More Feet

Do I even have to say this? Why do I even have to say this? And yet…

Putting your feet on the seats is wrong

Putting your Ugg shod feet on the seats is more wrong (on taste grounds, if nothing else)

Putting your Ugg shod feet on the seat that someone else is sitting on – someone who you don’t know, and who has to adopt a painful-looking twisted position so that she can keep herself away from your Ugg shod feet while simultaneously glaring at you as you chatter obliviously into your mobile phone about your last skiing holiday – is wronger than wrong.

Aargh

I’d have blogged this last night but I was out and we came back in a tube train full of underaged overexcited teens going out to some nightclub or other and the high-pitched shrill squawking noise they made drove all of the words out of my head.

I’m sure I was never that loud.

Faster Than a Speeding Milk-Float

…I am, embarassingly, not. Or not on my bike anyway as I discovered when one of them overtook me on the way to the station this morning. In my defence, I would like to point out that the milk-float was almost empty at the time, and that it had had a long, long, straight piece of road to accelerate in, and that had I known that the strange whining noise coming up behind me was a milk-float, I would have pedalled harder*. Just to avoid the humiliation, you understand.

But I’m not at least the slowest thing on two wheels. The private day school near where I work has obviously been having a bit of a ‘cycle to school’ campaign because there was a herd of tiny wobbly blazered cyclists heading towards its gates this morning. Which is all good stuff, especially among the Chelsea tractored classes. But, wobbly as they are, they were all wobbling along on the pavement. Oh dear. That’s hardly a good example to set the lower orders, is it? I may be a slow cyclist but I am a fast walker so I ended up having to walk in the road to get round them all. I wouldn’t want the little darlings back in their four-by-fours, obviously, but perhaps a little bit more practice on the ‘cycling in a straight line’ and ‘leaving a bit of room for people to pass’ part of the cycling proficiency badge may be in order. And then they can go out into traffic and be humiliated by Ernie by themselves.

*In retrospect the sound of clanking empty milk bottles should have tipped me off, but who even knew there still were milkfloats any more?

This Bus is Bound for Glory

I can’t help thinking that if Jesus really loved us, he wouldn’t let his friends make commuting any more painful than it already is. The girl doing the hi-NRG amplified preaching to the captive audience at the bus stop outside the Elephant & Castle was bad enough; having her acolytes blocking every single escape route with their outstretched pamphlets – think freebie paper distributors but hundreds of them and not wearing bright purple so they were harder to avoid – just made the whole thing worse.

If you were planning on making a journey to anywhere but salvation today, can I suggest you avoid the Elephant, at least until the current harvest of souls is over? Or, in fact, this being the Elephant & Castle after all, perhaps best just to avoid it altogether.

Try a Little Helpfulness

Chaps! Can I alert you to the existence of these? Buggies, strollers, pushchairs, call them what you will, women use them to transport your small children around. I’m telling you this because you seem to be completely oblivious to them. I was out the other day with Babymother who, I might add, is a mother of two and hence can carry a buggy complete with child, changing bag, kitchen sink and all up seventeen flights of stairs in her teeth, but even she appreciates a hand at times. Now obviously I was there to help, but even so we got the odd offer of assistance – and all of them came from other women. From the chaps? Not so much as a glance in our direction.

Then this morning, at the foot of the monstrous stairs (two straight flights) that are the only exit from Kew Bridge station, I saw another mother with a buggy, and offered her a hand. Were any of the gents streaming past us shamed into helping out? They were not. I’m sure had it been a suitcase – or perhaps if either of us had been blonder – there would have been offers aplenty. But a buggy? I don’t think men can even see them.

Now look, chaps. This is not some politically correct minefield we’re talking about here. Nobody’s going to glare at you and accuse you of opening doors for them. Nobody’s going to burst into tears because it turns out they’re just fat. Nobody lugging their precious infant up two flights of stairs is going to turn down any assistance wherever it comes from. Giving her a hand does not in any way imply she is not capable of carrying the buggy. It just implies that she might not want to have to every single time.

And you know what? Helping people gives you the warm fuzzies. It can perk up any commuter’s day. (It also gives you aching triceps but that’s a matter for another entry). Obviously I could keep this quiet and hog all the smug brownie points myself. But I just thought you gentlemen might want to share the joy…

Super Nanny

You would think that, if you were in charge of something called the ‘SouthWest Trains Customer Information Centre’, and the only thing that was displaying on the platform indicators was the legendary text ‘Owing to a fault no information can be displayed’, then your number one top priority would be getting that sorted out, wouldn’t you? Well, you would be wrong, which is probably why you aren’t in charge of it*. For no, what the Customer Information Centre was doing was informing those passengers who had lost all sense of temperature that it was a bit nippy out and possibly slippery underfoot, and reminding them to take extra care. I knew this already because I’d had to thaw out my saddle again, but the sort of ‘information’ served up by the Information Centre is all of this ilk: not the stuff we don’t know (where the next train is going to, where it’s stopping at, how long it is and roughly when in the next century it’s likely to show up) because that would be difficult and complicated. Far, far easier and cheaper to pre-record a bunch of announcements telling us what we already know: it is slippy when it is icy underfoot and we should be careful. It’s hot in the summer and we should drink water. It’s disrupted when it snows and we should stay at home with the duvet over our head. Don’t leave cases and parcels unattended or we’ll cause a security scare. This isn’t not information so much as nagging.

In fact, perhaps they should take the concept a little further. Forget the SouthWest Trains Customer Information Centre, rebrand it as the SouthWest Trains Customer Nannying Centre and use it to nag us all a little further. ‘Did you put on a woolly vest this morning?’ ‘Have you brushed your teeth?’ ‘Did you wash behind your ears?’ ‘Show us your hands, they’re filthy, go back and clean under your nails this time’. And – my personal favourite, and I would in fact pay good money to have them blast this out on the platform tannoy – ‘pull up your trousers, boy! Nobody wants to see the colour of your pants’.

*Unless you actually are in charge of it and you’re reading this, in which case, can we have a word please?

Lycra Louts

Now regular readers will know that I am a staunch defender of cyclists, but today I found the boot (shoe? cleat?) was on the other foot. The other half and I were crossing a zebra, on the second half of the crossing, with plenty of time for the approaching white van and cyclist to see us and react. White Van Man did what good drivers do – he started to slow as soon as he saw us, so we knew he had seen us and was prepared to stop and we had the confidence to start to cross before he’d come to a full halt. This meant that by the time he reached the crossing we were out of his way and he could drive off barely delayed at all. And the cyclist? The cyclist approached the crossing at full tilt shouting something that sounded like ‘Bleuaurghfarghgurghaaaarghgra’ but which was probably meant to mean ‘get out of my way you puny pedestrians! How dare you impede my mighty progress?’ We in turn responded with something which was intended to come out as ‘Excuse me, old chap, but we’re exercising our right of way on a Zebra crossing, as laid down in the Highway code and it would be a courtesy if you would come to a complete halt,’ but at that hour of the morning came out as ‘Arsehole!’

If the number of bikes in the underpass at Vauxhall are anything to go by, cycling rates in London have doubled or even tripled in the last year. We’re no longer a beleaguered minority and we should stop behaving as one. Now the finer points of cycling road etiquette may be open to interpretation and debate, but after today’s adventure I can offer you one good rule of thumb which should serve in almost all situations: if you’re behaving like more of a dick than White Van Man, it’s time to amend your behaviour.

The New Orange

Two helpings of deja vu today with the trip into work again in the morning, followed by a bonus excursion on the Silverlink-that-was line that has now branded itself the Overground*. I’d love to say it was transformed into a gleaming beacon of efficiency, or even a three-legged donkey, but frankly you had to peer pretty closely to notice the difference. The ticket machines at Kew Gardens now do Oyster, wahey, making me wonder what they did with all the ticket machines that don’t do Oyster that they’d installed a few months before. There’s a big orange Overground sign at Highbury and Islington. And the automated lady that apologises to you when the train is late now has an awkwardly stitched in ‘…overground…’ where the rather more polysyllabic ‘Silverlink Metro’ used to be. But you noticed we still got the apology and the train was still late, and it still meandered, squeaking and groaning through the wastelands of North London (the effect is rather soothing when you’re used to SouthWest Trains woman bossily announcing every stop and every thought that enters her empty little head). The stations are still dark, and where the orange signs have not yet reached you still have to guess which stop you’re at by recognising the graffiti on the platform. And getting off at Highbury is still a bit like re-enacting Moses parting the Red Sea as the 5,000 passengers who are waiting to get on stand back to form a grudging narrow channel to allow the 5,000 passengers crammed into the carriage to get off.

The only thing that had changed was that I, stupidly, had timed my journey on the assumption that the train would take about the amount of time it ought to have taken, instead of building in a good half our of contingency time, and by the time it finally did squeak and groan and meander its way to Islington I was fashionably late. SWT? All is forgiven…

* Erm, isn’t calling a train line ‘the overground’ a bit like calling all those people who aren’t travellers ‘the settled community?’ why not call it ‘the runs on rails’ line? Or, indeed, the ’stating the bleeding obvious’ line?

Deja Vu All Over Again

Hang on, hang on, I quit my job two and a half weeks ago, didn’t I? So what was I doing this morning trying to remember the correct sequence of actions for cycling down to the station (helps if you unlock the bike first), exchanging merry banter with the news-stand guy (Him – after a brief double take: so are you still working hard? Me – with a broad grin: not if I can help it) and getting on the train to work? Had I forgotten I was a free woman and gone to work out of force of habit? Sadly, no. I am temporarily back at the grindstone a couple of days a week to help out with a couple of projects, so there may well be intermittent disgruntlement for weeks to come.

The sad thing is that, by the time I’d negotiated the usual run-of-the mill irritants of the journey in (car turning into road without giving way to bike, man discarding banana peel behind chair in waiting room, train arriving at Kew Bridge three minutes late for absolutely no reason at all) it was as though I had never been away. And by the time I’d endured the journey back, crammed into a three by two with the loudest women in Christendom (is everyone in Australia deaf? Is that why they have to shout so much?) recounting some utterly unamusing office prank one of them had played on the other, and the train had spent far more time than was reasonable at Wandsworth Town (why?) and the SouthWestTrains woman had insisted on announcing the next station one station in arrears (I do hope nobody got off at Queenstown Road thinking it was Clapham Junction), I had lost all the lovely relaxed happy feeling I’d gained from my scant two weeks of freedom.  I’d say I was glad to be back. But that would be a lie.

This commuting lark, it’s pretty disgruntling, isn’t it? Maybe I should start a blog…