I can't help but wonder, sat at my desk in sleepy Dorking, if the feeling of stress from spending all those years commuting into London will ever fully leave me. It's been just about 18 months now since I had to get up and face the crushing, suffocating shuffle. When I close my eyes I can still clearly see ranks of departure boards filled with sickly yellow "Cancelled" status notifications, an unwilling participant in the moaning army of the living dead, barely held back from ticket barriers by a thin line of community support officers - fully prepared to rugby tackle and detain the runners (who have simply broken inside and no longer care about the consequences) - tube station platforms, so full of stinking bodies, gasping for breaths of what amount to blackened, scorching CO2 - swaying dizzyingly, mere millimetres from either a tumble to electrified rail or death by rushing steel canisters that flash before you as the hot bodies behind inch you always forwards - the unstoppable conveyor of people neverendingly spewing from the escalators - tube train doors groaning open to already crushingly full cattle trucks, stuffed with a spaghetti of twisted bodies, some red faces bulging out, just for an instant, to gasp for the slightly less cloying air, a gasp free from the stale cigarettes, second-hand coffee and clinging, sodden, stinking underclothes - it requires physical effort to deliberately enter and start to force yourself to voluntarily inhale the fume - a tiny handful managing to extricate themselves - then rushing towards the light above, finding too often steel grilles drawn across entrance and exit from the foetid maze or broken escalators foiling them - "you can't come this way mate, overcrowding" - and always that half a thought of those who would deliberately pick this perfect time and place to detonate a bomb...when you escape, you are dirty - black from the soot and newsprint, defiled by the experience.
I did everything I could to make it survivable, leave earlier (and earlier), take the bus instead of the tube (but then the 100-person long queues, buses not turning up, traffic jams or breaking down), take the DLR (but more breakdowns, acts of violence right in front of me - there are no staff on trains or platforms for ne'er-do-wells to worry about)...there is no escaping it, there is no way to fight it - you just have to join it and accept it for the horrible reality it is - and that changes something in you - people here are just rude and impatient, people here just care about themselves (it doesn't matter if you are pregnant or on crutches - don't expect a seat)...expectations of basic levels of sanitation and personal space are a ridiculous conceit - put up and shut up if you want to ride, oh and a fair number of these people are actively out to rob you or kill you, so pay mind to that if you want to get out with your wallet/life.
Doing this thing - commuting to London - for one day is utterly exhausting, doing it day-after-day, week-after-week, year-after-year for decades requires you to slowly, but completely, surrender all of your standards and expectations - and I'm not entirely sure you ever truly get these things back.
You are subjected to moments in time no-one would wish upon an enemy - the tiny girl in her school uniform I saw crushed to death with her push bike under the wheels of a huge truck - the wails of her classmates - the cyclist I saw thrown into the path of the traffic on the Gray's Inn Road by a car driver opening his door at just the wrong moment, the bombs on 7/7...hell, I'm old enough that I was even caught up in the IRA bin bombings...
Keep calm and carry on.
I'm sat at my desk in Dorking. Outside I can see Ranmore Common atop the South Downs, there is a slight drizzle falling from the slate grey sky, someone in the distance has started burning damp wood, causing a thick snake of smoke to climb until it becomes indistinguishable from the cloud and once again I try to remind myself that it's quiet and calm.
No comments:
Post a Comment