London by tube

I have always loved the tube. I love the fact that it’s underground. Not just ‘underground’ but actually what it says on the can: under the ground. How brilliant is that? I love tube maps. I love that version of the tube map that you can buy at the Tate, where all the lines are big fat satisfying lines of paint squirted out of artist’s oil colour, and at the bottom is a squashed, used aluminium tube of paint with the lettering ‘London by Tube’ written beside it. I love the way that the tube map is so gloriously, reassuringly brighly coloured, and the way that it’s so geometric and square like a child’s toy.

I love that moment, staring at the tube map, when you think you’ll have to change a million times and double back on yourself to get somewhere, then you suddenly notice a cunning interchange which means only one change. Yes! I can use the tube. Excellent.

I have, however, never used the tube regularly until now. Now I’m a twice-a-day tuber. A proper commuter. And I’ve always been aware that my childlike enthusiasm for it wasn’t entirely… well… it wasn’t entirely ‘cool’. It marked me out. And what it marked me out as was a tourist user, not a commuter. Somehow – in one of those great hierarchies that got drawn up when you and I weren’t listening at the back – occasional, tourist users of the tube are the lowest of the low.

At the top are those who use it every day for an hour or more. Next come the Underground staff. Next are school children. Next is anyone over sixty. Anyone carrying large amounts of luggage, or a guitar, automatically forfeits their place in the Tube hierarchy. Move to the bottom of the pile. Do not pass go, do not collect £200.

Did I say the bottom of the pile? Oh no. No no no. Because the very bottom of the pile is reserved for people like the tube-user that I was. The weekender. The sojourner. The day tripper. The tube equivalent of the social smoker. Sitting clasping rucksacks, eyes nervously fixed on the map of the route near the top of the side of the carriage. Holding their ticket between warm thumb and forefinger. Standing up to check which station we’ve stopped at. Pausing in front of the barriers, inserting the ticket the wrong way round, then holding up great swathes of tutting, pissed off Londoners behind them as the machine beeps and won’t let them out.

That was me. But not any more. And I still like the tube. Obviously I’d never say it out loud for fear of being beaten up by a tired, delayed, anti-tube strikers vigilante group. But I do. And I like it more now that I feel I’ve joined the club.

Before, in my day tripper days, I used to stand on the right on escalators. Really! I used to join the line of immobile people on the right, as to my left hordes of people stomped past. Now, I’m a climber, and as I pick my way past the lazy people with nowhere to go, I feel incredibly important. Yes I think to myself, I am more important, and busy, with more places to go to than you, as I pass one person, and you… and you….

Even when the London line train pulls up at District in the morning, and I barely manage to squeeze myself into a carriage, inserting myself carefully between some poor stranger’s armpit and their briefcase…. I still find some small pleasure in knowing that most people will get off the next stop but one so that they can change onto the Western line. I’m in control. I know what’s what.

Even when the train makes one of those stops in a tunnel that seem to go on forever (and once did, a few years ago, when I was stuck in a tunnel for nearly an hour during a signal failure) I still love the tube. Having marked out my membership to the club by reading while standing up, I am confident enough to raise my vision, catch someone’s eye and roll my eyes slightly heavenward. They do a similar glance upwards. ‘Chuh!’ our glances say, ‘Who’d be a Londoner, eh? The things we put up with. Huh!’

When in fact the answer to the question who’d be a londoner, is me! I would! And I am!
Perhaps….
But then on the other hand…I still gaze up at the buildings and grin. When a few of us at work caught a taxi to Marble Arch you could tell I wasn’t a Londoner born and bred both from my desire to catch the cabbie around the neck and tell him there was obviously a fault with his meter as it was going up so fast…. and also from the way that my eyes went like saucers and I all but pressed my nose up against the glass of the windows when we passed the Houses of Parliament, the Millennium Eye, and Buckingham Palace. I still catch the eye of Big Issue sellers and apologize if I’ve already bought the magazine that week. I still haven’t bought myself a weekly, or indeed monthly, travel card, and I still smile and sing to myself when I’m walking along the street back home to firstflat.

But then, to be perfectly honest (having been complimented on my smile by a man cutting a hedge this evening as I skipped home from the tube station) maybe I wouldn’t have it any other way.
with love, as ever
RTT
xxx

P.S. What I should have added was that, much as I love London, a downside of living here is that I do not have internet access. (sharp intake of breath from rumtumtugger’s readers) I know! I know! I can’t afford it until I can afford a new computer, as my usual computer is so old that you have to put coal in at the back to make it work… and I had previously got so used to my parents’ zippy, fast one… and I have internet access at work but I’m not yet confident enough of their internet policy to have a look at Open Diary- and my screen is a very visible one! So for the next few weeks at least, I will be a tourist to open diary, rather than a daily visitor. I hope you can forgive me, and that you’ll still know who I am when I come back…