Commuter Hell

Despite the title, this new post is not a direct follow-on from my previous post but in response to what is going on in London at the moment.

In case you've been in a cave for the last week, you would have heard that London Underground staff are on strike at the moment. And while I haven't been affected by it on my journey in to work, I can sympathise with the general mood at the moment. Amongst various other things, they cite the suspension of a member of staff who opened the doors on the wrong side of the train as one of the reasons why they are striking. Now, surely this is a disciplinary issue as there were major safety concerns here and any union involvement should surely be focused as support to the member of staff concerned in any future hearings and not with any wider problems they think they have. With employment being the way it is at the moment, if everyone offered this kind of support to a fellow colleague there would be no-one at work!

And here's another thing, their demands are totally unrealistic as they want pay rises above inflation. Do they live in those tunnels? Can they not see there is a recession on and nobody is getting paid more? In fact, most companies are having to reduce their wages to keep staff in jobs. Also, did they not realise the nature of the job when applying for it? Yes, there could be early mornings and late nights and dark crappy conditions, but you are being paid more than adequately and if you don't like it you can apply for an office job. Then, you might realise what a pain in the arse it is to get to work when there's a strike on. The buses in London run practically 24/7 and you don't see their staff going on strike at the drop of a hat (although they are quite surly, but that's another post entirely).

I could go on, but believe it or not, this post wasn't inspired by the tube strike but by London's reaction to it. Specifically, the Mayor of London Boris Johnson. Now, I know he's a bumbling idiot (or he's an evil genius with a great cover), but he has absolutely the right attitude. He, for one, is being honest about the effect this is having on normal people in their everyday lives and is not pandering to the unions like the last mayor did. The fact that the other rail union is not supporting this strike and some services are in fact running (sporadically, but still) is proof of the sheer bloody-mindedness of the RMT. Also, BoJo has in fact tried to aleviate the problem by providing more bus services and boat services which Ken Livingstone didn't seem to do. However, one brilliant idea that I think should be rolled out across London permanently is a shared taxi service. There is an article about it here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8091028.stm but in short, people have a coloured ticket that corresponds to a part of London and they then share a cab with 4 other people with the same coloured ticket. This means there will be 5 people in a cab, instead of the 1.5 average. There is a set fare for each person depending on the area you wish to travel to, which means your fare is cheaper yet the cab driver receives more because of the increased number of people.

I for one can't see anything more positive to come out of this strike - everyone's a winner. You pay less, the cabbie gets more, there are less waiting times in queues and the environment probably likes it too. However, the one major problem with this is that we are British. If there are no marshals in queues to see the system works, no-one would dare take the initiative to go up to someone and simply ask where they're heading and if it would be possible to share a cab. And for those who would do it (I am one of them), there is no guarantee that the other person would agree because some people are miserable bastards. When I lived in York and my fiancé was living in London, I used to get the late train home after visiting him at the weekend. This would get me in for about midnight and the queue for taxis was always quite big because the buses would have stopped running by then. It always struck me as odd that no-one would suggest sharing a cab when you would see one person get into a huge people carrier. I did say something on a few occasions, but my new friends were never going in the same direction.

I think if this was to work, the taxi drivers themselves must encourage cab sharing - maybe not move until a couple of other people get in or something. There are some interesting things in the article that cab drivers in other countries do, so I suggest you read it.

I might get a boat home tonight...

The Daily Commute

For those of you who also follow me on Facebook, you would have noticed lately that I have been posting up 'If I Ruled The World' rules as my status updates. And you may also have noticed that the vast majority (if not all) of them are aimed at the people I have to share my journey into work with, i.e. commuters.

I think you can get the measure of a person by how they behave on a bus or train when faced with what they obviously see as challenges. For example, if somebody sits next to you do you a) try and skooch along even though there isn't that much room or b) stretch your legs out even further so that the other person is precariously balanced on one butt cheek? That to me says that elsewhere in your life you are a rude, arrogant person who clearly thinks you are more important than the people you pass on the street. Or how about this one? When walking to or from the train station do you a) hold your head up high, taking care to avoid fellow passengers or b) bury your head in your mobile phone or a book? Now that to me smacks of an inconsiderate and once again, rude person. And as my fiancé so rightly and hilariously pointed out to me the other day, the world is full of cunts.

I wasn't always like this. I lived in York for a few years, and you can pretty much walk everywhere if you live close enough to the town centre. And if I got the bus, my only concern was whether or not I got a seat. It seems like London has turned me into this festering scab of rage as there are far more people to dislike and far more modes of transport to get angry with. Now, don't get me wrong - if anything terrible was to happen to somebody on public transport I would like to think I would step in there and help, but most of the time I bury myself in a good book and play my iPod just to make doubly sure no-one tries to make eye contact with me. I have far more negative experiences on the train than positive, so they have melded into one horrendous train journey, so much so, that the nicest thing that happened on the train with a total stranger stands out so vividly to me. It sounds like such a non-event, but it made my day I can tell you. The man I was sitting next to was doing a cryptic crossword and he asked me for my help on a clue he was stuck on. The fact he thought I should know was nice enough (I did get it actually), but also that he was willing to break the basic rules of commuting and have a conversation with somebody he didn't know was great. I could feel people looking at us and I swear some of them seemed to melt a little and gave off a feeling of jealousy that they hadn't been the one to sit next to this renegade crossword-puzzler. It was a nice sunny day, and I had a little glow inside me for the rest of the morning. Thank you Crossword Puzzle Man, wherever you are.

Despite my very English complaining, I don't want to be the cynical, scowling person that the daily commute is clearly turning me into - I am only 26 so I need a few more disappointments thrown at me before I get to that stage. But it is an awful, awful thing when the outcome of your day can be measured by how you were treated on the train by a fellow human being. One that you don't even know for that matter. And for me, it is so easy to either please me send me into a rage. I saw something that I truly despise and that was a lady walking while sending a text on her mobile phone, holding up a fair sized crowd coming out of Waterloo station. As you can imagine, I shook my head to myself and boiled inside, but then when the guy trying to get past her did the same as me I started smiling instead. I had found my kindred spirit and it made me realise for a split second that I am not alone and that the vast majority of people aren't cunts, they just have to live with one or two of them occasionally.

Limbo

So, I started my new job today and while it is still mid-evening (I should have re-thought the title of this blog), I have been thinking about a few things recently.

While it is exciting that I now have enough money to pay my mortgage and the endless bills for the forseeable future, it now seems like I have nothing to do for a few months. I have handed in my application for teacher training and while I wait for my references to come through I have to assume that what I wrote is sufficient to get me into one of the universities of my choice. I am relieved that I don't have to think about it anymore, but I have that awful feeling that I missed something out or put my personal statement answers in the wrong place and I think I should be working on it.

Also, I am not spending my days on the internet looking for work (and starting blogs) anymore, so everything seems really quiet at the minute. I know that once my handover is finished at the end of the week I'll be on my own so I'll welcome the quiet times and getting home to absolutely nothing, but right now it feels like I am in a kind of limbo and while I should cherish it I feel like my life is being wasted. I also don't know what I will do with my life if I don't get the chance to learn to be a teacher. Without realising it, I have pinned all my hopes on getting in to a university and training in September and even my subconcious is telling me this in my dreams. Ones with Johnny Depp in them. Sitting on the sinks of a ladies' bathroom and talking about life no less. Aw, just like high school.

I know that I could find a job for a year, or temp for a year and start next September, but I was so looking forward to starting and I have this awful feeling that if I don't do it now, I never will. While everything may seem rushed; getting student loans sorted, filling in forms, I know that if I have time to stew over them in the future they will never get done. And I have committed myself to a Proofreading and Editing correspondence course that I would like to get finished before I become a student again, but their weird symbols are putting me off.

In short, I have reached a plateau (or is it plateaux?) in my life that even alcohol doesn't seem to be helping (I know! Ludicrous!) and I need a good kick up the arse. Please form an orderly queue.

The Written Word

So, I was doing the usual lying in bed and moving around more than I do during the whole day, when I began to think of English in its different forms. I am from an era when you were marked down on bad spelling, punctuation and grammar in exams and not when you got marks for saying 'fuck off;' which apparently is showing good spelling. My point is, I am by no means a purist but I absolutely despise text speak. Don't get me wrong, I am aware that English is constantly evolving and that Chaucer probably had a heart attack when we started saying 'you' instead of 'thou;' but what I object to is the use of text speak when you're not even texting. For example, I realise that text speak came about as an ingenious way of saving space when you have limited characters in a text message and to that end it works wonderfully. It has even been proven that if you olny use the frsit and lsat lterets in a wrod it is prefelcty radealbe (kinda). But when you are presented with text speak on Facebook or Twitter comments is when it really gets my goat. You have a whole keyboard in front of you to type real words and you don't even bother - in fact, I would say it's harder to write in text speak on a keyboard than using real words. I suppose that's a good thing - they can spend more time indoors typing inane messages and leave the rest of us alone. And God forbid, if you actually use it in real life. I don't even use it in texts, but I think that's more of an age thing than anything else. I can stretch to the occasional 'LOL' but that's more of an internet thing anyway.

And as this is the way my brain goes, I thought about the awful way that some people pronounce the word 'ask' as 'axe.' Was that just a communal groan I heard through t'internets? However, I have since found out that this is actually an olde English way of pronouncing the word when I thought it was a relatively new phenomenon. This may be the case, but why is this pronunciation mainly among people of Black African or Carribbean descent? Or white, middle class 'gangstas' trying to look hard of course. The only conclusion I can gather is that when the English so very kindly colonised parts of Africa and the Carribbean, this is how we pronounced the word and it has been passed down the generations so to speak. I know this is how it is also pronounced in the parts of America where there is a large black population so this is the only explanation I could offer myself when contemplating its usage last night. If any of you know different, please let me know because I am genuinely interested in how it has come about and how we can eradicate it from our lives forever.

Fisher Price Memories

Well, here I am starting my new blog and it feels quite good. I just want to get everything down while I remember and then I can start playing with the formats later. You also may have noticed that it is in fact early afternoon and not midnight - I generally think about things around or after midnight while trying to get to sleep and type them up later. This probably has something to do with the fact that the computer is in the shed in the garden (or the Bat Cave as it is affectionately known) and I don't very much like the idea of being sat here on my own at that hour. Which is why I need a new laptop. This is what has been going through my head over the last couple of nights - apologies if it seems like I am typing the new Magna Carta.

I was recently made redundant from my job of 3 years and while I think I am coping brilliantly, there are certain side effects I wasn't counting on. For example, although this has happened to me and no-one else, I have the distinct feeling that there are people out there who know more about it than me, other than the bosses who dealt with it of course. This has left me with a horrible distrust of people as I don't think I know the whole story. I know that I don't have the right to know everything about a single person, but when it comes to things that affect me I think I have a certain right in finding out more. Throughout this whole thing and the six or seven weeks I've had at home looking for work I have found out who my real friends are and unfortunately for me it is far fewer than I first imagined.

So, as this was churning through my head, I began to think of happier times in the good old days - when the sun was always shining and there were more than enough hours in the day even if you did go to bed at 8pm. And I suddenly thought, how cool would it be to meet the 5/6 year old Laura? Not to sit her down and give her a right talking to and tell her who to avoid later in life. It's a bit of a cliché, but I wouldn't be the person I am today if I didn't make the same mistakes, and since I am essentially happy apart from the not-having-a-job situation I wouldn't want to change anything. No, I would just like to meet her and see if she is the same person I remember her being or if my memory has played tricks on me. Initially, I thought the 20 years since had made me into a totally different person, but as I got thinking I realised that I am pretty much the same just with a wider vocabulary (and arse). In the immortal words of Lloyd Grossman, let's look at the evidence:

- The main difference between Laura and me is that she was a very serious, quiet child who seemed to carry the weight of the world on her shoulders. For those of you who know me, this can come as quite a shock. This is the only thing I can think of that I haven't carried with me to some extent into my adult years - I definitely came out of my shell and although I am still a sensitive soul, I don't burst into tears at the sight of a blind man and his guide dog. The other big difference is that I don't want to be a ballet dancer anymore.

- I preferred my own company and thought of many ingenious ways to keep myself occupied (see below for examples). Please understand, this was not because of any social difficulties I may have had, in fact I was very polite in company, it was just the way I liked it. Now, I would say that I would prefer company over none any day; especially since being made redundant, the only people I see are Darren (my fiancé), recruitment consultants, bus drivers and shop assistants. But I am more than happy to sit on my own and entertain myself (not in that way).

- So, how did I entertain myself? Well, I read an awful lot - which I still do. The difference being that for me, reading had to be done out loud. With all the voices. And I used to have one of those brown (who thought it would be a good idea to be brown?) Fisher Price recorders where I used to tape my 'performances.' You know the one - it came with a cheap yellow tape which was blank on one side and had some of that non-offensive, bland electric guitar music that toy manufacturers thought was cool on the other side. Not only did I tape me reading - I came up with game show formats and stories that were also recorded over the same side of tape. However, my crowning glory was when I taped my Gran having an argument with one of my brothers and if my mother hasn't thrown it away, it should still be in the loft somewhere.

The whole point of this is that I thought I was different; a more practical and logical person than the creative one I have become. But all this shows that in fact I am pretty much the same person which has made me feel happier throughout this tough time - I still retain some of that childhood innocence and wonder even though I've had some crap things happen to me. I don't tend to read out loud anymore, but reading is probably still my number one past time, I have recorded sketches and stories for a friend of mine who sadly has since passed away, I love the theatre and although I am going stir crazy at times, I still enjoy my own company. I don't dislike people who are not Catholic anymore - a horrible side effect of being brought up Catholic, going to a Catholic school and attending church every Sunday (bor-ring). I have thankfully managed to grow out of that and I view all religion now with a sort of fascinated cynicism.

So in a roundabout way while lying in bed at night, my mind has succeeded in easing my heavy load in that subconcious way it does. And in a roundabout way, I suppose I'm saying that despite things life throws at me, I am essentially a happy person. Who loves to read.