Woke up late this morning (fortunately I work afternoons on a Friday) and had one of those panicky anxiety dreams where it takes you a few minutes of reality to come to terms with it just being a dream. I had to catch the tube (I don't live near an underground station) to get to an urgent appointment (I'm not sure what to, but it seemed very pressing at the time). And the station was complicated, and the connection was slow, and people were standing still on moving walkways, and they wouldn't get out of the damn way, and time was ticking, ticking, ticking...
A few days ago in a conversation with a friend I mentioned I don't like public transport. She assumed that that was because of coming out. Nope. Always hated it. I went to school on a bus, and work, on a bus, and to various voluntary and social meetings on buses. And. They. Were. Never. On. Time.
To be clear, by never on time, I don't mean occasionally a few minutes late. No, I mean just, like at random times of the day. The timetable was, at best, an unwieldy firelighter or an inabsorbent emergency toilet paper. I had to show up at the stops at least ten minutes early, and the only time guaranteed that the bus would not turn up was the time that it was "due". Sometimes I had to wait hours for a bus that was due every half hour. When I moved to my current address I got a car as soon as possible, but on the one occasion I thought I'd get a bus into town (to, you know, drink alcohol and stuff, like normal people) I waited an hour and a half for a service due every ten minutes.
You call up where these places come from to ask, like, what the fuck, and are greeted with nothing but an audible shrug. I even wrote in once, and eventually got a written shrug. You wanna know what a written shrug looks like? Well, I can't remember, it was along time ago. But somewhere I still have it. Future generations will find it and record it as the beginning of a new phenomenon, that you get a lot more since the advent of Email.
0Trains aren't so bad. But they leave you stuck in a station, which doesn't even give you the opportunity to nip into a shop and buy a magazine or something to while away the hours. The time I've wasted staring blankly into space waiting to go places. This is before podcasts, admittedly, which don't make such waits so bad anymore, but my hatred runs deep.
You try different tactics to make the things turn up. Pleading, swearing, screaming (best done when you're alone at the stop, of course), standing in the road, daring a bus to come and run you over. Nothing works, sadly.
Point is, I was traumatized more than you might think. I had to lie in bed, sweating, for a good ten minutes. If ever I get on Room 101, public transport is first on my list.
Then I found myself weeping at the TV later. Not many things make me cry on TV anymore, ironically. As a child there was one thing that was guaranteed to have me in floods. Animal stories. Lassie, The littlest Hobo, you name it, no matter how trite and obvious, if it had cute animals in peril, then pass the hankies. Now, I am largely immune to such simple manipulation, honest. No, what sets me off these days is documentaries with men crying. Men cry so rarely that I find anything where they can't stop themselves an instant faucet. There, I'm going now a little even thinking of it. Then I watched this documentary on Channel 4. You gotta be kidding me, guys, what chance have I got?
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