Steel dit boek*

Dutch-speaking fans of the Disgruntled commuter prose style – and I know there are hundreds of you out there, if only you knew it – might be interested in this.

The rest of us will have to wait until May

And yes, this is a little cryptic, but only a little. And it’s got nothing at all to do with commuting …

* That’s Dutch for steal this book, by the way

More Yoof

We have two sandwich students at work these days and very lovely they are too. One of them travels to work on the train like a normal person. The other one commutes in on his skateboard.

Words cannot express how old this makes me feel.

Gap in the Market

Ah Yoof. I was pleased to see this morning that despite the end of British Summer Time and the advent of the cold and dark of winter, the young lads on the station concourse in front of me were still defiantly wearing their trousers round their knees. They were otherwise sensibly dressed for the weather – gloves, anoraks, woolly hats, and boots – were it not for the several inches of buttock clad only in (surprisingly jaunty looking) thin cotton boxers. That’s got to be cold. Could someone – for the sake of their mothers if nothing else – not come up with some fashionable-looking thermal underwear for these poor deserving boys?

Meanwhile, SWT were celebrating the start of winter in their own special way by cancelling my homeward train and then leaving us literally* in the dark because their platform lights aren’t set to come on until 6pm. Funnily enough, the same thing happened almost exactly a year ago. Do you think they have forgotten that the clocks going back actually means it gets dark earlier again?

* But not metaphorically – the cancellation was due to signal failure in the Addlestone area. So that’s all right then

Speak English you Fool…

… there are no subtitles in this scene.

It’s rather unnerving to get off the train at Kings Cross and realise that you are at that moment surrounded by more people, walking more quickly, than you have seen in total all week. And that you’re not supposed to smile at them. Still the shock of our return back to ‘civilisation’ had already been eased by the woman who got on at Darlington and filled the unforgiving minutes until our arrival at London with a pretty much non-stop series of phone calls (the commuter death stare went phut after the first decent night’s sleep followed by days spent happily gazing at scenery. Hard to summon up the requisite steely glare).

During the next few hours we were party to one half of some fairly sensitive HR topics – the mystery of Darren’s resignation and why he was no longer to be allowed to use the health club, how Liz’s grievance was going to be dealt with and finally, and bafflingly, how the hapless Steve was going to have to be encouraged to ‘bite a chunk off the elephant’. (I swear I’m not making this up). True, in the interests of confidentiality, she was speaking in the special coded gibberish known as management speak (apart from the moment when she pointed out that she was proud of herself that she didn’t throw any punches, or indeed give anyone a slap. Is this how modern HR is done?). Unfortunately, so elastic and forgiving is the English language, we were well able to decode such nonsense as ’sometimes one has to be instructional towards people’, ‘we must encourage them to manage through these challenges appropriately’ and ‘I told her to ask herself whether these behaviours were the sorts of behaviours that would afford a positive outcome.’

And so we listened in appalled fascination as the stories unfolded before us. Darren, it seems, is under investigation. Liz will be getting a modest payrise despite those non-positive behaviours and Steve? Steve will be encouraged to keep an on-going list and sometimes make it a medium priority and sometimes a top one.

As to the elephant, no more was said. Perhaps because she had realised it was in the room?

What Not to See

Ah, Scotland, home of the vicious killer red squirrel, if the road signs are anything to go by (sure, they look cute).

It’s been a lovely restful few days in Dumfries and Galloway which is full of spectacular and somewhat cloudy scenery. It’s also full of lovely nature reserves full of signs explaining what all the lovely birds and animals are that you’re currently not seeing. There are rushing woodland burns where you can not see dipper, mature woodlands where you can not see red squirrels, splendid hillsides where, if you’re me, you can just miss seeing a magnificent stag and, on the river Cree, there’s a beautiful calm pool surrounded by reeds where – if you sit very still and quiet for a couple of hours before dusk – you’ve a very good chance of not seeing otter.

But if nature was easy, what would be the fun in that? And we did see some glorious sights (including, in the end, more red squirrel than you could shake a stick at) and sometimes just sitting still and quietly and waiting is an end in itself, and something I don’t get enough of in my life (except when there are signalling problems at Clapham Junction).

And it’s nice to be somewhere where what traffic hazards there are are on four legs instead of four wheels. And even there, one canny farmer may have discovered a solution to the problem of narrow winding roads populated by wandering sheep:

He’s painted them bright orange. Now all we need to do is teach them how to cycle…

GNE-ahhh

Emerging from the festering stew of humanity that is the city branch of the Northern line (cram in all the commuters you can get your hands on, jam on the lid and stew at gas mark 5 for what feels like forever) through the bewildering scrum that is Kings Cross, and into this …

A hundred quid for the pair of us has never been better spent. We’re off for a week of peace and quiet and rest and recuperation. More disgruntlement will follow, but not for a week or so.

Oh and the Death Stare? Doesn’t work on loud women from Doncaster. Must keep practising.

And it wasn’t even the Quiet Coach

Looking up from my paper this evening I randomly caught the eye of the girl across the aisle who was talking briskly and a little volubly into her phone. In truth, up until then I had barely registered her conversation, but the effect on her was immediate and electric. Putting her hand over her mouth, she stopped speaking for almost a minute and then, mortified, said in a stage whisper into her phone ‘I was talking too loud’. She cringed back into the furthest seat and completed her call in an undertone, as quickly as she could.

It would appear I have inadvertently perfected my Commuter Death Stare. Now all I need to do is find a more worthy victim to unleash it on…

Don’t let my Train take the Strain

I wasn’t even going to mention the fact that my train was 20 minutes late this morning. There’s only so many ways I can write about having to catch the next train, being crammed in, getting held up and so on and so forth. But SouthWest Trains are nothing if not inventive in finding new and more interesting ways (and I’m using ‘interesting’ in its loosest possible sense here, obviously) to compound the misery.

Basically, the 7:41 (which regular readers with few friends and little excitement in their lives will remember is the eight-car train) was ‘delayed’ this morning, with no further information as to how delayed and ominous warnings over the tannoy that it might be cancelled. Next up was the 7:56 Weybridge train, a four-car sardine special made even more sardine-like by the presence of the disappointed 7:41 passengers. So far, so normal. The train got more and more crowded, and consequently more and more late, until we got to Barnes. At Barnes we paused, and the driver got onto the tannoy to announce that we were held at a red signal to allow the delayed 7:41 train to catch up with us so we could take on the rest of its passengers. Clearly somebody somewhere had noted that there was still a little smidgen of space on our train – nobody was actually perched on the luggage racks, for example, and there was probably still only one passenger per toilet cubicle – so they could ditch the by now doomed 7:41, turn it around, and go off and meet their punctuality targets somewhere else more glamourous like, I don’t know, Mortlake. Sure enough, we sat and watched through the windows as the 7:41 arrived in all its eight-car splendour on the next platform, offloaded its remaining passengers, and sailed off into the sunset. Then we had to sit and wait while the passengers climbed over the footbridge to our platform, got to the Weybridge train and tried to cram themselves on.

And even then we couldn’t get away. Because as the pips went and the doors failed to close, the guard got onto the tannoy once more: ‘Will the person who’s blocking the door with their bag please move it away so we can get away.’ Because, after all, at the end of the day, it’s always the passengers’ fault…

Sweaty Betty

Cycling into Battersea in the morning has opened up a bit of a commuting dilemma for me. Take this morning, when I got into the station to see that the Weybridge train was running late and if I sprinted I could catch it. No matter that the next train was a few minutes behind it and the Weybridge train is short and crowded whereas the next train is long and generally spacious, the first rule of commuting is that if you can catch the train, you do, because it may be the last one you see. Once on, though, I realised I was a little – erm – warm from the 20 minute cycle (enlivened by a lorry deciding that the bit of the roundabout in Battersea that I happened to be cycling on was the very bit of the roundabout that it too wanted to be on, right now, forcing a bit of nifty acceleration from my part) not to mention the sprint up the stairs and I hadn’t had my usual five or so minutes cooling off time on the platform. If it’s true that ladies merely glow, then I was glowing buckets with visible circles of glow under my arms, and even a few droplets of glow across my forehead. Mmm. Bet you all wanted to visualise that of an evening

So I walked up the train looking for a seat but the only seats available were in the middle of the three-by-twos and would have meant wedging myself in between the shower-fresh and dandy looking commuters who were all giving me that fixed look of horror that plainly said ‘Lord, I hope she doesn’t sit next to me’. In the end, someone got off at Clapham and I was able to perch myself on an outer seat and glow away quietly to myself without bothering anyone. But what would you do? It’s not as though they’re going to be installing showers in Queenstown Road station anytime soon – unless, of course, the mysterious Miss Havisham wills it should be so.

More Mond’oh Morning Blues

I am coming to the conclusion that there are some days when I shouldn’t be allowed out on my own, and Monday – any Monday – is one of them. Take today, when I woke up early, and instantly remembered there was some stuff I needed to put together to take into work this week. I was pretty pleased with my powers of recall, up until the point where I got to Vauxhall station and realised that this feat of memory had entirely over-written the normal instruction I have in that bit of my brain on a Monday which is to remember to take my oyster card out of whatever jacket I was wearing over the weekend and put it into the jacket I was wearing to work. Too late to go back and get it, so I decided to take the hit and buy another ticket today.

Which of course made it an excellent day (what with everyone else wanting to renew their tickets as well) for SWT to have put up signs warning people that none of their machines was taking cards. The guy in front of me – ignoring the girl from SWT who was busy warning customers about this – paid by card anyway and succeeded. I – having already queued up to take cash out – then attempted to pay by card and failed. I left the poor SWT employee putting up and taking down the ‘cash only’ signs rather in the manner of an Irishman* telling a motorist if his indicators were working or not. I think she was having a bit of a Monday-ish day herself. Still, I did at least manage to remember to get on the train this time. And for that small mercy, much thanks.

*Or Cork man or Kerry man or blonde – it’s pick your own prejudice week here on Disgruntled Commuter