To Be Transported…

Underground, overground, humbling, free…

Photo by Rodrigo Santos: https://www.pexels.com/photo/grayscale-photography-of-people-standing-near-train-2225274/on...

I’ll say this about disappointment – it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. Friday, I made my final commute of the year, a morning much foreseen. First I cycled to the tube. This takes ten minutes and is such a sudden mixture of cold air and determination in this season that it is hard to retain the details – it just happens. Not though for the friend I shared a drink with the night before. He cycles to work an hour ahead of me, just after seven am when it is still dark. At seven fifteen on Thursday he was hit by a scooter (his fault, he says). He thinks he has some broken ribs but “they can’t do anything for that,” and so went, not to hospital, but to the pub, where I found him, and a sense of gratitude that although I still had one morning ahead of me, at least when I left the house the sun would be up.

The sun kept its bargain, the city less so. All set for the usual rush hour privations, I saw from the empty bike racks outside the station that a lot of people were already on holiday. The quieter than normal concourse, the un-frantic escalator confirmed this. By the time I reached the platform I had some work to do because I had expected hustle and woe and all the everyday matters, and it wasn’t going to be that way. I had an appointment with the usual thing and it had not turned up and so I was, despite the improvement to my circumstance, dis-appointed.

In the Sam Fuller move The Big Red One, Lee Marvin’s character, unaware that WW1 is over, kills an enemy soldier after the armistice. I have few things in common with Lee Marvin or that character but I would say that when I go to work on the underground I am in a Lee Marvin mindset. When peace broke out on Friday ahead of Christmas and without my knowledge then I didn’t know who I was anymore, and it took a few stops before I was OK with the ceasefire. The PT in my SD stands for public transport, sometimes.