It’s grim up north
When like me you don’t get out much and driving to Worcester by road seems the equivalent of crossing the Atlantic but in fact only takes about three and a half hours (to four) hours, it is a fact of life that over the course of a couple of decades one can acquire a pretty warped sense of reality.
This week I travelled deep into Lincolnshire from London and for the first time in ages did some inadvertent first-hand research into how life is lived in other parts of the country in this post-Brexit UK. From a people-watching perspective it had a certain ‘window on an alien world’ (car-crash mentality) fascination to it, but boy was I glad to reach the warm cocoon of the Metropolis last night – the endless traffic jams, the bright lights, the sheer weight of human numbers and the varied frustrations of a 24/7 society all welcoming me back to civilisation.
For the truth is that once you go northwards beyond about Harpenden things begin to get very strange indeed. And once you venture further, i.e. to about Leeds, on the railway and have to change to a local branch line, you enter a weird world of virtual reality in which trains can consist of a single carriage (complete with engine) and it is a case of ‘standing room only’ all the way to the terminal with passengers treated like cattle and the blunt Yorkshire humour kicking in.
As I stood, cheek-to-jowl, halfway down the carriage for over an hour, having with others responded to repeated calls from the guard at the back to “Move along please! Move along please! I’ve got women with children in buggies to get it …”, two middle-aged ladies close to me wondered aloud with long-suffering ‘London wartime Blitz-like spirit’ whether the railway company concerned wouldn’t benefit from adding at least a second carriage to their train services (by this time I was thinking more of a third or fourth).
One very large roly-poly gentleman in his late thirties then launched into an improvised stand-up routine that initially came over as intensely unnecessary and inappropriate but gradually became funny after six or seven minutes as the locals became amused by it. At the top of his voice he counselled:
“Yes … move along please! Everyone breathe in and we’ll able to get the Huddersfield ladies choir on board ….[pause] … Nobody fart, or we’ll all smell it! … Ladies, can you all very carefully get yourselves up on the luggage racks, we’re not leaving until we’ve got another twenty folk on board … And preferable, can you take your clothes off as well, while you’re about it …”
“You’ll be lucky!” responded one of my two middle-aged ladies, loudly and cheerfully.
And so it went on, for tens of miles of windswept, rugged, very flat farmland.
Let nobody tell you that England is over-crowded and we’re running out of space. You could fit three or four cities the size of Birmingham into the barren landscape on either side of the railway lines going north and nobody would even notice.
Yesterday I travelled south again, joining a Virgin train at Doncaster for the section of the journey down to Kings Cross. It was packed and I found my reserved seat at a table for four with a man in a suit aged about forty opposite. It appeared that he was reading an official report of some kind whilst at the same time occasionally glancing at, or working on, two separate iPhones which he had plugged into the charging stations below the table.
Twice on the one hour fifty minute trip he took phone calls – one private, on one phone … and one from his office on the other. Both times (why do people do this when on public transport?) he spoke as loudly as if he was trying to make himself heard ordering two pints a gin & tonic and a diet Coke across a crowded bar. The latter call, incidentally, was about some colleague who’d just returned from a holiday Down Under only to receive the bad news that his cancer had returned – the conversation our entire carriage became party to was all about who in the office should organise a “Get Well” card.
The other item of irritation was that my companion had some sniffle or sinus issue which required him, or indeed just caused him voluntarily, to give a great, mucus-laden, ‘snort’ about once every three minutes. It was all I could do for the entire duration of our time together to stop myself leaning forward and suggesting:
“Excuse me sir, would you mind very much taking out your handkerchief and giving your nose a thoroughly good blow? I think you might find that you’d both clear your blockage and give the rest of us a bit of peace and quiet …”
I’ll tell you this. There’s a hell of a lot wrong with central London but I wouldn’t swap it for some of the other places in the UK you could end up in.
