Bathroom windows and Pepsi cups

Lately I keep seeing exquisite beauty in unexpected places.

For example, my bathroom window:

This evening I tossed a Pepsi cup off my seat on the tube, and after pinballing around a bit it came to rest against the lip of the metal grating just inside the carriage doors.

For the next three or four stops it rested there, being rocked just slighty as the doors opened and closed in the nigh-on empty carriage at each of Warren Street, Oxford Circus and Green Park.

It wasn't beautiful in itself, but somehow it seemed imbued with immense potential energy as it rested there unquietly. Almost planetlike. Of course, an 8-gram cup on a 1- or 2-degree slope would actually have negligable potential energy, but because it was resting against the open aperture of a tube carriage - a place from which you yourself would very much not want to be ejected at high speed between stations - its position seemed that much more precarious and momentous and meaningful.

Eventually a father kicked it off at Victoria, thereby relieving both my palpable tension and the guilt I'd been feeling at having unwittingly converted traveller detritus into the (not) very real possibility of catastrophic derailment. Yet even on the platform it retained some of its unlikely power, as person after person daintily avoided the delinquency of an accidental booting.

What does all this unlooked-for beauty mean? I for one am hoping for the rapture...

Book review: The 32 Stops - Danny Dorling (2013)

This is the second of the two books I bought from Penguin's set of twelve celebrating 150 years of London Underground. They're pretty little things. The other one I bought was A History of Captalism According to the Jubilee Line, which I very much enjoyed.

The 32 Stops is based around an unusual concept. Dorling takes you on a journey from west to east along the Central Line, but without actually descending underground; instead he character-hops a waking day at half-hourly intervals, giving you a few minutes with each person.
 
This he does using a wealth of real-life sources and statistics to present a snapshot of what life is actually like for people living beside that part of the Line. It's fact-based fiction as social commentary, played out along one of the city's main arteries.

It's an ingenious way of communicating a selection of socioeconomic statistics. I like a good geek out as much as the next blogger, but this is the first time I've ever put a book on this sort of stuff to the top of my reading list. A clever ploy.

And Dorling does a surprisingly good job of giving each new character or set of characters fairly unique circumstances. He is a Professor after all, not a novelist, and his characterisation is admirable, even if the writing itself is just a touch clunky at times.

It does get a little bit samey after a while though, as each inhabitation is too brief to delve deeply into the individual's circumstances. Wisely there's a non-fictional recap every four stops or so to tie together the disparate tales into a coherent thread, but it's still only a surface glimpse of the different layers.

Another minor complaint is that I found Dorling's politics took ever so slightly too forward a seat: the characters on the less enviable sides of the median lines are much more sympathetic than those on the other sides. That might be inevitable - I don't know how I would go about instilling sympathy for a dozen different well-to-do characters; you can't give them all cancer - but it was a weakness for me all the same.

(I suppose it's predictable that Dorling would be a lefty.  I wonder whether there are any conservative 'quantitative social geographers' out there?)

It's also a surprisingly depressing read. Real life, with its massive inequality and commonplace deprivation, dictates that many of the characters will be in difficult circumstances, but the bleakness is fairly unrelenting. Dorling also adds a further layer of complexity to the book by incrementally increasing the characters' age at each stop, so that a lifetime as well as a day is experienced across the journey as a whole. Although this is again ingenious, it amounts to an inexorable ride towards death through a multitude of lives filled with little more than constant worries about money and children. That is, it's a bit too realistic to be enjoyable as well as informative.

Still, overall The 32 Stops is an impressive accomplishment, and a credit to Penguin's bravery and powers of selection.

As I said, it's a lovely volume, but in case you don't like to fill your shelves with things both lovely and edifying, the thorough and at times rather witty notes include a link to a website currently under construction that looks as though it will soon provide an equivalent experience online. It too is already looking very snazzy:

http://www.londonmapper.org.uk/

I think I might buy more of the books though, personally.

The tube has no memory

I came onto the southbound Victoria line platform at Kings Cross at about 9.20 pm this Friday night. I thought I was too late to catch the tube train that was sitting there, because the doors near me were all closed, but then I noticed a commotion further along the platform that offered some hope.

Several Transport for London staff and maybe some transport police were standing half in and half out of the doors of one carriage dealing with some kind of situation, and as I approached I saw that the next set of doors further along the same carriage were also standing half open. Unlike other people hanging back on the platform, I slipped in...

The officials back along the carriage were in the process of deciding whether to detain some dude who was fervently protesting his innocence regarding whatever incident had taken place. I gained a picture of the scene in half-heard snatches as the staff rapidly made up their minds:

"I'm the victim in this!"

...
"Leave him alone!"
"You stay out of this!"
"I'm his mum! She bit him, he was just standing there!"
...

Within a remarkably short space of time, the officials made up their minds and withdrew, presumably with some female aggressor already in custody. With that, the familiar warning beeps sounded out and the carriage doors slid shut.

At this point the central part of the carriage was unnaturally empty of people. It wasn't entirely empty: there were the man and his mum, trying to pull themselves together, and one other young dude lounging back with his leg cocked nonchalantly over another seat, looking like he hadn't moved a hair during the whole goings on. And scattered across the floor of the carriage were the crushed remains of a burger and chips complete with decimated foam packaging, making the scene look like that of a low-end food fight gotten horribly out of hand.

The unfortunate young man was now examining an impressive instant bruise about the size of a £5 coin on his upper arm, having removed both a hoodie and a lightweight jacket to inspect the damage. The skin was scraped and ragged but looked unperforated, and there was no sign of extracutaneous blood.

I considered the situation. Both ends of the carriage were fully populated with seated people but largely empty of standees, whereas my central section was mostly empty of seated people but very crowded with somewhat shaken-looking standees. Reasoning that the danger was over, I excused my way through the crowd and sat down opposite the young man and his mother, just now themselves regaining their wits. One other man also took a perch at the far end of the section, but aside from he and I everyone else remained standing as the train pulled away.

I surreptitiously glanced at the man and his mother from time to time as the metres slid by. There were some quiet enquiries as to wellbeing from one to the other, but they were surprisingly low-key considering what had happened. The mother found or regained an Evening Standard from somewhere and directed the main force of her attention its way, although the hands holding it trembled. The son simply sat trembled and wondered where to look and what to do.

I looked at my feet, at the squashed chips, occasionally at the tube map and occasionally at the poor people opposite me and those still standing by the doors. Who knows what terrible scenes these people had witnessed, and why they were still so unwilling to sit down. Perhaps blood had been spilt after all - or not only spilt, but sprayed wildly across the seats, in Tarantino-esque reproduction of the ketchup smeared across the floor. I couldn't see any, though.

And then the tube reached Euston and the carriage doors opened and people embarked and, not knowing any reason not to, pushed past those still standing and filled the empty seats, pausing briefly at the sight of tattered foam and mashed potato, but not letting it stop them from claiming their deserved rest. A pack of teenage girls in skin-tight jeggings and faux-leather jackets squeezed on, squalling and laughing and drinking wine straight from a bottle, and suddenly they were the thing to contend with, the place not to look, the thing people wanted to be over.

When the man and his mum left the carriage at Oxford Circus, the only sign that anything had ever been amiss, aside from the stray chips and burger patty, came when the man who had perched on a seat when I took mine advised the fellow who had been bitten to perhaps see a doctor in the morning, to which the bitten murmured his quiet thanks.


The tube has no memory.