How to fall in love

[kaberett]

I 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.

Comments

[jjhunter]

<3

[kaberett]

& for you.

[untonuggan]

This is lovely

[sfred]

I love it when tube drivers engage with their audiences :-)

[inoru_no_hoshi]

Oh, that train driver sounds fantastic. :D

<33

[crazyscot]

<3

I wonder if there's any chance that that's the same train driver I encountered some years ago? At King's Cross, after the train shudderend and lurched about a yard towards Cambridge: Ladies and gentlemen... I just broke the train.

[nanila]

I used to take the KingX-Cambridge train frequently. One of my favourite Sarcastic Train Driver incidents: "This 'fast' service has been downgraded. This is because the signal controller, in his wisdom, decided to let the slow stopping service pass in front of us."

[kaberett]

THAT IS GLORIOUS.

[swaldman]

hee!

[kaberett]

AHAHAHA.

[hairyears]

This makes me want to go to Cornwall!

Part of that is also: "Where does that road go to?" and I always wonder what will happen if, one day, I take that train or that road until the terminus, or until there's no more road.

Like Bilbo Baggins, I grew up with a road outside my front door that's older than we can imagine, and goes far, far further than our daily journeys.

[kaberett]

This is one of the things I love most about Interrailing, and about getting the train to Where My Family's From - you end up at the Hbf Muenchen, and you can go anywhere in Europe, and you look wistfully at the trains that are going to Venice and Spain and France and Switzerland and get on your train up to Austria... (I feel similarly about Hbf Zuerich, and increasingly about Paddington - I'm spending a lot of time in Oxfordshire at the moment, so I take trains in that direction out of Paddington a lot, and it is always such a temptation to get the Penzance train instead and show up on Papa's doorstep.)

[swaldman]

I have a little bit of that last feeling whenever I visit Inverness. I see the sleeper train sitting in the station, and... it's somehow a physical link to London and home. I know that if I got on that train, I could go to bed and wake up at Euston... it's still very far away, but it's a connection.

[nanila]

Wonderful. Have you ever been on the northbound Victoria line platform at Victoria station on a Friday evening? There's an absolutely brilliant platform announcer there.

[kaberett]

Oooh, no I haven't, but maybe I will :-)

[khalinche]

London is not neat, or tamed, though. It is just a dirtier, intenser kind of feral underneath a thin shell. Admittedly large corporate interests and the Duke of Westminster have been conspiring to make it seem all gloss and chrome, but that's inimical to the London people fall in love with, which is animated by millions and millions of messy lives.

I don't mean to sound correct-y or unsympathetic. My blood runs peaty and saline; I come from the edge of the Atlantic where some days you're more likely to see an otter than someone you don't know, and the horizon is very, very big. It's probably vanity, but what I like to think is that it's not contradictory to love big empty skies and to feel brackeny hills so much part of you as to be part of your own body, and also to spend the best afternoons of your year leaning on the side of a London bridge overcome with proprietary pleasure at the outline of buildings and the waves of tourists and office workers. It just takes a big capacity for love.

[quirkytizzy]

God you write beautifully.

I love those moments when people break the fourth wall. It's so jarring but often so gorgeous. So what we need, if only for a few moments.

Seriously - this entry is like poetry. So gorgeous.

[kaberett]

<3 I keep writing posts like this as a deliberate exercise in storytelling & lyricism - I spent years & years terrified that if I tried I'd fail and it would be clumsy and awkward and pretentious & unreadable, and instead I... seem to be finding a way towards flow & comfort, and it's... really encouraging, actually.

[quirkytizzy]

Also, I was thinking yesterday:

I wonder if you folks overseas understand just HOW EXOTIC you guys are to Americans. Talking about London and the subways and the rainswept cliffs, your accents (which, okay, I've not heard YOUR accent, but I imagine you have one, etc)....

A lot of UK'rs get to visit tons of different countries because there are so many over there. Americans, and definitely THIS American, are landlocked (typical when you have most of an entire continent to yourself for your single country) and so when I read things like this I sigh and swoon a little.

(NOTE: This really had nothing to do with the entry, but I just wanted to say it, because me saying LONDON SOUNDS SO COOL TO THIS MIDWEST USA CHICK might sound a little dull.)

[kaberett]

There's a recording of me reading one of my poems :-)

[quirkytizzy]

OMG YOUR ACCENT IS SOOOO COOOOOL!!! It's like the classy kind of accent, so - like, the words are clipped in that sort of high accent - that's the kind of accent that American filmakers hire for their smart and smooth characters in films HERE!!!! NICE!

And that's a gorgeous poem. So evokative. You really have a talent for sharp imagery and for looping that back to the poem's emotions!

[kaberett]

Heh, at some point I might actually record myself code-swiching - I can go from super-super-RP (i.e. posh) to fairly working-class. And it might be interesting for those of you that know any German to hear me speaking German too... :-)

[deathbyshinies]

This was a lovely little snippet to read.

I know, intellectually, that this side of London exists, and that it's possible to fall deeply in love with the place. I do confess to sometimes wondering impatiently why it's never shown that side of itself to me -- why I can never associate it with anything other than feeling sleep-deprived and slightly panicked and disoriented. I think it's probably partly because when I'm travelling to London, I'm nearly always tired and slightly ill from the journey, and partly because all of the good times that I've ever had there have been associated with people, rather than places -- f'rex, a fun evening in the RVT with friends that I mostly see in Oxford isn't actually concretely different to an evening spent with those same friends in Oxford, so I associate the positiveness with the friends rather than with London... if that makes any sense at all?

[kaberett]

I didn't ever until I lived here; I think a huge part of it is the way a city fits differently when it's home. (A bit wrung out so probably not going to manage to make more words on this atm but that is my gut reaction.)

& yes, time-with-friends versus time-in-place absolutely makes sense.

[swaldman]

As Kab has said, I find that London feels very very different when you live there to when you're just visiting. I'm not sure why...

Part of it is probably familiarity, but I think part is that when you live there it dilutes some of the sense of urgency[1]: If you're visiting, you have things you have to do before you leave! If you live there, you can always do it tomorrow.

[1] London does sometimes try to infect one with a different sense of urgency, that of the stressed-out city worker who must get on THAT tube train, not the one that's due in 3 minutes... sometimes I used to find it easier than other times to let that wash over me.

[fyreharper]

Oh, this makes me smile :)

[swaldman]

This reminds me of one of the two best announcements from airliner pilots that I've heard. It went along the lines of,

"Welcome aboard this British Airways flight to $destination. I apologise for the delay to our departure. This is due to BA not employing enough staff at the airport. Please feel free to complain; perhaps they will listen to their customers more than they do to their captains".

On an unrelated note, I don't think that "belonging" somewhere is zero-sum. I still consider myself a Londoner, but I miss Orkney almost as much when I'm away.
(and I didn't strictly grow up in either place, both are adopted)

[calissa]

So beautiful. Thank you for sharing.