Yesterday was our third and final trip into London. We drove to Didcot Parkway railway station again, paid the nearly £8 parking fee and walked into the station concourse, as we had previously, although this time I had our travel tickets, printed when I collected the previous trip's tickets.
There had been an "Incident" somewhere between Didcot and London that was messing up the train schedule, but we managed to board a packed train that was stopping only at Reading and London. The rail network in and around London is amazing, so complex and heavily used, and it runs fairly well on any given day. Incidents, though, do mess things up and I doubt that the 1320hrs to London would have been that busy otherwise. But we all had seats, and the train was fast, and we emerged from it into the vast cavern that is Paddington Station, and I hit the noise filter on my hearing aids. London is such a noisy place.
We had to make a quick run to an Argos store, the reason isn't important. I divined that there was one some fifteen minutes walk from the station, but why walk when you have a Transport for London (TfL) Oyster card in your pocket? After the mandatory loo break, we stood on Eastbourne Terrace, curiously on the west side of the station, and waited for a bus. Now the TfL phone app is a thing of wondrous beauty, and while I had already worked out that we could get a Number 7 bus, the app said we could get a 36 as an alternative. Sure enough, a 36 lurched around the corner and we boarded it for the short trip to George Street, on the Edgeware Road.
Then it was off to Portobello Road, also on a Number 7 bus, only this time going west, not east. The app said there was "Disruption" on the route, so it was an unusual ten minute wait, but the bus wasn't too busy and we made our way up to the top deck for the fifteen minute ride.
I have a social comment to make here, and it's about mobile phones. I have one, yes, so I don't eschew the whole rationale behind them, but boy are they ever intrusive? There was a man at the bus stop, walking around and talking loudly into his phone. He got on the bus of course, and continued to talk loudly into his phone. He got off the bus and he was still talking loudly into his phone. Everyone else was treated to half his call, which was nice. That was just one, though. All day we encountered people talking loudly into their phones while riding the bus, or the tube, or walking down the street, or whatever. Are these people so important that they can't wait to hold their long conversations until they find somewhere quieter and more private? I guess it's me getting old, but it doesn't seem too difficult to me to keep phone calls to less public places. I mean, what did these folks do before the invention of the shouting machine?
Dear Wife made another social comment. She said she liked getting away from the tourist-dominated parts of Central London and mingle with some of the people who live in the great Metropolis. West of Paddington you're into Ladbroke Grove, where the people are more likely to be residents. The ethnic mix of Londoners is wonderful to see, and to hear, and I don't care what the current obsession with right-wing politicians is about, diversity IS strength.
In Portobello Road is a market. There's a different one every day, for six days a week. I'm not sure what Monday's theme was but the road was closed to traffic and it was lined on both sides by stalls selling all sorts of weird and wonderful stuff, including what's known these days as "Street Food", which smelled divine. The street is also home to masses of interesting little shops, cafes and restaurants, and I'd imagine that you could happily spend many hours there. Unfortunately for us, Charlie was tired and was hankering for a ride on the Underground, so we fairly whisked along through the market, to our destination which was a shop used as a filming location in the second Paddington Bear movie. Sadly, Charlie wasn't much interested in the shop, but we did get the photos before moving off to the Underground Station at Notting Hill Gate. There are a lot of terraced houses in that part of Town, gentrified for sure, very expensive to buy, but very nice to observe as we walked. Many were brightly painted, but the presence of so many Banham door locks and burglar alarms told us these were wealthy people's homes in what was once a poor part of London. There were some bulky, brick built, 1920s London County Council apartment blocks, but even those looked to have been sold off. Margaret Thatcher is responsible for a lot of bad stuff, I can tell you.
We were making for Waterloo Station and a rendezvous with family. Charlie enjoyed his Tube ride, and we enjoyed another loo break and a snack, while people watching in that other huge cavern of a railway station. Unfortunately there was a very loud busker giving it some welly close by, and that added to the general level of the noise.
Heading home from Waterloo, we rode the Tube again, straight to Paddington this time. As we approached Paddington, though, the train's guard came onto the PA system and said that there was no rail service westbound out of Paddington. What? I had visions of trying to get hotel rooms in London for the night because there is no real alternative to getting to Didcot and the car other than by train. As we came up into the mainline station, though, I was mightily relieved to see the departure boards all functioning as they should, and trains apparently running normally. The guard on the Tube train clearly had old information and, as our arch-researcher, DW, discovered, the cause of the rail disruption was in fact the "incident" that had occurred in the morning and was long resolved. Although not specifically labelled as such, it looked like someone had decided to end it all on the tracks at Hanwell Station. The language of the reports suggested suicide, and the reference to The Samaritans kind of sealed it. I can't imagine being moved to do such a thing, and while lots of people were delayed earlier in the day, that's as nothing compared to the poor person at Hanwell.
We ran to catch a fast train back to Didcot, which was packed, of course. I upset everyone when I said to a young woman that she shouldn't have her shopping bags on the train seat when it's so busy, and she gave up her shopping bags' seat, and her sitting seat, and left the car entirely! Maybe I shouldn't have said that bit out loud, but it pisses me off when people use seats for their bags, very clearly in the hope that no one will sit next to them. I saw it on the morning train, too, and some people are just so polite that they won't ask, nay demand, that people leave the seats for people, and not for bags. I guess years of commuting frustration got to me.
Despite all my grumbles, the public transport network actually functions really well in and around London, and the fact that just about every train we caught was packed full tends to speak of its success. I am not a fan of privatised trains and their labyrinthine ticketing, but with tighter Government control, things are getting better. TfL's Oyster Card is great, as is its control of public transport within the Capital. I'm not saying it's as cheap as chips to use TfL's services, but the cost of getting around in London these days is acceptable. Kids who are eleven and under travel free in London, too, although five and over have to have their own, free, Oyster Card. Isn't that great?
We're done travelling to London now, at least for this trip. I will be reporting on the fun and games in Andy Burnham's Greater Manchester travel systems next week. Watch this space.
