The Londoners Life – October – By Phil Ryan
If there’s one thing that vexes the average Londoner it’s the state of public transport. Mainly because it doesn’t actually work often. It sort of nearly functions. I marvel at the regular announcements on the Underground. Today we have a good service. Two things always strike me about these announcements. One is they are setting me up to get ready for the bad service days by alerting me to the fact that to every equal there is an opposite. And the second is the thought why announce that the system is doing what it’s supposed to be doing. That’s like walking into a restaurant and the waiter coming over and announcing they have plenty of food. That’s the point isn’t it? But once you’ve managed to actually struggle around in the day on our crumbling and ever fragile transport infrastructure the next even more pressing problem is the late night options. And these can be summed up in three words – The Night Bus.
These are effectively large slow moving vehicles designed to contain as many drunks and werewolves as possible. Sprinkle in the few members of the occasional psychotic street gang, the unconscious guy who smells of vomit, and the elderly man wearing a tin foil helmet singing in a curiously low mumbling voice and voila – you have an average Night Bus passenger manifest. Where it says destination they might as well put Narnia. As the doors open the smell of alcohol and chips hits you, you nod at the driver cowering behind his bulletproof glass, he shrugs and off you go. It’s like buying a lottery ticket. And interestingly offers the same complete element of chance. I once got onto a Night Bus in Camden Town. It was packed. So I made my way upstairs onto the top deck. It was full of silent people all dressed in Gorilla suits. I went back downstairs. London. With its unique social fabrics. Difficult to fathom.
Just like asking people for directions. No matter what area you are in, if you pull the car over and tentatively call to a passerby they will do one of three things. Run in terror. Blatantly ignore you. Or smile and say they are not from round there. It’s guaranteed. I now believe that every morning everyone in London goes to a completely different area. Everyone. En masse. They walk around. Fill the cafes. Sit in the offices. Thus guaranteeing nobody is from anywhere local ever. A month back I was in Balham. Somewhere. In a friend’s car. Late and lost. First I tried the obvious approach of asking people walking by. They displayed the three standard characteristics I mentioned earlier. Then I went into a shop. Three guys behind the counter. Sorry mate they chorused. We’re not from round here. It was a 24 hour shop. When did they have time to be anywhere else? A conundrum. But paling into insignificance compared to the new phenomenon that I now struggle with. Re-cycling confusion.
I now have four bins. I used to have just one. But now I have two yellow bags. A brown bin. A blue bin. A green box. Four collection days. And a handy explanation guide from the Council. Written by a dyslexic gibbon. It’s the new thing. Re-cycling. In reality it means stuffing your home with small piles of waste. Rotting food. Great stacks of paper and cardboard. It’s like living in a well furnished refuse facility. The only thing missing is a flock of seagulls and a bunch of those weirdos who turn up in orange boiler suits on weekends. The ones that find a broken chair and reclaim it. They carefully fix it up until it looks just like a broken chair covered in gaffer tape. Coincidentally one lives next door. My next door neighbour is a pinched face woman. She wears one of those knitted Peruvian hats. Her dog is called Krishna. A keen re-cycler she once told me. I’d commented on her orange boiler suit with ‘This is my Planet’ stencilled on the back. And I made the mistake of asking her to explain the new system to me. Sadly she explained it. For an hour. I went back inside. I’d been doing it wrong. I’d been mixing paper with plastics. Food with waste. And batteries with old nuclear warheads. It was ridiculous. I felt bad. I was destroying the planet singlehandedly. But then that’s the whole idea. To put you off balance. As they guilt trip you they can now charge little bits of extra cash. For special waste bags. To pay for new trees in the area. To keep the park nice. To mow the verges. To stop the icebergs from melting. To save the Patagonian purple booby hawk. A Green levy they call it. To pay for things your Council tax used to pay for anyway. I once met my local Council leader. He smilingly told me they ship all my rubbish to China. Very green. Ten billion gallons of diesel and a filthy old cargo ship chugging from Camden to Shanghai. Oil slick trailing behind it. I hate my Council. I have to. But all Londoners do. It’s a London thing.