As I write this, I am emerging from a “migraine lite”. A Migraine lite is the same as a migraine, but it fools you into thinking that it’s just a bad headache. When you are still struggling to get through the day several hours after the tablets should have kicked its arse into next week, too late, you realise that you can’t face lunch and you really should have taken Migralive rather than Nurofen Plus. Bugger!
Anyway, that wasn’t what I wanted to write about. I wanted to write about the Underground. Not, as the Devil’s Kitchen has; rather, the whole awful experience of using it.
Yesterday I had a job in Brighton and travelling back on the 16:49 meant hitting London in the middle on the rush hour. Bad enough though this was, it was made worse by a broken rail on the Bakerloo line. So, the whole crowd on the Bakerloo platform slurped its way through the tunnels to the Central line. Oh, God, what a dreadful experience this is. Tripping along dark smelly holes beneath the dingy, dirty, ghastly city that is London, crushed among the madding crowd as it plies its way home against the tide of the delays and breakdowns that the daily commuters take for granted, before being crushed like cattle into the train carriage, pressed nose to armpit with ones fellow travellers.
I have expressed misanthropic tendencies here before. As someone who makes a living training others this might seem odd. However, I do have social skills and, I do like people; on a one to one basis and in small groups. It is the crowd that I cannot stand. And on the underground, you get crowds, hordes of them, moving through those claustrophobic tunnels, crushing all before them.
I may have misanthropic tendencies, but actually, I do not hate my fellow man…
Just those who can’t be arsed to wash their armpits.
Humans are fine in small doses. 😕
I actually quite like using the Underground when I visit London and I do like the city itself however I wouldn’t wish to make the Tube and Train commute daily. A couple of weeks back, Kim & I were in London travelling on the Tube when we discovered that all Circle lines back to Paddington had been halted due to a technical fault further down the line. Kim & I had a one-day travelcard so knew we could use the buses to get where we needed to. We found the bus we wanted, which would have taken us part of the way. We got on and asked the driver if he could let us know when we approached the stop and where the bus stop was for the one that would take us the rest of the way. His reply was priceless. He said that he didn’t speak very good English and although he could drive us where we needed, he couldn’t tell us which stop was which. That got me pissed off and I had a mini rant about it but wondered if I was coming across as an intolerant buffoon or worse a racist so thought better of it and shut up. Luckily for us, two rows of seats down from us was a London bus driver who had long since retired and he not only showed us where to get off but which bus stop to stand at and a better number bus to get us where we needed to be. On the next bus, there was not one person where we were seated who spoke any English at all. I suffer with panic attacks anyhow so this made the whole situation nightmarish. Eventually a chap behind us took off his walkman headphones and told us where we needed to get off. We thanked him profusely and within minutes were back at the train station but it was something I could have well done without.
London in autumn really messed with my sinuses…I immediately caught a cold, which was exacerbated by the heat from the tube stations and the following cold and rain from the outdoors.