I Suppose …

… Hallowe’en is meant to be frightening, but next year I think I’ll avoid any form of public transport during the hours of darkness. Particularly if I’m travelling out to the wilds of North Kent: not so much the garden as the pub patio of England. It wasn’t the assorted ghouls, ghosts and witches on the journey out – the really scary bit was when the train that was supposed to be taking us back to civilisation came in at such a clip we had to sprint down to the very end of the platform to catch it. For a moment I thought it would leave without us and we’d be abandoned in Erith forever. After that, the small riot that seemed to be kicking off as we arrived at London Bridge held no terrors for us – anything was better than the deserted streets and alleyways of the Thames Gateway.

That said, the woman who was otherwise normally dressed but flashed a set of plastic vampire fangs at me at Kennington gave me a bit of a turn. At least, I think they were plastic. I didn’t hang around to find out…

Lighten our Darkness

I was going to blog about the fact that SWTrains chose this week to have all no lights at all on the platform at Kew Bridge (and Feltham) this evening – possibly to get us all in the Hallowe’en mood. This in turn led to late running trains because, mother-hen-like, the driver was waiting at each station to make sure all the passengers got safely off the platform, lighting them on their way with the lights of the train. But – and I don’t know if it’s the effect of the extra hour sleep or not – I’m having a hard time getting disgruntled about this. I think it was actually rather sweet. So instead, now that the clocks have finally gone back and we’re all going home in the real dark – a word of advice to at least one of my fellow-cyclists spotted (but only just) on the ride home: cycling with a lit cigarette in your hand isn’t really adequate in the absence of any other bike lights. If only because the glow of the butt is red, and so should properly speaking be at the back not the front of the bike. A lit cigarette backwards behind your ear and, I don’t know, a sparkler in your hand – now, that might do it. In fact that might be what it takes to get some people to notice that a bike is there at all…

Zebra Cross

What, exactly, do drivers think pedestrians are doing standing on traffic islands? In my case, this morning, I suppose that, as I was wearing my shorts and was a little pink in the face, I could have been a confused tourist who’d been sold an island holiday by a very unscrupulous travel agent, and I could simply have been standing there enjoying the morning sunshine. But I think, actually, that it was much more likely that I had just crossed one half of the zebra crossing, and was about to start crossing the other half of it, don’t you? So the driver who approached it without slowing and without preparing to stop was probably just being a dickhead who was hoping that if he looked like he was bent on keeping going I wouldn’t step out in front of him and force him to come to a reluctant halt.

Unfortunately for him, I was prepared to be a much bigger pain in the arse than he was. Once I’ve got one foot in the road he must stop – especially when he’s outside the Police control centre – but boy was he unhappy about it. The nose of his car was edged over the stripes in the road by the time he’d managed to brake, and he and his wife – they were both in their forties, old enough to know better – were glaring at me like Daily Mail readers confronted with an asylum-seeking single mother who’d frozen her embryos to further her career. I kept eye contact all the way across, worried that if I broke it for a second, he’d simply accelerate straight over me. Dogs, teenagers, car drivers: never let them see your fear.

Look, I know I was being obnoxious forcing him to stop like that and glaring at him all the way over (although I didn’t do what I wanted to do and drop a handful of change on the road and spend twenty minutes picking it up – I think he really would have killed me). But drivers who don’t give way to people on zebra crossings really piss me off. I don’t have many rights as a pedestrian, but that’s one of them. And all he had to have done was slow down as he saw me – no more than by a few miles per hour so that I could see he was prepared to stop – and I could have been across the road before he’d even reached it. Instead, I made him stop, he made me stop, and both of us went off with the edge taken off our Sunday morning. If drivers keep abusing zebra crossings, they get replaced by pelican ones and those are much worse for all concerned. Especially if pedestrians, annoyed at the loss of their nice zebra crossing, press the button every time they pass it just because, you know, they can…

I Pity the Fool

What sort of person gives his (and it was a he) little BMW roadster a personalised number plate that reads ‘Phool’? Well, if the evidence of yesterday was anything to go by, the sort of person who also turns left across a pedestrian crossing without indicating he was turning.

Actually, thinking about it, the real shame is that all the other drivers aren’t so conveniently labelled. Some sort of compulsory scheme seems to be indicated. I’m accepting nominations now for the driver who most needs the number plate ‘ID10T’…

I was beginning to Wonder …

… whether Sod’s Law had somehow been repealed in my absence, or at least its enforcement suspended as far as it applied to me. On Tuesday morning I thought I’d missed my train due to a bit of queuebarging at the coffee stall (the coffee guy allowed someone to butt in and order a triple skinny decaff with extra chopped nuts or some such nonsense when I’d been standing waiting patiently* for ages with my Guardian and my 70p) but the train was delayed by just long enough to allow me to catch it. And then today, I slept in and managed to miss the worst of the Waterloo emergency engineering works chaos, getting into work at about the same time I would have done without the extra hour’s sleep. I’ve also managed to avoid being run over when looking the wrong way crossing the road, drenched by passing cars (due to a strategically placed lorry in the middle of what looked like a small lake on the way in to the station on Tuesday), and being backed into by a reversing delivery van. But I was wrong. The gods were not sleeping, merely gathering their strength. I shan’t bore you with all the tedious details – just suffice it to say that when they cancel the eight-carriage train and not the four-carriage train, several hundred passengers have to spend their evening enacting a well-known phrase or saying regarding quarts and pint pots.

Oh well, at least it gives me something to blog about. Let’s see how Sod’s law deals with that one …

* oh all right then, impatiently.

Caution! Beer on Board

Top tip to – well, just about everyone: never get on a bus with a belly full of beer. Or, to be precise, a bladder full of post-beer. Especially not a bus which is quite jolty and which is grinding u-n-b-e-l-i-e-v-a-b-l-y slowly through the last dregs of the rush hour traffic. In the rain. With all the sort of rainy, watery noises that that entails. And especially not a bus with the sort of driver who treats the ‘bus stopping’ light as more advisory than anything and sails past your stop, the one that’s lovely and close to your house, and only stops at another, rather more inferior, stop, one that is definitely much further away from your house, and, more to the point, your loo.

Anyway, I made it home without disgracing myself. Although my greeting to the other half was a bit more perfunctory than usual…

Nine-and-a-half Days…

… appears to be the amount of time it takes the average Brit, i.e. me, to learn to look consistently the wrong way when crossing the road in the States. Which is also, curiously enough, the amount of time I actually spent there. Which may in turn explain the number of near-death experiences I encountered while walking to and from the station today. In retrospect, it’s probably a good thing I wasn’t on my bike. And if present trends continue, I should be fit to be allowed out by, ooh, Wednesday week.

Meanwhile, if you do see me stepping confidently out in front of you, do me a favour. Honk. Thanks.

What a Way to Run a Railway

I really don’t think the Americans have got the hang of this mass transit lark at all. On Saturday we were coming back from a quick trip to a mall and headed up to the MetroLink station to get back to the hotel. This was out in the suburbs, where you have to walk across the tracks to get to the platform. As our train came in, clanking its bell, I started to sprint for the platform, not realising that my travelling companion was still wrestling with the ticket machine which had developed an instant dislike to almost all of his dollar bills. Not willing to abandon him in the wilds of the greater St. Louis metropolitan area, I stopped to wait. So did the train. The driver was beckoning me over encouragingly. I performed a complicated hand gesture intended to convey that, while I was grateful for him for his courtesy, I was waiting for someone who was trying to feed $4.50 worth of quarters into a slot in record time. The driver waited some more. The ticket machine timed out, and returned all my companion’s change to him with a jackpot-winning flourish. Still the driver beckoned us forward. Finally, reluctantly, unwilling to miss the train, but more unwilling to hold everyone up any longer, I had to wave the driver away, and off he went.

No such nonsense back here in London of course. Interchanging at Embankment, laden down with three bags (funny, I left with only two), suffering from jet lag and sleep-deprivation and with my brain still apparently somewhere over the Atlantic, I found myself once more hurrying to catch a train, this time the southbound Bakerloo tube. As my foot hit the platform, with bags flying behind me, the pips went with a merry flourish, the doors closed, and the train sailed off without a backwards glance. Ah London. I’m glad to be back. At least, I think so…

Top Tip for Travellers …

… giving directions in St. Louis, Missouri, home of the Anheuser-Busch brewery.

‘There’s a bar with a Budweiser sign on the corner’ is not a particularly good way of distinguishing one street from another.

Just so you know. 

Place Your Bets

We’ve been using the St. Louis MetroLink system a fair bit here in the evenings to go out to eat somewhere that isn’t a shopping mall. It feels fairly safe (although I’m not sure whether the sign saying ‘no concealed weapons allowed on these premises’ makes me feel more or less secure) and never seems to be that crowded. It adds a little dimension of urgency to the meal, too. Because as well as the normal single and all day travelcard type tickets they also have a ‘two hour’ ticket that costs 25c more than the regular single. At the beginning of the evening you have a choice – get the two dollar ordinary ticket and pay another two dollars to get home – or spring for the extra quarter and hope you can get in and out in the time alloted (don’t try this at home – American restaurant service is generally a lot brisker than its UK equivalent). It’s become something of a game. The first night we got the ordinary ticket and would have had loads of time on the two hour ticket. The second night we sprung for the extra quarter but travelled further afield and had to buy more singles to get home. Last night we were determined to make it work. Our waitress was confused by our accents (‘water’ became ‘warm tea’) and seemed to lose the plot completely at one part of the meal; however with the bill on the table, the complicated bistro-mathics equation satisfactorily solved, and the clock ticking, we had a dilemma. Did we wait for our change (saving four dollars) or did we leave her with a rather over-generous tip in order to get back to the station in time for our tickets? In the end the lure of the tickets won. We managed to scramble together enough change to leave a suitable  but not monstrous tip, and left the restaurant with indecent haste. We made it with three minutes to spare, saving us the grand sum of $1.75 apiece. In retrospect, this may well turn out to be the highlight of the trip.

I think I’ve been away too long.