2007 and All That

In retrospect I should have guessed today’s journey was going to be quiet when I got to the station and found a spider busy building a web across the bike racks. No queues for the ticket machines, no news stand, no coffee stall, no passengers, no announcements but fortunately some trains (short ones, but with a grand total of ten passengers, hardly worth raising a sweat about). No readers, either, but that’s nothing new. And consequently, nothing to blog about.

I was going to write one of those ‘year in review’ posts that proper bloggers do, but I’m sure it was all tedious enough the first time around, and I couldn’t really be bothered. Except to award Eurostar the prize for best excuse EVER for ‘wild boar on the track’. Come on SouthWest Trains, do try to keep up.

And so I’ll leave you with nothing but my best wishes for the New Year. Me, I’ll be seeing it in my bedroom where – if I lie on the floor and peer up through the left hand window – I can see the London Eye and hence, I’m told, the fireworks. Given that my festive cold is currently entering its tenth day with no sign of letting up in either its virulence nor the inventiveness of its symptoms (today’s special: sore ribs with a side order of hacking cough), that’s about as much excitement as I can currently stand.

Happy New Year, one and all, and in 2008 may all your trains be long ones, and all your coaches quiet ones, and all your seats be window ones, facing the engine.

A Dreadful Warning

Round the back of the Elephant and Castle, on our way home, there is a little car park next to the leisure centre. This car park had a barrier, a jaunty red and white one, that could be raised and lowered to stop the cars from leaving before their owners had paid. This barrier had, as things do around the Elephant, suffered a little over the years. It seems the local residents had taken a scunner to it, and had taken matters into their own hands.

When we moved here, it had already been bent upwards at the end by main force leaving just enough of a gap that a car could be driven out without paying. The barrier rested permanently upwards, or did, until it was broken again, and then removed, leaving just a pillar and a vestigial stump of arm where the barrier had been. That was when the pillar itself started to suffer. They really didn’t like that car park barrier down at the Elephant and Castle, they really didn’t like it at all.

All this we saw and noted as we passed it on our occasional journeys to and from the station. But it was only yesterday, coming back from King’s Cross that I noticed this sign, at the other entrance to the car park:

I’m wondering – should that not be the other way around?

Home Again, Home Again

The worst thing about King’s Cross Underground is getting stuck behind some out-of-towner who’s busy experiencing for the first time just how expensive things in London really are. Sadly, this evening, o gentle reader, that out-of-towner was me. I had been thinking all week that four whole Euros for a single ticket into Paris from our outer suburb was a bit steep, even if that did include one trip on the metro too. But then we made the mistake of arriving at St. Pancras with my parents in tow and without our emergency visitors’ oyster cards. I plunged into the fray to buy a couple of zone one singles for them to get them home, knowing that they would be pricey but not prepared for what the ticket machine wanted. Four quid. Four quid! Four whole quid EACH for a single – a single to anywhere in zones one to six, I grant you, but that’s not much good when you’re only going to the Elephant. After I’d finished sharing my incredulity to the gathered queue behind me (sorry), two nice young ladies gave the other half their unwanted travel cards and we were able to go on our way without my treating the assembled ticket hall to a disquisition on the inequities of TfL’s latest pricing policy. Four quid. Four bloody quid. For a single.

According to all the announcements, handing on your travelcards to people who ask for them funds drug dealing, prostitution, organised crime and probably pigeons, and nice young ladies really shouldn’t do it. But in this case it was merely funding getting two blameless visitors from Kings Cross to South London without their daughter having an apoplectic fit on the way. I think that’s probably fair enough, don’t you?

Even so, though. FOUR. QUID.

I’d say I was glad to be back…

Twin Cities

Chugging out of Paris for suburban parts this afternoon, our eyes were caught by a Union Jack on a passing road sign. I always assumed that those twinning deals were pretty much entirely for the benefit of the British half of the bargain. Some rural backwater or soulless new town in the UK would gain a little continental glamour and some cross-channel jollies while their French counterparts stood around scratching their heads and humouring les Rosbifs and their strange fancies. After all, what could the French side possibly hope to gain from the arrangement? Some Cheddar? Mad cows? Salad cream? Surely, I thought, the minute the mayor of wherever and his entourage had gone back to Blighty the local dignitaries would heave a sigh of relief, put away their little British flags and pretend nothing had happened.

But I was wrong. For there is at least one borough of Paris, city of light, that considers itself so nondescript, so undistinguished, that the local Mairie felt it would gain a certain je ne sais quois from a sign announcing it was twinned with Enfield.

I don’t know…

…how the word ‘queue’ ever got adopted by the English from the French, who clearly don’t even have the concept, rather like those tribes who have no concept of number and allegedly count ‘one, two, many’. This makes getting on the Eurostar particularly painful. When they moved the terminus from Waterloo to St. Pancras they missed a trick and didn’t set up a single queuing system so that passengers attempting to check in have to guess which of the scrums for the ticket gates will have the man having a strop because he can’t check in more than an hour early in it (we guessed wrong). And then when the platform finally opens and all the English people who have been patiently waiting in line to get on the train get overtaken by a tide of cashmere overcoats and dodgy purple backpacks, the effect is more slow moving bread riot than the sophisticated return to international train travel we had all been led to expect by the salivating coverage of the new St. P’s. Frankly, wherever French people and queues are likely to meet, a strict system of first-come-first-served enforcement and clearly marked queue lines should be put in place. It’s the only language they understand*

Still, when you glide up the travelator and look up at the sparkling new roof, which they have managed to light so that the sky appears to be full of stars, much can be forgiven. And Eurostar have set a new standard in train excuse technology – not only blaming our late start on too much passenger luggage (at Christmas! who’da thunk it?) but then blaming our further lateness on the presence of wild boars on the track. You don’t get that at Brentford. And SNCF, obviously alerted to my imminent arrival and hoping to head off all disgruntlement at the pass, declared all local trains round Paris free this weekend. It won’t stop me, but it was a nice try.

*Apart from French, of course.

What is the Verdict…

O esteemed readership, on pink fluffy ear muffs for men? With a pink fluffy headband to boot.

I suppose the advantage of pink fluffy ear muffs – setting aside the whole keeping your ears warm thing – is that you can’t hear what people are saying about you. Although some of the more elaborate double takes of the other passengers on the platform were worth a thousand words…

Hung. Over.

Work Christmas dinner. Late out. Late home. Late to bed. Too much drunk. Don’t sleep well. Wake up. Still dark. Peer at watch. 6:45. Oh help. Overslept. Late to work! Must get up. Out of bed. Dressing gown on. Cold hallway. Light on. Check watch. 5:45. Back to bed.

Sometimes it’s those unexpected ‘extra’ half hours of sleep that are the sweetest…

I don’t Want to Start Any Blasphemous Rumours…

But what is it about driving buses that gives some bus drivers such a sick sense of humour? I know, I know, probably the passengers.

David, from the busdriving blog seems a nice chap, always ready to give his customers the time of day and help them with their troubles, but that’s down in Devon where perhaps the pace of life is slower. Whereas here – well, you get the odd nice one occasionally. But it’s the bastards you remember.

Take this morning. I was crossing the road, mere yards from the bus stop with a grandstand view of a number three pulling in at the stop. As I started to sprint for it, the bus driver must also have had a grandstand view of me running and clearly signalling my desire to catch the bus – aka waving like a madwoman. Which made it, I suppose, inevitable that he should wait just long enough for me to reach the stop before pulling away. This happens pretty much every time I try and use that stop. I suppose I should have learnt by now…

Now I know that buses have timetables and if I’m not actually at the stop he doesn’t have to wait for me. But if that was the case he might have looked a little repentant as he drove away. A rueful smile, a mouthed ’sorry’ – I would have understood. But no, not this one. He didn’t exactly give me a triumphant grin as he passed me. But there was a look of satisfaction on his face, a little hint of smugness that suggested he knew exactly what he was doing. And that I had made his day.

That’s (Still) not my Train…

The confident announcement of the imminent arrival of the 7:41 this morning got us all out of the waiting room this morning and into the chill of the platform. Once there, we all peered up the track to see what the train gods had in store for us today. They’ve been playing fast and loose with the train lengths for the last few days and nobody wants to be caught napping and having to end up sprinting the length of the platform to cram into the last carriage. The first train to round the bend was – oh horrors – a four car train, but as it didn’t slow down and its destination appeared to be Sorry, via Not in Service, we didn’t worry too much. The next train up was the right length but the wrong colour and not stopping either so we all stood back from the platform edge and waited some more. By the time the 7:41 – by now ‘the delayed 7:41′ – actually arrived, no fewer than four trains had thundered past empty and dark, off to the suburbs to pick up commuters to feed the endless appetite of Waterloo

Now obviously when you are doing important train-positioning work actual passengers – wanting to get on and off and such – are a bit of a nuisance. Much easier to trundle empty trains around, however many plaintive faces may stare at you from station platforms as you go. We know that. We know our place in the scheme of things. It’s just that – as we’re cooling our heels and every other bit of our anatomy while stranded on the platform – it’s a little frustrating to see train after train go by empty, and us summoned from the waiting room to watch them go by. Could they not at least give us a lift? Perhaps if we stuck out a thumb…

The East Wind doth Blow

Egads it’s cold out there. Probably not as cold in terms of the temperature as last Thursday – although the geese this morning were standing on the pond outside my office, instead of bobbing about in it – but taking into account the wind chill plenty cold enough. Especially on a bike. In fact, you don’t really know the meaning of the word wind chill until you’ve felt it flowing over your gloved hands and up the sleeves of your jacket. I try and tell myself it would be colder if I wasn’t on my bike and walked instead, but I’m not so sure. When the wind rounds a corner and buffets you sideways with an icy blast, pretty much anything would feel like an improvement.

But it’s not the east wind that’s massacring the bird population round here. Heading up to  Lambeth North Tube the other day we noticed not one but three pigeons squashed on the junction with the Kennington Road. Three! How stupid do pigeons have to be that the second and third don’t get out of the way when they see the first one get it? Or do you think the later two were simply feasting on their fallen comrade when the second blow fell? In which case, why did it stop at three?