Why So Serious: A Commuting Tip

Like many Londoners, I both love and hate various aspects of the public transport here. I love how efficient it is (most of the time), the helpfulness of the staff, the general cleanliness of the trains and buses (again, most of the time) and the fact that I can get just about anywhere in the city within an hour.

I don't like how crowded it can get, especially during rush hour. The Victoria line is my worst offender. It's not only packed solid but air circulation is abysmal, meaning the line is not only crowded but stuffy and beyond claustrophobic. It is at its worst in the morning when everyone from North London is packed into the trains, and I intentionally avoid it by taking the Picadilly line and changing to the Victoria at the last possible moment, even though it probably adds about 5 minutes to my trip.

This morning though I found an excellent solution to the overcrowding problem. Like all amazing scientific breakthroughs this came about by accident but I'm going to use it anytime I don't want my face shoved in some Russian's stinky armpit between Holloway Road and Green Park.

1. Find a comedy CD that you haven't heard in a couple of years. Say, Lewis Black or Dave Attell.
2. Put the comedy CD on your iPod or portable music device and crank it when you're on the Tube.
3. Look like a normal commuter, dour-faced and avoiding eye contact with everyone, closely examining either the adverts or the floor.
4. Laugh to yourself at the jokes only you can hear.
5. Laugh out loud when appropriate. But continue to avoid eye contact and otherwise act normally.
6. Watch as the people around you slowly move so you have a nice little 3-foot circle all to yourself.
7. Enjoy your commute.

London Underground Station or Fictional Fantasy Location?

Congrats! You're about 100% knowledgable of fantasy worlds and/or London Tube stations.

 

I certainly hope you made this score without cheating, because no one likes a cheat. I'll assume you didn't and congratulate both your nerd knowledge and / or your knowledge of London's geography. Show this score to someone so they're proud of you.

London Underground Station or Fictional Fantasy Location?
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A little unfair since I made the quiz, but hey, have fun with it!!

A Day Out In London: A Narrative By Jason Mical

Liz Ready

Time: 12:40 PM
Location: Holloway Road

"Woke up, got out of bed
Dragged a comb across my head
Found my way downstairs and drank a cup
And looking up, i noticed i was late
Found my coat and grabbed my hat
Made the bus in seconds flat"

Holloway Road

Note: we did not take a bus. But it is time for a day on the town, a perfect way to spend a Sunday afternoon walking around our new home town. Holloway Road stretches south towards London. Did you know that Holloway Road goes all the way to Scotland as the A1? It's true, there are signs for "The North" everywhere. It's a very vague term to see on a sign.

It's a 10 minute walk from our flat to the Holloway Road tube station and we're taking it slow, joking and laughing. The Nag's Head shopping center is across the street, home of the Morrisons where we buy most of our groceries.

12:43

Time to get a move on, we've only got a few hours! The usual hubbub on Holloway Road, a half-dozen languages - English, Arabic, French, Italian, etc. - all around us and people of every size, color and shape. The newspaper calls some of them chavs and others dangerous but I realize more and more it's just the latest iteration of classism.

Scouting

The Scout Center is a bit of a conundrum since you can't do a lot of camping here and there's always trash piled outside (aren't Scouts clean here?) but as an Eagle scout I have to salute them for at least trying. The good old three-finger Scout salute in fact.

Speaking of, "we like to hike along, hike along, light-heart and free... we like a rowdy song, rowdy song, jolly good bunch of Scouts are we.." [repeat 10x]

Underground

Then it's down into the mirror city, the upside-down city of the Tube. The dirt on the sign is nothing compared to what lurks in the tunnels but believe it or not it all seems cleaner than it was the last time I was here. At least I'm not blowing as much black snot out of my nose as I used to.

That's a good thing right?

The Tube is like, well, many things. That's part of its beauty: it's a metaphor for some many things, and so many things are a metaphor for it. Aside from London itself, there are very few things that can inspire such networks of thought.

Fines

It's hard to charge a fine for something when the thing you'll be fined for using is broken / gone / nonexistent, but that won't stop them from trying I guess. I wonder how much someone got paid to create the placard, because the 'button' certainly looks to be permanently gone.

The idea of a key emergency button seems like it defeats the purpose of said button, eh? If the only one who can use it needs a key... oh fuck it, never mind.

Useless

Speaking of useless as tits on a bull, I don't think I've ever seen this so-called 'help station' in service. I guess I'm glad I've never needed help in the Holloway Road tube station because I'd have to run around and find someone first.

But we're not here for help, not today. We're here to keep going, deeper into the rabbit-hole of the Underground.

Adultery

Those crazy Europeans, free from Puritanical views on sex. Actually this ad is kind of uncommon and it was only up for about a week; it's been replaced now by an ad for the new Mary J. Blige album, but I'd actually rather have this suggestive and admittedly effective piece of advertising up there anyway. You can kind of see how the walls of the tube station curve here, giving the Tube its nickname.

It's actually called the Underground, which is equally appropriate. No one officially calls it the Tube but they might as well, kind of like the way people in New York refer to New Jersey as "shit."

Sign for Line

Urban Dictionary seyz:

whippin picadilly
d: having nothing to do, wasting time

Guy: "Hey man, what's up?"
Other guy: "Nothing, just whippin' picadilly."

I can only imagine they're referring to the wait time on the Picadilly line from about 8:15 - 8:45 am. On Sundays, there's no wait so we waltz right on the train and continue.

No/Motion

Speed is a relative thing when you're on the Tube. When the black walls are six inches from the window, it looks like you're flying by even though when they suddenly drop away for a switch or something it looks like you're only going about 10 MPH.

Escalators are no different; it's all relative, I suppose. Still the Tube is typically faster than any other form of transport in London because it travels in a (generally) straight line from point to point and somehow the hodgepodge of competing railroads from the 1800s actually managed to make a layout that decently serves most of London.

1:05

Even after a quick change of lines it's still only 1:05, so about 20 minutes from when we left our flat and walked by the Nag's Head till when we're in central London. Bloomsbury to be exact.

Most literary types know Bloomsbury by the people who hung out here: Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, and some other poor chumps who never became quite as famous. It's one of those quiet sections of London where you go to stroll around because there aren't a lot of tourists or other people to get in your way; at the very north end is the British Museum. At the south end is Chancery Lane.

Oyster Card

This is an Oyster card. This is a newfangled invention so you don't have to buy paper tickets every time you want to ride the Tube. It carries a balance on it for single trips, or you can do what we did and buy monthlong or yearlong passes (at a discount.) It works by and RFID chip.

Conspiracy theorists and right-wing loonies are constantly shitting themselves about how the government can track where you are at any time because of these things. I find that exceptionally hard to believe because most times I have to lay mine on the reader for two or three seconds for it to pick up the signal. We're a little ways off from real-time people-tracking. That's what all those CCTV cameras are for, sillies!

Griffin

I want to say a quick word about these griffins, not because of any familial relation but because the griffins are a symbol of London. A similar pair guard the south side of London Bridge, and this used to be one of the gates to the city which these fellows used to guard.

Oddly enough, Griffins used to be the symbol of the Iceni tribe, whose queen, Boudica, burned Londinium to the ground after the Romans abandoned it to her army. Griffins and London go way back.

2:00

A brief meander later and we're looking up Regent Street. Our destination: the Dover Castle, a pub near my office where I've eaten lunch a few times. We're out for their Sunday Roast, a traditional English dish eaten on Sunday consisting of Roast. But where Regent turns into Great Portland is this church, rebuilt several times, most recently after the Blitz. Even what's new looks old here.

The Beeb

Speaking of, here's a pair of jokers outside the BBC office. The BBC is the UK's answer to... well, I'd say PBS but that would be insulting the BBC. It's entirely funded by taxpayers so there's no commercials, and it's channel 1 on every TV in the country instead of channel 50-something. And it actually has interesting content and cool shows, although their special effects are laughably bad most of the time.

Pit

Typically you don't get a good look inside construction sites because there are big fences to keep you out - mostly because there are a lot of dumbasses around who, when drunk, might think it's a good idea to go playing around in construction sites. Hell I've done that in my adult life and I wasn't even drunk. And the results were not pretty.

I learned after our walk that this is the location of the New Beeb - the BBC's new office building. Apparently the bottom floors of the building will be located somewhere in China because goddamn that's a big pit. I can't wait to see what it will look like when it's done.

One Glove

There's kind of a lost-and-found thing going on here, but this glove looks really nice. So I made up this limmerick about it:

There once was a glove lost in London
Which smelled a bit like an onion
It sat on a spike
And said "this I like,"
"For I don't have to cover a bunion."

Needs some work huh?

Flashman

Seth only recently introduced me to the Flashman novels by George MacDonald Fraser, who sadly died just a little while ago. Flashman is an anti-hero I can admire if not identify with: a coward who constantly shirks responsibility, sleeps with many women and betrays people.

Maybe admire isn't the right word.

I can however admire this statue, which looks like I kind of imagined Flashman to look. If he were made of Bronze.

Pub

And we arrived at the Dover Castle, which turned out to be closed. It's down the tiny Weymouth Mews, surrounded by houses that cost more than a million pounds. The irony is that they used to be servant's quarters (a "Mews" is the street where the carriage-houses were for the rich folk) and the pub's prices are really low compared with most of the rest of London. My local boozer in Holloway is more expensive.

BT

So we set out in search of something else, which took us right by my office and the lovely views of this big phallic symbol. Its tall and yes, it looks like a big wiener. It's also covered with BT's mobile phone sending/receiving devices so I imagine working in it would be akin to frolicking around Chernobyl as far as the radiation exposure goes. Which is probably why none of the offices in there are occupied anymore.

It is definitely a noticeable part of London though, and it's a long way from the Isle of Dogs and the rest of London's really big buildings.

Food

We eventually found another pub with an even cheaper roast so we went up, ordered some pints and noshed some, um, nosh. The roast was boiled beef and the gravy came from a can and the sprouts were overdone but otherwise it was OK. The good news is there was a really good cider on tap, which I'm starting to like as a good beer choice even if it is a little sweet.

Grey

The name of the place was the Yorkshire Grey, and I'd definitely go back again. It's one of those quintessential pubs: horrible wallpaper, strange photos or memorabilia on the wall, great beer on tap, food, a few people talking quietly. I like a pub where I don't have to ask my tablemates to repeat themselves.

I just wrote "tablemates" which is a pretty British sounding term. Crikey, I have to watch my language around here eh guvnur?

Buried

So a brief walk later - if you want to see the pictures go to my Flickr stream - and we're in Marylebone, near Regent's College, our old haunt. The churchyard for St. Marylebone (a bastardization of St. Mary le Bone, in case you're wondering) holds some awesome old graves which you don't realize you're standing on until it's too late because they're the sidewalk leading through the churchyard (actually a peace park, because that part of the church was destroyed during the Blitz.) It's awful small to read on the sign, but one of the great forebears of my craft is buried there which I didn't realize until I read the placard: Hoyle, of the Book of Games fame. He was buried here in 1769.

Detective

A little further along and we find this familiar fellow:

"His very person and appearance were such as to strike the most casual observer. In height he was rather over six feet,and so excessively lean that he seemed to be considerably taller. His eyes were sharp and piercing, save during those intervals of torpor to which I have alluded; and his thin, hawk-like nose gave his whole expression an air of alertness and decision. His chin, too, had the prominence and squareness which mark the man of determination. His hands were invariable blotted with ink and stained with chemicals, yet he was possessed of extraordinary delicacy of touch, as I frequently had occasion to observe when I watched him manipulating the fragile philosophical instruments."

4:10

And by now it's time to head home, a little tired but happy and satisfied at a great day out in London.

Like I said before, so many people compare London to so many things that it practically serves as a metaphor for everything at the same time. I will say this: it is very much a giant, collective organism more than the sum of its millions upon billions of parts. Say what you will about many cities, but there is no place like London anywhere else on Earth and I love living here.

Local Art

Liz and I began our Boxing Day ramble at our local Tube station, Holloway Road. We were surprised to find that graffiti artists had tagged pretty much the entire station between Christmas Eve and Boxing Day - and I got some pictures of what it looked like. I figured the context would remain a mystery but recognized a photo on Londonist as being a shot of the same art. So a few clicks later and I'm on Nicobobinus' Flickr stream, where he is displaying his shots of both Holloway Road and Caledonian Road (and commentors noted that Angel and Arsenal stations were tagged as well.)

More importantly, he linked to a Guardian story that provides context to the tags - seems its a memorial for two artists named Ozone and Wants who were stuck by a train and killed in early 2007. The article is a good look at the London graffiti scene, and makes for a good afternoon read.

I've always enjoyed well-done and artistic graffiti - it's a unique form of expression in urban areas, and is beautiful when done by a real artist - so it was cool that a series of coincidences and click-throughs gave me the whole story on the art in my local station.

London LOL Already

Liz is on the ground and I've got a little more than a week, but Seth linked me to a Metafilter post about the "Voice of the Underground" being fired for posting parody sounds on her website. I listened to a couple and holy shit are they funny. If you've ever want to hear the nice lady on the Tube telling people their city is a "stinking shithole," now is your chance.