface of the planet with advertising. Yea, even as we speak we have just put adverts onto the ticket barriers at Vauxhall station even though they are mostly broken and more likely to piss people off than anything. And we wondered if you could help us.’

3. And God did ask, ‘What about the foreheads of the passengers?’ forgetting that advertising people did not do Irony

4. And they did respond, ‘Their foreheads have all been auctioned to Golden Palace Casinos on eBay,’ making God wish that He’d rested on the sixth day instead of making Man as He had intended to, had He not been tempted by getting double time working on a weekend.

5. So God did sigheth and say, ‘Well I’m not making you lot any more planets, what do you want Me to do about it?’

6. So the advertising people did say unto Him, ‘We want you to make a yellow bath and put it outside Lambeth North station and fill it with water, if that’s not too difficult.’

7. And God grew wrathful and said, ‘You know very well it’s not My fault there’s a drought, it’s the water companies’ drought, don’t you lot read the Evening Standard?’ and created the bath and the water that was in it and placed it outside Lambeth North just to show them.

8. And the advertising people said unto God that they would fill the bath with rubber ducks and leave them there for people to take, making God ask ‘What’s the point of that?’ even though He had a sneaking suspicion He was supposed to know these things being omniscient and everything.

9. And the advertising people did explain that people would take photographs of it with their mobile phones and blog about it and put the name of their advertising company all over the internet without them having to pay Google to do it for them.

10. And lo it came to pass that the people did take photographs of the bath with their mobile phones and blog about it on the Internet

11. And lo it also came to pass that all the stickers had fallen off the ducks because the advertising people hadn’t made them waterproof and so nobody could tell what the advertising was about.

12. And God looked at it and saw that it was good.

Caution – Contains Language

Some years ago, back when we were in southern Africa, the other half and I stopped at a mechanic to see if our wheel – which had recently been punctured – could be repaired or would have to be replaced. ‘That depends,’ said the mechanic, lapsing into technical terms, ‘on whether it’s completely buggered or just a bit fucked.’ The wheel, as it turned out was only fucked and easily fixed with a magic spray (I believe the same sort of thing can be used on footballers these days) and we went away happy and only 10 rand lighter.

I was reminded of the phrase this morning as I decided to wrong-foot SouthWest trains by not taking any of their trains at all (go on! cancel away!) and wheel my bike up to Waterloo to find out exactly where on the fucked/buggered spectrum it was. It was hot, I was lugging my laptop, and I wasn’t too pleased when the first bike shop I tried didn’t actually fix bikes and sent me round the corner to the second one. This one did fix bikes, just not mine which is apparently too old, too buggered, too difficult and probably not expensive enough. ‘It would cost 100 pounds to get it properly put right,’ they said. ‘You’d be better off buying a new one.’ After I’d explained that I’d rather spend the money on having my old faithful bike back in working condition than on having a shiny new one stolen, they sent me round another corner to the third bike shop where a mechanic looked at it, pronounced it only a little bit fucked and offered to fix it for 10 quid if I picked it up at five which was a relief. Whether it’s actually buggered or not, I’ll find out in about an hour. But one thing amused me (in retrospect, once I’d stopped wheeling a bike and lugging a laptop around and was capable of being amused again) was the fact that everywhere I stopped I carefully locked up my bike, its front brake cable flapping in the breeze, before stepping ten yards into the shop to enquire about repairs. With hindsight, I can think of no better fate for a bicycle thief than that he (or she) cycles off into the distance on my own personal deathtrap and only realises when it’s too late that there’s no way of making it stop other than falling off it or cycling it into a wall.

The Week Gets Longer

It’s beginning to look a little pointed. I had to leave extra early today to allow for not being able to cycle to the station and to renew my weekly ticket but I hurried out of the house and walked as quickly as I could and made it with a few minutes to spare before my usual train was scheduled to depart, only to discover it had been cancelled. Again. Due to – according to the excusometer – a shortage of carriages. Can’t argue with that, right? I can hardly expect SouthWest Trains to run a train it didn’t have, now can I?

Hmm. Except that there was an extra non-stopping empty train running through the station this morning. At exactly the same time as my normal train, looking suspiciously like my normal train*, but whizzing through to other more glamorous destinations to pick up other more important passengers than us. Carriage shortage my foot. They really are out to get me.

* and before you counter that they all look the same there are differences in the rolling stock and, sadly, I can now tell them apart.