Angels with Dirty Faces (and noTeeth)

I headed home early today as I had a headache so bad it felt like my brain was trying to climb out of my skull to escape it. As I was unlocking my bike I heard a friendly, if slightly slurred voice ask if I was all right. Turning, I saw one of Vauxhall’s local drunk guys looking at me with toothless concern. ‘Cheer up gel,’ he said, and then added, ‘I love you but there’s nothing anyone can do about it.’ ‘Mmm,’ I said, ‘thanks…’ and got on my bike and pedalled away in bemusement.

But that wasn’t the end of it. I had to wait for the lights at Vauxhall Cross and so did he, so we had further conversation – or he did, and I confined myself to nodding and smiling and hammering repeatedly on the pedestrian crossing button in the hope that it might change quicker that way. ‘You mind how you go gel, wait for that green man,’ he advised me when a gap appeared. And then when gridlock had finally brought the cars to a stop he relented. ‘when it’s blocked, it’s blocked. You might as well cross, gel. And mind how you go…’ and we went our separate ways.

Is this just me? Or does everyone have tramps, drunks and assorted dossers appointing themselves their guardian angel from time to time? They tell me how to cross the road, they warn me about my bike, one even once stood up in Port Authority bus station in New York and told two people who were starting a fight in front of me that there was a lady present and they should mind their language. That was almost exactly half my lifetime ago, and yet I still don’t seem to have lost whatever it is about me that marks me out for attention. I don’t exactly mind. I just want to know what it is about me that makes them feel sorry for me, when really it should be the other way round.

Spot the Difference, part 3

This one is for my fellow passengers, mostly. 

 

The one on the left is a recycling box. The one on the right is a train. You probably actually already know that, unless you also spend a lot of time sitting in your green box on your doorstep, wondering why you’re not going anywhere. Yet somehow you continue to keep treating the trains as though they were somewhere to discard your paper waste. It’s not so much the abandoned newspapers, although it’s no longer really an act of altruism to leave your Metro or LondonLite for the next passengers seeing as they’ll have waded past several dozen ‘vendors’ to get to the train so if they really wanted one they probably would have one already. It’s everything else. This morning someone decided to leave half their diary pages on the seat I wanted to sit in. And not scandalous secret already written in diary pages, because that might have been interesting. No, just a bunch of blank filofax pages from 2006 that were no longer required. Gosh they must have weighed, ooh, grams. And taken up whole square centimetres of room in your bag. Can’t be lugging those around as far as a real recycling facility, can you? Nah, just leave them on the train. Someone else will pick them up. Why should you bother?

Gah.

Looking After the Pennies

Wedged in to the train home yesterday evening I ended up stuck listening to the following conversation:

Fat Girl 1: So how do you get home from the station? Walk?

Fat Girl 2: Nah, bus. I mean, it’s not far, but I’ve got a travelcard and you’ve got to get your use out of it.

Fat Girl 1: Yeah me too. And I’m that close to the station but I get the bus.

Fat Girl 2: I should walk it really. But I’ve paid for that travelcard…

Fat Girl 1: Yeah. You got to nail that travelcard. Get your money’s worth.

Comedy pause

Fat Girl 1: So, you going down the gym tonight?

Fat Girl 2: Nah, I’m knackered. Sitting down all day, 8:30 to 5, man that’s tired me out. It’s tiring, sitting.

It was at this point that I realised it’s not a matter of if but when humanity loses the use of its lower limbs. Still, at least we’ll have got full value out of our travelcards. If not of our gym memberships…

Beauty and the Beast

My normal approach, when taking the train somewhere new, is to go to the National Rail timetable website, get a selection of suitable train times – allowing plenty of slack in case something goes wrong – and print out the page as handy reminder. I had to be in Mortlake today and, for some reason, decided to abandon this tried and tested method and instead went to the National Rail timetable website, got a selection of suitable train times – allowing plenty of slack, remember – didn’t bother to print it out and promptly forgot all of the salient details. All I could remember this morning was a vague feeling that I needed to be at Vauxhall at 7:53am. This turned out, once I got to Vauxhall, to be the time I needed to be there in order to get to Mortlake ridiculously early. Which is why I ended up with more than 25 minutes to fully explore the delights of Mortlake station this morning – roughly 24 minutes longer than would normally be required.

This gave me plenty of time to admire the baby-blue soft-top Mercededes 500SL that was for sale in the classic car dealership across from the station entrance. If I was the type of person who owned a ridiculously polluting over-priced sports car that is exactly the sort of ridiculously polluting over-priced sports car I would like to own*. The temptation was strong, and lasted until the owner of the dealership got in and started moving his stock out into more accessible parking places for the day. It was sunny this morning, but still a little chill, and frankly, time is no kinder to highly tuned automotive engines than it is to human flesh.

‘hnurrr nrrr nrrr nrrr nrrr’ … ‘hnurrr nrrr nrrr nrrr nrrr’ … ‘HNURR HNURR nurr nurr nurrrr vroom VROOM…’

As the cloud of black smoke cleared, I decided maybe baby-blue wasn’t quite my colour. I think I’ll be sticking to the train…

* for those of you who missed my birthday

Spring Forward

I don’t know about you lot, but it would appear that some bugger broke into our house during the early hours of Sunday morning and stole an hour from our precious weekend. The police never warned us about this. And it was particularly painful for me as I had to be in early this morning, meaning getting up at what was effectively 5am today. I’m not sure my brain has recovered since. And it wasn’t just me that was suffering. There was actual snoring on the train on the way in.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again – if they have to take an hour off us every year, why does it have to be out of our Sunday lie ins? Why not out of Mondays? Think how much better it would have been if, half way through this afternoon, it was suddenly an hour later than it had been. It’s not as though anybody gets that much done in the dead hour between two and three anyway – especially after a 5am start. It’s that or bring back the siesta. I tell you, it’s the only way. I’d start a petition but I’m too tired.

Anyway, at least someone seems to have found Spring and put it back more or less where it ought to be, and for that I am grateful.

Arty Farty

The lamp-post – traditionally a holder of signs, an illuminator, adjunct to the signifier rather than the signifier itself – being used instead as a breadcrumb trail, however chromically hued, instills a confusion in the eye of the seeker who, emerging from the subterranean world where signage is all, occupying the liminal space twixt the stygian deep and the quotidian street to be navigated primarily by cartography, finds a disjunct between expectation and reality. Thus they are forced, these travellers, these seekers after art and, (controversially!) beauty, to enter into unmediated discourse with unfamiliar denizens, who – wearied by repetition, no longer receptive to the playful contradictions of the idea – employ their own ironical, satirical, mode of communication. Thus, the seeking of art, of the place of art, brings a tension and conflict, eschewing easy harmony, enacting what we may (again controversially!) call ‘art’ into the diurnal sphere.

Or, translated into English, tourists coming out of Southwark tube station and looking for Tate Modern generally expect some sort of a sign to point them in the right direction. You know, something with a little arrow, maybe a walking person, and the words ‘Tate Modern’. Instead, they stand blindly under the orange lamp-posts that are supposed to lead them there, and ask directions, usually of me. I do try to keep the sarcasm out of my voice, I really do. It’s not their fault someone decided to be just that little bit too clever …

I’m an Idiot, Get Me Out of Here

The waiting room on platform 3 at Vauxhall is a tricky one*. Two doors, only one of which opens, and two options: push and pull. There used to be a little handwritten cardboard sign on the one that opened saying ‘push’ on the outside and ‘pull’ on the inside, but that got taken down last year, no doubt on health and safety grounds. Or perhaps somewhere deep in the bowels of SouthWest Trains a committee on door signage is drawing up a policy document prior to commissioning a team of branding experts and sign designers to roll out a company-wide door-signage solution. Meanwhile, the less methodical passengers will continue to try pushing the non-opening door, pulling the non-opening door, pulling the opening door that needs to be pushed and then, as often as not, scratching their heads and walking away. Or in the case of the young man this morning trying to get out of the waiting room (goodness knows how he managed to get in) to catch his train, shaking the non-opening door violently in his desperation to get out. Most people have enough rudimentary logic to go through all the alternatives until they find the one that works but there’s always somebody who persists in trying to open the door in the way they think it ought to be opened instead of the way it actually opens.

And those of us in the know? We sit there and watch. We could point out the correct way to open the door but it might be interpreted as patronising. And besides, watching someone making a slight tit of themselves in public is one of the few pleasures we have left in these benighted times, and we wouldn’t want to cut it short.

* That’s ‘tricky’ in its loosest sense…

Lock Up your … Well Just About Everything, Really

The police, having thoroughly terrified the pedestrian population of Lambeth, are now targeting the car drivers. All those lampposts not advertising the presence of the MP3-player branch of the thieves’ guild, now have scary yellow ‘SaferLambeth’ (the camel case is theirs) signs addressing motorists thus:

‘Have you locked your vehicle?’

Well, duh. To paraphrase the late great P.G. Wodehouse, you’d have to look at Lambeth for a long time before you mistook it for Dorset. In the Fifties. Still, it’s the year end, you know, so they’ve got to spend their budget on something.

I’m just waiting for them to notice us cyclists and for the bike racks at Vauxhall to sprout their own yellow signs saying something like ‘Leaving your bike here? Are you insane?’ or ‘Look, just stay at home under the duvet, why don’t you, it’s safer.’

I would, but I’m frightened of burglars.

It’s Behind You

This birthday, my family have mostly been giving me hi-visibility cycling gear – I think they’re trying to ensure that I survive to celebrate some more of them in the future. The other half has given me a slinky new scary yellow jacket that makes me look like a proper fit sporty cyclist – an impression that lasts up to, but not including, the moment I set off anywhere on the bike. And for evening wear, I can jazz it up with a nifty flashing LED vest from my sister. Together the combination should ensure that I and my bike are visible from the moon.

From the moon, maybe, but not – apparently – from the pavements of South London, if the young lady who stepped out in front of me with her back to the direction of traffic is anything to go by. For it doesn’t matter how bright and flashing the cyclists are if the pedestrians don’t turn their heads to look out for them. It would appear that I still need one of these.

You are the Ball Cock in the Toilet Tank of Life

She is standing by the counter of the newspaper stall at Vauxhall, waiting for her coffee. She has a mobile phone clasped to her ear, but she is not speaking into it, nor even apparently listening to it. Perhaps she is on hold. Perhaps she just goes around with her phone stuck to her ear as a matter of course. She is not slim, not by a long way. She is blocking the exit. People queue up to buy things, things which don’t require waiting for, like newspapers and then they are stuck, they cannot get out with her there in the way. They say excuse me. She moves out of their way, dreamily, automatically, her phone still clasped to her ear. Then she bobs back into the gap, blocking the exit again, as though it were not of her volition, as though some physical process or law of nature was forcing her to do this. Someone else wishes to leave, and she repeats to process – moving out of the way, bobbing back into the way, regulating the flow of people out of the stall, one by one. I come to the head of the queue and buy my paper, make my excuses and go, leaving her there, still clutching her phone, still waiting, moving and bobbing, moving and bobbing as though she might never stop.

And it was only after I have taken my train and am walking to work that I realised just what it was that she reminded me of.