London loves

I love this city. But just some­times … over the past ten days or so, I’ve exper­i­enced some minor irrit­a­tions that have irra­tion­ally turned into major annoyances.

One night last week, I left work at about 6.30pm. As I exited the build­ing, I could hear mobile phones ringing and beep­ing in the main recep­tion area. The sound fol­lowed me — cour­tesy of other depart­ing work­ers — as I walked the short dis­tance to the tube sta­tion. The vari­ous elec­tronic noises of com­mu­nic­a­tion then con­tin­ued through the sta­tion ticket hall, whilst I waited on the plat­form, and dur­ing the nine minutes of my tube jour­ney — only finally ceas­ing when I arrived at my des­tin­a­tion. A total of approx­im­ately 20 minutes dur­ing which I had to listen to mobile phones incess­antly chir­rup­ing, play­ing an inane tune, or beep­ing out morse code sig­nals. Half of me wanted the hor­rendous noise to cease imme­di­ately. Yet the other half of me wondered why mine was the only phone that remained silent, and why I was the only per­son not com­mu­nic­at­ing … the city can be a cruel and lonely place sometimes.

On another day, I spent a long tube jour­ney sit­ting oppos­ite the fol­low­ing four people. First, a woman pick­ing a scab on her arm with her long fin­ger­nails. Next to her, a young­ish guy per­form­ing the pre­cari­ous bal­an­cing act of pro­gram­ming the tracks on his min­idisc player, whilst also trans­fer­ring some num­bers from his mobile phone to his PDA. How much gad­getry does one per­son need, for heaven’s sake? Finally, two guys shar­ing the earpieces of a pair of head­phones — one of them gyr­at­ing in his seat, drum­ming his fin­gers on his knees in time to the music, smil­ing and sway­ing his head from side to side as he tried to interest his stony-faced and impass­ive friend to join in. They appeared like a much younger ver­sion of The Two Ron­nies, for some strange reason.

Late one night whilst wait­ing on a tube plat­form, I spot­ted a dishevelled middle-aged man — com­plete with oblig­at­ory car­rier bags stuffed full of vari­ous uniden­ti­fi­able things. He was press­ing on the ‘call’ but­ton of one of the elec­tronic Help Points along the sta­tion. Every­one could clearly hear the recor­ded announce­ment say­ing that the ser­vice was not in oper­a­tion. But the man con­tin­ued press­ing the green but­ton, while get­ting increas­ingly agit­ated. He did it again and again. The instinct of the seasoned Lon­don trav­el­ler told me that I should not even register this person’s exist­ence — but then I caught his eye, and I couldn’t look away. His eyes were huge, round, star­ing. I was trans­fixed. I couldn’t stop look­ing, even though my brain was telling me, “Don’t stare at him like that. He’ll hit you.”

It’s gradu­ally dawned on me — I love this city, but I think I need a break from it. Got to get out for a little while. A wide open road to the north, or a speed­ing train to the west. “I really need to spend some time in the coun­try.” Soon.