Siren Song

Stepping out of Vauxhall station the other day, I heard the wail of an approaching police car. We hear so many sirens in London these days, it’s sometimes hard to take them seriously – they’ve just become part of the background noise. But this one was coming round the blind bend into Vauxhall Cross and was clearly approaching fast, so despite the arrival of the long-awaited green man, pretty much everyone stayed on the pavement keeping well out of the way until the danger had past.

Pretty much everyone – but not all. For one of Vauxhall’s posse of down-and-out drunks was waiting on the traffic island and tottered out into the road, completely oblivious. I held my breath. He got a few feet out, realised nobody was coming with him and stopped, swaying slightly, looking confused. Then he saw the police car as it screamed out of the tunnel, bowed, waved it on with a flourish as it passed just inches from his nose, and continued tottering across the road completely unscathed. I breathed again. Sometimes I think there must be a special guardian angel reserved for drunks. Or perhaps it’s just that the gods look after their own?

Anyway, have a good weekend one and all, and if you’re planning on drinking at all, make sure you’ve got that guardian angel handy. You never know when you’re going to need him.

I Know My Bike…

…is a heap of junk, but there’s no need to rub it in by leaving more junk on top of it. Yes, London’s ‘tidy’ litter louts have been at it again: somehow fooling themselves that it’s not littering if you place your rubbish neatly on something – like a bike – instead of casually tossing it over their shoulder. Frankly, as the owner of the bike in question, I’d prefer the shoulder toss approach. Most days I come out of the station to find my rear rack adorned with a neatly placed freebie paper, which is irritating enough. Yesterday it was a sandwich wrapper complete with half-eaten sandwich. Nice. I pity the poor sod with the bike with the basket – top tip for bike owners: take the basket off the front before parking your bike in the underpass if you don’t want to be emptying out your body weight in rubbish from it every day.

So here’s this week’s dilemma: You are the proud owner of a bike and the reluctant custodian of someone else’s half eaten sandwich. Do you take the sandwich home and throw it away yourself, or do you toss it over your shoulder before cycling into the sunset?

No points for saying you place it neatly on someone else’s bike.

The King Of France Is Bald

There’s wrong, and then there’s wronger than wrong. Two South African girls joined the train this morning at Putney, and proceeded to have a loud conversation with each other right across me. So far so normal. When they’d finished character-assassinating all their colleagues (this part was actually quite amusing) they switched on to the topic of why South African Girl One’s eye was twitching:

South African Girl One: That means someone’s talking about me doesn’t it? That my eye is twitching?

South African Girl Two: No, when someone talks about you, your nose itches.

South African Girl One: No, I’m pretty sure it’s your eye.

Me (silently screaming inside my head): No your ears burn, you utter morons…

And yet I know that, in fact, when somebody is talking about you behind your back, your ears do not burn, nor do your eyes twitch nor your nose itch, as that is of course a complete old wives’ tale, with no basis in physical reality whatsoever. It’s just that it is still somehow MORE wrong to say that your nose itches than it is to say that your ears burn. I spent many happy hours as a philosphy student debating why this should be so, and never came up with an answer. I still don’t know. But I stand by my original judgement: they were morons. And I wonder how their colleagues’ ears were feeling early this morning … a little warm, perhaps?

Oh! So Rude!

Sorry, I should have come up with a snappier title but I’m still too retrospectively flabbergasted by this woman’s behaviour to think straight.

Picture the scene. There’s only one guy on at the news-stand and there are a number of people milling about waiting for their coffees at the coffee counter. I have picked up my Guardian and am standing at the other counter, Guardian laid out, money in hand, ready for the news-stand guy to finish making a latte so I can pay and go and catch my train. Which is when The Woman turns up. The Woman also wants to buy a paper only, and she also has her paper and her money ready – so far so good. This puts her in the top ten percentile of all newspaper purchasers at the news-stand at Vauxhall. But here’s where she goes wrong. She walks straight in front of me, slaps her newspaper down on the counter right next to mine and starts indicating she wishes to pay. News-stand guy, who is up to his elbows in steamed milk, doesn’t see this blatant act of queue-barging starts trying to ring up her newspaper with one hand and make coffee for the coffee crowd (who were there before either of us) with the other. Me, I’m just standing there agape. The small part of my brain that’s still functioning thinks, well, in fairness, I only have a two-pound coin, so if she’s got the correct change, I’d hold her up if I insisted on my rights by going first. But no, The Woman does not have the correct change. The Woman hands over her coin, points to the paper and demands 5p in change. She then bustles off.

What really annoys me about this episode is my own cravenness in standing there and letting her do it without so much as a squeak of protest. It’s possible she thought I was waiting for a coffee, but in those circumstances you don’t barge past, you check first. Besides, the look of horror on my face should have tipped her off about her solecism. And, yes, maybe she was in a hurry and had a train to catch. But this was in a train station … where we all have a train to catch.

Spare a Few Coppers

Oh dear. The information screens at Vauxhall this morning were awash with turquoise – the colour they’ve chosen to highlight cancelled trains. The signs said merely that this was caused by ‘vandalism’ and the announcement from the platform was that it was vandalism at Barnes. Odd, I thought. Barnes is the leafiest of leafy suburbs, a true London Village with a properly rural feel. It was hard to know what sort of vandalism its locals could muster that would disrupt half the morning rush hour out of Vauxhall station.

Passing through Barnes made things no clearer. The station was still there, and only marginally more graffitti’d than normal. It was only when we’d pulled out of Barnes Bridge at half speed and then ground to a halt in the environs of Chiswick that the true problem was revealed: not vandalism per se at all, but theft. Of the signalling cables. So each train had to be ‘talked through’ each signal at walking pace from Barnes Bridge to Kew. This meant thirty long slow minutes to complete the last few miles of our journey* before we finally pulled in at Kew Bridge. And no doubt by then the queue had built up even further behind us.

The problem I suppose is that copper prices are so high that signalling cables have become valuable enough to steal. In fact I read somewhere – and it was on the internet, so check before setting up your own smelting plant – that the price of copper is now so high that old style 2p and 1p coins – those minted before 1992 – are now worth more melted down than they are used as actual money. Our course of action as responsible passengers is now clear. Get out your penny jars and search under the sofa: all tickets should be paid for in coppers from now on, so that the rail companies can keep the infrastructure patched up until the crisis passes. Only please don’t try and do this when I’m behind you in the queue …

* Made longer and slower for me because a woman had – once more – plumped herself down right next to me when there were four other empty seats she could have chosen. Why do people do this? why why why why why? This time she was at least foreign, so had some potential excuse but even so why? Is this the way people behave in Slovenia? And why is it always me? Aaargh…

Mild Idiocy, Nobody Hurt

The Guardian was reporting this morning that – no doubt as part of their brave new era – SouthWest Trains would be getting tough on fare evaders. I have no problem with that – I spend 15 quid a week on my travel and I don’t see why that should be subsidising anyone else. It was just that they had cleverly decided to kick start this campaign by stationing two ticket inspectors at the foot of the stairs at Kew Bridge, checking the tickets of people not just getting off the trains but those who were rather hoping to get on one some time before the evening was over. The flaw in their cunning plan was this: the only place you can buy a ticket at Kew Bridge is from the machine which is … on the platform. So to get around this problem, the ticket inspectors were selling tickets to people who didn’t have them. Which made them rather inefficient at checking the tickets of those people who did. For while both of them were burdened with credit card pin number machines and ticket issuing machines, only one of them had an oyster card reading machine – something I only found out after I’d queued up behind the guy buying a ticket from the one who didn’t have an oyster reader and then had to queue up behind the other guy buying a ticket from the one who did. And all this with a perfectly good brand new ticket machine sitting idle on the platform. Aargh.

Fortunately, despite their best efforts, I got my ticket inspected and caught my train. And now it is definitely and officially the weekend, and I’m not going to worry about it any more.

ps. Apologies for the late running of this blog, which was due to a lack of internet connection on the line…

Ladies’ Day

And it’s an exciting lineup here at the Vauxhall Stakes Challenge, a big field, bit of jostling as the runners and riders line up at the doors. Disgruntled Commuter looks well placed in the sixth door, prime position, just behind Old Geezer, she’s looking fresh after her qualifying win at the Kew Bridge Sprint. And they’re off, the door pips gone, good door technique from Old Geezer, he’s well out the doors, Disgruntled Commuter lying third after him and Man in Suit. And there’s a bit of a scrum at the first bend, approaching the stairs, Wheelie Suitcase is in there, yes – Wheelie Suitcase is blocking the stairs, half the field is held up behind Wheelie Suitcase now, it’s looking like carnage. Just the three front runners seem to have escaped, Old Geezer out in front but fading fast, Disgruntled Commuter closing the gap, Man in Suit nowhere. And it’s Disgruntled Commuter out in front now, making all the running, the filly’s looking good as she approaches the second flight. But Man in Suit has found new legs now, Man in Suit is catching up fast on the stairs, Man in Suit is taking them two at a time, Disgruntled Commuter not breaking her stride, Man in Suit is ahead – no – they’re neck and neck! Neck and neck on the last step, this is very close, the finishing line now and it’s Disgruntled Commuter! Disgruntled Commuter by the smallest of margins wins the Vauxhall Challenge cup.

And What do Points Mean?

Yesssss! A combination of cunning carriage selection, perfect door timing and the correct choice of footwear yesterday meant I was the first out of the station yesterday morning at Kew Bridge. I wasn’t quite in pole position at the base of the steps but I had my Chucky T’s on and was lightly laden so I could sprint up the stairs and make it on to the pavement the winner of a race only I knew I was running. In combination with a long and punctual train and a complete absence of tannoyances, this gave me an almost perfect score for the journey in. Only a minor fault in the seat selection stage (didn’t get the window of the three-by-two and had to share it with a couple of talkers) prevented me from gaining maximum points for the morning commute. It’s hard to know when I will better this performance.

What? Why are you looking at me like that? These things are important! You mean you don’t award yourself points for your commuting prowess? You’ll be telling me next that it’s not a competitive sport …

Be Afraid

There is, in truth, much to be alarmed about in the environs of the Elephant and Castle. There is the shopping centre itself – its name, its awesome ugliness, the bewildering array of badness of its shops. There is the pink and glowing mysterious solar powered space pod which had been there for some months and proclaims on its side that it is ‘connecting the people of Southwark with the people of Europe’ (whether any of the people of Europe were asked if they wanted to be connected to the people of Southwark is not stated). And there are its foxes which are large and getting beyond bold these days. But the sign on the road chooses to warn motorists of none of these hazards. The sign on the road is warning motorists of the presence of bicycles instead, although logically it should be the other way round. Perhaps this means the hard men already have taken up cycling…

And that’s the last word I’ll say about cycling for a while – it only winds the motorists and the pedestrians and everybody up and then they start ganging up against me. Back to the trains tomorrow.

Made To Measure

I see TfL have revived last year’s inexplicable cycling promotion campaign this summer. The posters show a wittily prescient picture of London landmarks made out of dismembered bicycle parts and the headline: ‘London – A City Made For Cycling’. WTF? Describing London as a city made for cycling is akin to describing a cow as an animal made for pole-vaulting – its just so wrong, and in so many ways, that it’s hard to know where to start. London – like all major cities – is made for making a few people very large amounts of money. Everything else is just incidental. There may be some cities – in Denmark, maybe, or Holland – where cycling is pleasant, or at the least non-lethal. London is not one of them.

London does need more people to cycle. It’s the only way our transport infrastructure could actually accommodate any more growth, and more cyclists makes for safer cycling (even with the cunning deployment of the passenger door, a car can at best only pick off two or three of us at once). It’s just that adverts as patently wrong as this are not the way to acheive it. Anyone fooled into getting on their bike by one of these posters in the belief that their path will be strewn with rose-petals and flowers instead of broken glass and potholes and homicidal drivers will get off white and shaking after the first roundabout and cast their bicycle into the nearest canal, vowing never to ride again. Ken needs to find another way. And, as it happens, I have an idea.

You see the people he needs to convince are the petrolheads, the Mr. Toads, the Jeremy Clarksons of this world who still insist on driving whatever the personal or public inconvenience. Driving in London today takes a special sort of pig-headedness – unless you’re going a very long way, at antisocial hours, anything else would be quicker. But the die-hard motorists aren’t going to get on a bike because they think they should, or because they think it will be somehow easy. Oh no. A far better slogan – above a picture of a scarred and scary looking cycle courier type in Lycra – would be this

Cycling in London – Come on in, if you think you’re hard enough.