I was on the London Underground today. What a slice of life that is! I find a trip on the Tube to be the transport equivalent of visiting the websites I mentioned in my last blog: a morbidly-compelling view into humanity in all its manifold weirdness, until you can't take it any more and turn away in revulsion.
I have many Tube-associated fears. You might think, post 7/7/2005, that most of these would be terrorism-related. Not so. Primary among them, as I never tire of discussing with my friend Tarry, is actually the possibility that some mentalist is going to push me on to the tracks one day in front of an oncoming train. (I use "mentalist" here in the hilariously inaccurate way English people prefer, as denoting 'an insane person' rather than referring to those dudes in the 19th century who practised mind-control.) For this reason I shrink against the platform wall until the last possible minute and then make a hair-raising sprint for the opening doors. It's quite stressful, but enormously exciting at the same time.
Incidents of people falling in front of trains is the reason why the Tube tracks have deep pits beneath them, which are colloquially known as "dead men's trenches". You know when a mentalist has struck because the PA system will apologise for the delay caused by a "customer incident". (This is all true, by the way.) Employees of the Underground refer to this type of event as "one under". They have a special Therapy Unit to deal with drivers' post-traumatic stress after this happens. Feel safe yet?
Second in my hierarchy of horrifying Tube scenarios is the idea that one night I will get trapped in a carriage full of drunken Arsenal supporters on their way home from a footie match which their team has lost. The way my nightmarish version of events plays out, the Tube suddenly stops in a tunnel between stations, as it is wont to do to allow the conductor to scrape up the remains of victims of mentalists. In this liminal space, normal societal mores break down a la Lord of the Flies, and I end up with my decapitated head impaled on one of their team flags.
It is odd that these fears plague me in such terrifying clarity, because in truth nothing remotely bad has ever happened to me on the Tube. Unless you count the time I found myself the only normally-abled person (other than one frazzled teacher) in a carriage hosting a field-trip of mentally-retarded eight-year-old schoolkids, and I mean "mentally retarded" in the clinical sense here. But that's a story I can't tell without crying.
And then there was the time Tarry and I almost got happy-slapped by murderous chavs on a Tube to Putney late one night. (Happy-slapping, if you're unfamiliar with this particularly beautiful aspect of English culture, is the favourite pastime of the common-or-garden chav other than smoking over your baby's pram when you're 14: one of you attacks an unsuspecting victim while your accomplices record it on a camera-phone.) We escaped only by following Tarry's wise hissed advice of "Don't make eye-contact - they can smell fear".
I do find the Tube fascinating, though. Here is an itemised list of things about the Tube that interest me:
1.) My number one-for-fun activity is seeing what my fellow Underground commuters are reading. And everyone reads on the Tube, except me because I'm too busy plotting exit strategies and keeping an eye out for mentalists. I've never yet seen anyone tackling Tolstoy, and in general the literary choices would fail to get an unequivocal thumbs-up from F.R. Leavis, but the point is that they all read. In South Africa you would have to visit a university English Department to find such a concentration of people engaging with written texts at any one time, and even then half the academics would be reading Heat.
2.) Another thing that's interesting about the Tube is how rubbish it is. They've had 145 years to improve the system and it still sucks. In 2006 it's estimated that the average commuter lost three days, 10 hours and 25 minutes on the Underground due to delays. That's a fairly chilling thought, especially when you consider that it takes the average Arsenal supporter roughly three minutes to rip out your internal organs with their bare hands.
3.) If you've ever taken even a single trip on the Tube, you'll be familiar with the female voice warning you to "Mind the gap", and advising you of upcoming stations. The woman behind the voice is a comedy actress called Emma Clarke, who held the contract from 1999 to 2007. Last year she was unexpectedly fired by the London Underground for releasing a series of spoof Tube PA announcements as audio clips on her website. They included: "Passengers filling in answers on their Sudokus, please accept they are just crosswords for the unimaginative and are not in any way more impressive just because they contain numbers." So you can expect a different voice in the future, which saddens me because I find Clarke's well-modulated tones very soothing.
4.) The now-iconic Tube map was designed in 1933 by a dude who was paid the princely sum of five guineas, which even back then wouldn't stretch to a portion of kebab-van cheesy chips for a drunk Arsenal fan. But what's weird about the Tube map is that its design is topological rather than geographical. What this means is that the position of stops on the map bears absolutely no relation to their location in the physical reality of the sprawling, ramshackle mess that is London's urban landscape. You've probably figured this out if it ever struck you as unlikely that London's town-planning design could be encompassed by a perfect rectangle. Since I am cartographically-illiterate, however, and would struggle to produce or decipher a map leading from my bedroom to my kitchen, I never realised this until 2005's Underground bomb attacks. After 7/7, large chunks of the Tube were closed for several weeks, and Londoners who are as thick as me were thrown into disarray, as they were forced to come to terms with the fact that they didn't have a blinking clue what their city looked like without the Tube map as a compass. Londoners wandered the streets lost and confused for days afterwards, slowly grasping the idea that Tube stations marked as falling in an equidistant straight line from each other on the map might be five minutes direct walk away in one case, and a forty-five minute meandering route in another case.
5.) Today I saw a mouse on the Tottenham Court Road platform. It was nibbling a piece of lettuce abandoned by a vegetarian fleeing a happy-slap. And I thought, aren't we all a bit like that mouse, really, when it comes down to it? Then a mentalist came along and crushed its tiny skull with one of his Doc Martens, and ate the remains.
Sunday, 24 February 2008
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10 comments:
Bec i am snorting with laughter on this end of the world...brilliantly put! *snort* *puke* I'm the same on the tube - non of this reading business it's the Saffa-stay-safe-by-observing-the-dodgy-characters-in-your-area approach. You can never be too careful about these matters.
Have to confess I enjoy reading the trashy free papers on the tube, perhaps it´s because I miss the free copies of Heat I could used to find lying around the English Department?
I think you mean West Ham supporters. We Arsenal fans are civilized bunch, more likely to be reading Steven Pinker than manually removing organs.
I LOVE the heading of this post. However, I found myself singing "tubeetubeetuuuuu" to the tune of "Strangers in the Night."
THANKS BEC!!!!
P.S. Word verification below noted.
Bec, I suspect your not reading on the tube has less to do with rampant paranoia and is more due to your exoticizing attitude towards your fellow passengers. If you were a Londoner, you would read with secure pleasure on the train; as a tourist you are too absorbed with anthropological investigation of the 'other'. The same happens to me, both in London and New York (when I lived in the latter I read on the subway).
Do the English genuinely use "mentalist" in that sense? Before I read your parentheses I was marvelling at the specificity of your fear - that some guy with psychokinetic powers would happen to be passing by and push you onto the tracks. Although in that case he could probably just use his mind, ho ho ho.
This is Matthew W-S. (still haven't figured out this comment thing)
One key facet on this topic you forgot to mention is how ugly the lighting on the tube makes people look. Do you think they sat down and designed the quality of light to deliberately accentuate every pore, cold sore, dimple of cellulite? It would be difficult to beat tube lighting on Photoshop.
On the issue of distance, I too have been fooled numerous times. For instance, one would never guess that Charing Cross is like a block from Embankment, and Embankment is just across the bridge from Waterloo and the National Theatre. The National Theatre could have been in fucking Brixton for all I knew.
Caught the train into work this morning (the good old-fashioned Cape Town Metrorail train, no larney Tube crap for us!), and was the only person reading - not Heat, by the by. Most mornings, though, there's at least one person reading the Daily Voice; a couple of Cape Times readers, and a copy of the Cape Son being passed from hand to hand. The majority of commuters either drool all over themselves or are listening to extremely loud music, sometimes without headphones to shield the rest of us from the din. Most days, the thought of a giant Doc Marten descending from the sky and crushing us all like teeny tiny mouse skulls is very appealing.
My worst ever tube experience, aside from all of my other ‘worst ever tube experiences’:
Let me set the scene. It was a fairly frisky summer’s day, and I was returning from a rather gruelling day of petting wonky kittens or applying mascara or whatever it was I did in my youth. The tube train was by no means packed; the seats were full, and I was left to stand and hold the dysentery / hepatitis pole. Suddenly I feel a massive erection push into my back.
“Dear Sir! Please cease this behaviour at once!”
Much to my surprise, he did. Wow, I thought to myself, I can really thwart these perverts, I am truly awesome. I then saw him turn to the closing door. He slipped his erect penis between the doors, letting out a squeal of ecstasy as the doors smashed his manhood. In typical London commuter fashion, we all looked at our copies of the bestseller of that week, doing our best to ignore the grunts of a man fervently masturbating by thrashing his penis against the floor.
The End
Finally on the same page!! Also reminds me of the "old mac donald" day - we seem to draw them in Bec
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