![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
How to fall in love
Mar. 20th, 2014 10:44 pmI was walking through the subway system near Elephant & Castle this evening, and I passed a group of people being given a guided tour of the history of the murals painted on the walls.
I catch myself singing along with buskers in the underground.
On the District line, earlier this week, in rush hour - I keep promising myself I'll stop taking the tube in the rush hour and I always forget - and we ended up waiting and waiting and waiting outside Earl's Court. "Apologies for the delay," said the driver, "we're being held at a red signal, and should be moving as soon as the platform ahead is cleared." The carriage full of people pulled faces. "-- and while I've got a captive audience," he continued, "you may be wondering why, when we're sat here not moving, you just heard an announcement at Gloucester Road about there being a good service on all lines, when we were sat there not moving." The first set of restrained chuckles spread through the carriage. "Well, London Underground in their wisdom have decided that 'good customer service' means 'it takes less than two minutes after arriving on a platform to get onto a train', never mind whether that train then moves." And on we went, passengers packed in laughing increasingly unselfconsciously at this wry diatribe about how LUL is the only company in the world to give the lowest grades of employees bonuses for making announcements apologising for the crap service; how he frequently got monitored to make sure he was making enough of them; and finally, as we got moving again, he announced that he was getting off at the next station and sincerely hoped we were too -- and oh, but it was lovely, the careful glances to see if other people were laughing, if it was okay to laugh; the shattering of our careful shared belief that we are isolated and in solitude in spite of how closely we are pressed against one another; the sudden unexpected camaraderie that emerged from initial shock that our driver was deviating from the script.
It breaks my heart to find myself walking along the Cornish cliffs looking like I belong anywhere other than a gorse-covered hillside with the spray of the breaking waves below coating my face - looking like I belong not in mud and brambles but in somewhere neat and tamed and glossy and paved - and all the same, oh, all the same, I find myself falling in love.
I catch myself singing along with buskers in the underground.
On the District line, earlier this week, in rush hour - I keep promising myself I'll stop taking the tube in the rush hour and I always forget - and we ended up waiting and waiting and waiting outside Earl's Court. "Apologies for the delay," said the driver, "we're being held at a red signal, and should be moving as soon as the platform ahead is cleared." The carriage full of people pulled faces. "-- and while I've got a captive audience," he continued, "you may be wondering why, when we're sat here not moving, you just heard an announcement at Gloucester Road about there being a good service on all lines, when we were sat there not moving." The first set of restrained chuckles spread through the carriage. "Well, London Underground in their wisdom have decided that 'good customer service' means 'it takes less than two minutes after arriving on a platform to get onto a train', never mind whether that train then moves." And on we went, passengers packed in laughing increasingly unselfconsciously at this wry diatribe about how LUL is the only company in the world to give the lowest grades of employees bonuses for making announcements apologising for the crap service; how he frequently got monitored to make sure he was making enough of them; and finally, as we got moving again, he announced that he was getting off at the next station and sincerely hoped we were too -- and oh, but it was lovely, the careful glances to see if other people were laughing, if it was okay to laugh; the shattering of our careful shared belief that we are isolated and in solitude in spite of how closely we are pressed against one another; the sudden unexpected camaraderie that emerged from initial shock that our driver was deviating from the script.
It breaks my heart to find myself walking along the Cornish cliffs looking like I belong anywhere other than a gorse-covered hillside with the spray of the breaking waves below coating my face - looking like I belong not in mud and brambles but in somewhere neat and tamed and glossy and paved - and all the same, oh, all the same, I find myself falling in love.