The most annoying
thing about middle age is the creeping nostalgia, everywhere you go
things scream, 'I am not like I used to be!' at you all the time. I
am not from the age of steam, but most stations are, the slatted
wooden roofs and victorian buildings hit you with a warm glow of
Jenny Agutter-related feelings.
The
now-sadly-locked-forever doors between platform and cafe at Exeter St
Davids take me back to the days when my mother used to leave me and
my siblings on the train and send us off to our grandparents. Anyone
could get from street to platform and back as often as they liked
without buying a ticket, or having to find a human being to help you
through a broken automatic turnstile. A well-meaning parent could put
you and your bags on the train before waving a tearful goodbye
(probably tears of relief at getting a break from the kids) from the
platform. An abandoned bag would be picked up and asked about, rather
than detonated, and you could buy your ticket on the train after
getting on (or try to skilfully avoid the conductor). Modern stations
are now, architecturally speaking, an uneasy mix of Enid Blyton and
Philip K. Dick.
Once on a train it
is now customary to make a little living room in your seat. Young
girls are setting up tablets and headphones to bingewatch shows on
netflix, all the while holding their phones to their faces to make
sure they're getting enough insta-likes – 'On the train bingeing
Ru-Paul, lol. #bigweekend #essaydue #lateron.' filter filter filter
filter. Meanwhile the besuited city men continue to hammer noisily at
laptops or give it the full trigger-happy TV into their mobile
phones: working, working, working (perhaps).
My reaction to this
is surely a sign of my age, the world keeps moving, and we can move
with it, or be angry about everything until we die. I felt a pang of
sadness that these kids weren't allowing themselves a bit of space,
time to think. That they weren't even paying attention to the TV show
they were watching, let alone where they were, being in the moment
for a minute. They were no different to me, sitting reading a book (I
am currently going through a phase of reading dreadfully written
books with really interesting plots, or beautifully written books
with no discernible plot, and one anomaly which turned out to be
both) on a kindle no less. Or even the newspaper-reading
bowler-hatted commuters of the golden age of steam. Ignoring
everything and putting yourself into a little bubble is what being on
a train is all about surely?
I remembered the
days when I used to cross the country by train with an 8 pack of
lager and a packet of embassy no 1. I was that drunk bloke on a
train, waving a cigarette in your face and making you talk to him
about whatever happened to come to mind. I met some of my best
friends on trains, admittedly, I never saw them again after I got
off, but for a few hours, we were best friends. I still drink on
trains, but the difference now is that I buy it from the trolley –
fellow passengers find this more socially acceptable (upon field
testing my acceptable train drinking theory, a man gave me a scathing
look as I pulled a can of Strongbow from my coat pocket, minutes
before he paid for a tiny bottle of trolley wine).
This
is not a real historical picture of me on a train
On my return (from
London) I had a look at my notes. There were loads again, enough
that, added to all the previous pieces I've written (this,
this
and this
at least) I could probably make my next book non-fiction: a
misanthropic yokel's guide to the capital. On the other hand, I can't
keep on writing jokes about modern parents (this time they impressed
me, a lady in a hijab patiently explaining the 1666 restoration of
Charles II using Frozen as an analogy), ludicrous fashion trends
among the young (this year it's Noddy Holder trousers and big socks)
and urban runners (my favourite was an angry goose on the south
bank).
Security is the new
constant. The streets of London have never been more fear-inducing.
More so because it probably is necessary. Armed police and crash
barriers side by side with anachronistic horseguards (who are not
necessary, because of the armed police and crash barriers). Add this
to the fact that everyone you walk past has an earpiece and is
talking to themselves down their sleeves, so therefore must be a
secret agent, and you could be living in an Orwellian dystopia of
your own making. The city itself is the same stark contrast as the
station, shining glass and steel alongside iconic historical edifices
– Bladerunner writ large atop Fagin, Scrooge and Pickwick.
We are treated like
idiots now, from the locked station cafe doors to the 'Caution
Extremely Hot Water' signs above the tepid stream of public toilet
handwashing water. Large public tactile art installations rendered
impotent by cordons, every stair covered in high-vis yellow and black
tape, and warnings on tube platforms about dropping your phone on the
line. Like most of the modern world, it is beyond satire.
The first ten years
of the millennium saw change beyond belief. When 2000 dawned, there
were a handful of us hanging out in forums and text-based chatrooms
online, still seen as weirdos, I had a CD walkman and a coat full of paperbacks for long journeys, and wrote notes in a
notebook in my pocket (when I hadn't lost it). By the end of the
decade everybody was sharing pictures of their breakfast via
smartphones, I was reading books on a kindle (same one I still have),
making notes on my phone (truly a godsend since any pen left in my
pocket will make a break for it within an hour, and my notebooks all
ended up in illegible scrawls) and could fit my whole record
collection on a box in my pocket (again, the same one I still have).
All the changes since then have felt like tinkering around the edges,
bigger phones, smaller phones, slightly more intuitive interfaces,
whizzier graphics. This could be just because I got old. I was in my
twenties when it all began so I paid attention. Do please prove me
wrong.
The
past was generally okay if you had staff and a big house
like
the Box of Delights kids did
It makes people
yearn for the past, for a simpler age – as change always has done.
The hipsters returning to print books, vinyl records, and waxed
moustaches are no different from the pre-Raphaelites trying to return
to what they saw as a golden age of art. Going back is both
impossible and ultimately undesirable. Fictional versions of the days
between the wars, travelling on steam trains and listening to Jazz
are very different from the realities of polio, tuberculosis, manual
labour without health and safety and dying in childbirth. Besides, if
you did it properly, you wouldn't be able to snapchat it, so what's
the point?
But
for most kids it looked a bit more like this
Not
quite so palatable
The London I have
just visited, and the trains I travelled on are completely
unrecognisable from those of my youth. It's not a bad thing, and the
world moves on. Eventually it will become so unfamiliar to our eyes
that we do not want to see it anymore. It's always been this way, and
prepares us so that when we finally have to leave this world, we are
glad to wave goodbye to a place we no longer recognise.
