WARNING:If you don’t like me in ranting mode, skip this entry.
I do love going to London, but it’s always an eye-opener how different my life is now, how much the city I grew up in, knew and loved has changed – and how, for that matter, I have too. Last night I felt frumpy and naiive – I try to be relatively presentable in the Clinic, but haven’t worn the London 20-something’s uniform of chic little city suit for a good few years, and stuck out a mile from my erstwhile peers. I also forget how the underground has its own climate system, and I’m always disorientated by the sheer heat – not just temperature but airless, crowded people heat, fast impersonal and unfriendly. We do have public transport in Wales (!), but it’s a lot less frenetic.
Perhaps that’s stating the obvious – Swansea isn’t a capital city of however many million people bizzing about their 100 mile an hour lives and of course it will be quieter and less lunatic than London. I should expect that. The point I’m making isn’t that London’s busy – of course it is! – but that I was scared and surprised by how out of place I felt going “home”.
Five of the seven escalators I had to negotiate en route between Paddington and my parents’ were out of order, and I was unprepared for how unfit and knackered I was at the top (and bottom!) of each flight. The pregnancy thing changes your balance considerably, and I was surprised how frightening I found it negotiating the stairs instead, specially at a speed dictated more by the pressing crowd around me than being able to take time to breathe.
Also surprising to me, though perhaps it shouldn’t have been, was the oblivious bubbles of isolation within which the individuals forming the mass enclosed themselves. I began to feel as though I were in some sort of parallel universe that looked like the South London I knew so well but whose systems and customs were alien, further removed than my few months or years away had prepared me for. It was a relief, in the circumstances, to find my parents’ house where I’d left it, and that my keys still worked!
Attempting the return leg was no less interesting – I was relaxing and thinking I’d maligned the Tube yesterday, putting it down to my tiredness and the fact that Aspies have difficulties with crowds at the best of times, how much nicer it was out of rush-hour and how quick and easy (relatively) it would be today, until (apologies to non-Londoners, this might be too detailed and require local knowledge)…
The Bakerloo wasn’t running northbound due to signal failure. Please use Northern line services instead. Fine, except that I was already on the wrong branch of Northern line for if I’d been planning to go that way. I left the train, looked at a map (I never used to have to do that when I lived there!), found what I thought was an alternative route, started putting that plan into action until another announcement, that due to a defective train no service on Central line either. Oh good. Ta muchly for telling us – after I’d started on a detour that would have involved using the central to cut a corner. 7 Northern line stations, one change and 8 Bakerloo was turning into 10 Northern, 5 Central and 5 Bakerloo, revised to 12 Northern and 9 Circle (but NB check in which direction round the Circle, and that you don’t end up on Metropolitan or the pink one whose name I never remember instead)… Gah! I used to be fluent in Tube, but today I felt frustrated, unweildy and foreign.
Eventually (1 1/2 hours to do what’s usually a 40 minute journey) I made it to Paddington by a most circuitous route (my brother said that since I’m only in London so seldom, there’s no harm in circumnavigating the entire tube map to remind me where it is and reawaken fond memories. Hmm. How much sarcasm?!) where a foreign student obviously also having London transport “issues”, wearing a wide rucksack and walkman, stood squarely between me and the doors, staring at a map. I sympathised, but wanted to get out of the tube and nearer my train. I wanted to shake her, shout something (my frantic “scuse me please”s having had very little effect through the walkman-induced deafness and/or language barrier), but didn’t, instead making an ungainly dash to the opposite end of the carriage and flinging myself, bump and bag platformwards as the doors started to beep and close.
Having resigned myself to a later train because of the lovely shenanigans and roundabout way of the Tube, I wasn’t intending to race from tube to mainline station at a marathon sprint, but again I’d forgotten the Londoners’ way of navigating within the system – determined, singleminded and regardless of obstacles in the path. I was bashed with a briefcase, bulldozed by a bloke with a trolly and barged unceremoniously by the busy, purposeful horde. And the strange and scary thing is that I recognised them – in fact not all that long ago could have been one of them myself. Now I’m not just slower but wary, protective and a lot more spacially aware. Your average commuter seems to have no radar or wing-mirrors, and will change direction, push for a too small gap in the flow, and neither apologises nor even seems to notice the collisions, chaos and confusion caused in their wake.
I don’t, I really don’t, please believe that I don’t have a downer on London, Londoners or London transport – but I am heartily glad I don’t have to spend so long in the Tube these days. And by this stage, I was quite looking forward to returning the country I function rather better in.
The station was no less chaotic and disorientated me further – there seemed to be fewer seats, or far more people fighting over them, and the only non-smoking areas were in expensive little cafés that expected you to buy expensive little coffees for the privelege of sitting (fair enough!) which I didn’t feel like doing. Having missed my train by seven minutes, and not relishing the prospect of another 53 in said crowds (plus Paddington is one of the more draughty of mainline stations!), I opted instead for the relative tranquility of a train to Cardiff, assuming a train home from there would be easier to come by. Of course, not travelling on the designated train incurs extra penalties – and I was already feeling penalised having had to relinquish my Young Person’s tag 6 weeks ago (the 1/3 off that rail-cards give you makes a HUGE difference, believe me!)
You don’t really want to hear the rest of this do you?! I obviously got back in the end, or I wouldn’t be able to be telling you about it now. Maybe if I can bear it I’ll share Cardiff-Swansea with you another time. I’m back in work tomorrow and need sleep now.
