It’s much more Bother with a Hover

It was a busy but not impossibly crowded train, and the woman sitting next to one of the few available seats was doing the bag hover. I think you know the move I mean: when the person whose bag is taking up a seat doesn’t whip it off hastily and apologetically onto their lap as they should, but instead sort of half-heartedly picks it up and lets it hover over the vacant seat in a way which is intended to say, ‘well, I could move this terribly heavy bag and put it on my lap but oh, it’s so difficult and painful and inconvenient and if I do it really, really slowly maybe you’ll get bored of waiting and go and sit somewhere else…’

I don’t know about you lot, but when I see the hover, then that instantly becomes the seat I want to sit in, and nowhere else will do.

Of course, I may just be contrary that way.

Two Turtle Doves

Look – was today international irritating couples day or something? I ask because I was stuck behind not one but two separate pairs of lovebirds billing and cooing in the queue for the quick ticket machine this morning. The whole point about the quick ticket machine is that it’s simple and easy to use, so it doesn’t require two to drive it. Or in one case, one to drive and one to nibble on the driver’s ear. I’m sorry but it was way too early in the morning for that sort of behaviour. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again – it’s all the fault of the classical music they play in the underground station, especially the more low-key romantic sort. Less of the Vivaldi, I say, and bring on the Wagner.

And – to the couple I encountered on my way home this evening – that double set of lines painted onto the pavement with the picture of the bike on it? It’s a bike lane. Not an indication that you should stroll romantically along it hand-in-hand. There’s plenty of room on the pavement for that outside the bike lane, thank you very much, and more dimly lit too, should you fancy a canoodle. And, in case you were wondering what I was doing, I was trying to cycle around you, which was quite difficult once you’d both stopped in your tracks and stood and stared blankly at me instead of getting out of my way. Just thought you’d like to know…

Fading Away

Oh dear. I’m fairly sure that when I set out from the station this evening on my bike my lights were at least legal, if not exactly bright. By the time I turned into my street I was having to put my glove in front of the front light to check that it was still on. Shortly after that I realised that putting my glove in front of my light wasn’t a very good way of rendering me more visible, so I just cycled along with my head down peering at what was now no more than a despairing glimmer. I think I made it home before it finally went phut, but it was hard to tell. Lucky for me our street is pretty quiet.

Top tip to all readers: Tesco batteries are rubbish. Time to go shopping I think. Or find out if it’s still possible to get a dynamo in this day and age … now there’s carbon-neutral for you.

Destination Station for the Nation

So the other half and I missed our connection at Kings Cross the other day and decided to make use of the extra half an hour waiting time to nip across the road and see the newly refurbished St. Pancras on which so much praise has been lavished. I used to spend a fair bit of time there back in the Nineties, waiting for the Derby train, and I had a soft spot for it then, despite its air of ramshackle dilapidation. And I’m a sucker for a fancy train station and had heard good things so I was prepared to be delighted.

We were … underwhelmed. Yes, it has a sky-blue roof, and a champagne bar and an endearing statue of John Betjemen. And yes, it doesn’t look like the inside of Terminal 2 during an air traffic controllers’ strike, or at least not yet. And it hasn’t been turned into a vast shopping mall (that’s all downstairs, cunning, eh?) or covered in horrible corporate logos and the new clock’s quite nice, what we could see of it under the scaffolding. But the snogging lovers statue is grotesquely out of scale and deeply naff, and the blue ironwork – well it’s not exactly the most macho colour for a railway station, is it, baby blue? It’s all right on the girders which are actually up in the sky, I suppose, but a lot of the ironwork is down at the concourse level and frankly that makes for a lot of blue. I suppose we should be grateful that the marketing lot didn’t get hold of it and decide women would be more likely to take the train if the station was painted pink.

I can see why the commentators got so excited about it, of course. Given the things they could have done with St. Pancras – knocked it down, sold it for luxury apartments, turned it into a shopping centre – I suppose we should be grateful they let us use it to catch trains. And nothing can take away from the excitement of the original gothic frontage and the soaring single arch, pastel colours or no pastel colours. But since when did not actually cocking something up become a triumph of regeneration? And what on earth is supposed to be meant by the phrase ‘a destination station’?

Still the proof of the pudding and all that, and I’m prepared to reserve my final judgement until we have used the station for real – not just to gawp and take photographs. we’ll be catching the Eurostar to Paris for Christmas again this year and we can see then how it compares with Waterloo. Because the point of a station, in the end, has got to be the trains. Not the bloody station itself

Ticket Sellers, Please

An unusual outbreak of sociability in my life means that tomorrow evening I’m off to the South Bank to meet a couple of friends for a drink and a bite or two to eat. But how to get from Kew Bridge to the SouthBank Centre (nearest station London Waterloo)? Curiously enough, despite the fact that my regular train home terminates at Waterloo, I was actually considering some convoluted combination of the District line and Bakerloo, despite the fact that taking the overland would be much faster and more convenient than sitting on the District line and watching it chug slowly into central London*. Why? Because I couldn’t see a way of doing it legally. My ticket (zone 2&3 travelcard) takes me to Vauxhall but no further. SouthWest Trains don’t accept Oyster Pay as you Go, so that’s out. Back in the good old days before the penalty fares I could have simply stayed on the train and paid the extra at Waterloo but doing so now risks encountering someone with a mean streak and a quota to fill, and ending up with a 20 quid fine and a criminal record – and frankly, if I’m going to get one of those for a night out on the town, I’d be aiming for something like Drunk and Disorderly not fare evasion.

So what to do? The platform ticket machines only sell tickets from the station they’re on, so the Kew Bridge one will want to charge me for the whole journey from Kew Bridge not just the Vauxhall to Waterloo leg. I could get off my nice comfy train at Vauxhall, go down the stairs and out through the barriers on my oyster, buy a ticket, go back through the barriers, find the platform for the next Waterloo train and try and catch that one, but that’s just madness, and I’m not going to. I could ask the nice person at the Kew Bridge station ticket office to sell me a ticket from the edge of zone 2 to Waterloo, which would be my preferred option if there was such a thing as a ticket office at Kew Bridge, with or without a nice person in it, except that there isn’t and there hasn’t been for years. So I have come up with the cunning plan of remembering to buy my ticket to Waterloo in the morning when I am at Vauxhall and within reach of a ticket machine that will do this. People who know me well may already have spotted the fatal flaw in this plan. For the rest of you, if you see me walking into Vauxhall station with a big yellow post-it on my forehead saying ‘REMIND ME TO BUY A TICKET TO WATERLOO’, then do me a favour and do so. For I will surely have forgotten.

Meanwhile, I still think it was a mean trick to put in penalty fare zones for stations where you can only buy a ticket from a not-very-flexible machine. Bring back the ticket office, I say. Like that’s ever going to happen…

*as, indeed, would almost anything

Great Breakthroughs

I have discovered – and I’m expecting the Nobel Institute to be on the phone any day now – that my bike goes a lot faster when both its mudguards aren’t rubbing against the wheels. It has been making a horrible whirring squeaking rubbing noise for a while now, and even the flattest part of Lambeth has begun to feel strangely hilly, so on Wednesday I got out my garden wire and my secateurs (why, what do you fix your bike with?) and reattached the mudguards – which had been hanging on front and back by a strut apiece and some rust – to the frame. Suddenly I can get to the station in half the time and with half the effort. The only problem is that now that I’m riding a stealth bike, pedestrians and pigeons are even more reluctant to get out of its way.

But I’m not the only one pushing back the frontiers of knowledge this week. I bet you thought that trains could only either be cancelled, or not cancelled. But the station staff at Vauxhall have found a third way. As I was leaving this evening I heard the following announcement:

‘Passengers on platform three awaiting the Richmond train, this train is no longer expected to leave London Waterloo.’

It’s not cancelled, you see. It’s just not going anywhere…

Darkness Falls

I came out of the house this morning and found the streetlights were having a vote on whether or not I needed to put my lights on. You know, I always thought that streetlights were on some sort of central timer switch controlled by the council, plugged into some sort of national register of lighting up times. Cometh the hour, or cometh the dawn, and they’d all switch off in one go. But it seems not, at least around here. Instead, it looks like each individual light is on its own timer, or else is triggered by something else, like light levels. Certainly they don’t all go off at once. Instead, the first one went off as I was zipping up my jacket, the next as I put on my gloves. Two more went as I unlocked my bike and stowed my lock away. By the time the moment of truth came – to put on my front light or not – there was just one hawkish die-hard holding out in a corner of the square. Did I need my lights or not? In the end, as I wheeled my bike out of the front gate and got ready to get in the saddle, the last light gave up and went out. It was now, finally, officially daylight.

But not for long. Tomorrow there will be two holdouts or more still shining as I set off for the station. Next week, it will probably be all of them. The brief respite of daylight we gained in the morning by turning the clocks back will be gone. For the next few months I will leave in the dark, and come home in the dark.

Anyone else feeling SAD?

Siren Song, Part two

I was running down Lambeth Bridge road this morning when I heard the familiar wail of a police siren. I always enjoy watching the panic this causes as drivers try and work out how best to get out of the way but this time someone had kept their head and left a nice gap so the police car could get into the bus lane and the police car duly did this. I fully expected it to streak off down the road and over the bridge for there were no buses, but no – the driver stopped and waited. Why? Because there was a cyclist in the bus lane and the cyclist was clearly buggered if he was going to stop for the police. It was his lane, dammit, and he was going to cycle on it. Even as rabid a cyclist defender as myself cannot condone this behaviour. If nothing else, plain old caution dictates that you stop or pull over and let them pass.

Yet time and time again I see people not doing this – not because they’ve lost their head and can’t work out how to react, but out of sheer bloody mindedness. You might argue this was just a police car and so fair game (although you’d probably think differently if it was your house being burgled) but what about ambulances? It behoves us all to keep up our ambulance karma, surely? Yet the other day, cycling home, I saw an ambulance trying to turn into the road I was on. It had its lights going, though not its sirens (it was a residential area), and so I made it clear I was stopping to let them pull out and get past. Not so the driver of the bus going the other way. Oh no, he saw the ambulance nosing into the road and didn’t just try and bully it out of the way, he even hooted at it. Fortunately the ambulance had just enough clearance to force its way past, otherwise some poor sod might have been having a heart attack in slow motion, pausing at every stop to let the little old ladies of Pimlico on and off the bus. I know you’re supposed to let the bus pull out, but that was ridiculous. You’d think that might come up in driver training, no? Or is it all NVQs in customer service these days?

Let them Eat Rich Teas

Cycling into Vauxhall the other day I noticed that the police had replaced their old mystery vehicle in Vauxhall Spring Park with a newer, shinier one. This one says ‘Police Conference Unit’on the side – no doubt part of Lambeth Police’s mission to bring meetings to those benighted parts of South East London that have never known the joys of hearing the words ‘Any other business?’ For after all, in these benighted days, who could argue with the idea of more meetings?*

And just think of the benefits to the modern day copper of a mobile conference unit. Too busy catching criminals, or dealing with a major security alert at Vauxhall station to attend your regular monthly management meeting? No problem. The meeting will come to you. And no doubt when they’ve worked through the last of the actions on the agenda, and approved the minutes for all to see, it will trundle off into the sunset to bring mild tedium and nasty biscuits to another dark corner of the borough.

So far, though, it’s been there three days. That’s one hell of a meeting. Do you think we should send in more biscuits?

*don’t answer that.

The Rain Falls on the Just

Walking into Kew Bridge this evening – doing my famous drowned rat impression – I could hear my train being announced just as I was coming onto the platform and I watched the waiting passengers emerge from under what little shelter there is and put up their umbrellas. It struck me then that – just as a matter of common courtesy – those passengers who are fortunate and/or far-sighted enough to have umbrellas, might want to actually use them, and leave the few dry spots to those of us that don’t. No?

Of course, it would be an entirely uncommon courtesy for those passengers who have umbrellas to offer to share their shelter with those of us who don’t – although it has happened to me once in the past, and in Hackney too. I’m not sure, but I think our society would have to be very different before that became a regular occurrence. But it would have been rather welcome this evening…