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Me And The Girl From Clapham

Dear Rachel

Anyone who, like myself, was glued to rolling news coverage of the London riots last August will have swiftly concluded that what this city needs more than anything else is a velodrome. Fortunately, the Olympics have given us one, and as if this wasn't bounty enough there is also a swimming pool and, basically, everything's going to be alright forever. The Games themselves will bring many new visitors to London, which is always good but will, inevitably, result in more hilarious cutting edge social comment about Londoners being miserable and stand-offish, based upon their behaviour on an overcrowded and frequently malfunctioning underground railway, which seems a bit harsh.

I think this is a subject we may have discussed a couple of years ago, but anyway, I can only guess at the disappointment of people mistaking the entrance to Tufnell Park tube or wherever for some kind of magic portal to a non-stop party world. The London Underground isn’t Alton Towers. There is no log flume at High Barnet. There is no Ibiza-style foam party at Kennington. If you started chucking a beach ball about at Stockwell people would probably be a lot more amenable than you might think, but even so, don’t. The reason is simple: if you look closely, you’ll notice that the London underground is not Disneyland Paris, but a Victorian mass transit system operating surprisingly well under the considerable pressure of serving a major world city with an urban catchment area of ten million people. While there is the occasional conga at King’s Cross and hokey cokey at High Barnet, it’s a bit unfair to expect people quietly going about their business to be wearing novelty headgear and endlessly blowing those paper whistles that unroll and have a feather on the end in order to get a party that no-one's asked for going with a bang.     That said, while being at ease with people on the Northern Line being less than ecstatic, you don’t expect one of them to get on at Clapham North and weep in front of you all the way to Tooting Bec, a slightly awkward scenario I encountered myself last Friday.

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