An Essay on the Tube, the Communities It Creates Against Its Will, and the Bus I Have Started Taking Instead
I began keeping a log of my Northern Line delays in January with what I told myself was journalistic curiosity and what was probably something closer to the need to make the time spent underground waiting feel purposeful. By the end of March I had documented eight hundred and forty-seven minutes, which works out to just over fourteen hours of platform time spent in the company of strangers who were managing their own relationship to the delay with varying degrees of composure. The log is not, I want to make clear, a complaint document. The Northern Line works more often than it does not work, and when it works it is efficient in ways I appreciate with the specific gratitude of someone who takes a thing for granted until it goes wrong. The log is a record of the time the city takes back, and what you do with that time.
What you do, mostly, is stand and look at the platform and check the app and look at the platform again and put the phone away and then take it out again when someone sighs near you and the shared acknowledgment of the sigh feels like it deserves acknowledgment. You check the time. You recalculate whether you will be late to the thing you were going to. You achieve a state of resigned acceptance that the mindfulness industry describes as present-moment awareness and that the Northern Line produces at scale, and entirely for free, among its regular users.
What Delays Actually Produce
The delay at Stockwell last October, which ran to forty-one minutes, produced a conversation with a woman from Finsbury Park who had strong opinions about the Northern line’s historical decision to unite its two branches into a single service and who turned out to have attended the same village show in Wales as my aunt in 2009. We talked for the full forty-one minutes. We exchanged numbers. We have not spoken since, because that is also how London works, but the conversation exists and was made possible entirely by a signal failure at Oval. The delay at Euston in February produced a performance by the busker at the bottom of the escalator that lasted through the delay and into the resumption of service and that was the best forty-five minutes of live music I have experienced without intending to experience music. The delay at Camden last week produced nothing except the discovery that the app was showing ‘Good Service’ at the same time I was standing on a stationary train between stations, which is a reliability gap that I noted in the log with appreciation for its specificity. MyLondon reports the Northern Line’s delay statistics. The statistics do not capture the busker.
The Solidarity Problem
There is a solidarity in shared tube delay that briefly suspends the standard London compact of mutual non-engagement, and I have been thinking about this solidarity and whether it represents something real or whether it is simply the collective management of mild inconvenience. The conclusion I have reached is that it is both, and that this is fine. The bonds formed on platforms during delay situations are real for the duration of the delay and then release cleanly when the train arrives, which is the correct duration for bonds formed in this context. They are not less real for being brief. They are the appropriate response to the situation: genuine acknowledgment of shared experience, without the expectation of continuation that the experience does not warrant. London does this well. The Northern Line teaches it involuntarily, at scale, fourteen hours a year in my case.
The Bus Option
I have started taking the 29 bus. The 29 from Tufnell Park to wherever I am going takes longer than the Northern Line when the Northern Line is working, which is most of the time, and takes about the same time as the Northern Line when the Northern Line is not working, which is often enough that the calculation is less straightforward than it appears. The bus is aboveground, which means it has windows, which means it has the city going past outside. The top deck in the evening is one of London’s genuine unremarked pleasures: a slow, warm, elevated tour of streets I have walked at speed for years and that look different at bus pace from above. I have seen things from the top of the 29 that I would never have seen on the Northern Line because the Northern Line goes underground and the 29 does not, and what it does not go underground it goes through instead, which is the whole city, visible, at the pace at which it is worth looking at.
The 847 minutes, viewed another way, represent something that the purely economic analysis of North London life misses entirely: the enforced pause that the city occasionally provides, the removal of urgency that a delayed train creates, the involuntary slowdown that produces the conversations and observations that the successfully moving tube does not permit. I resent the delays and I do not wish to stop resenting them. I also recognise, with the uncomfortable honesty that journal-keeping eventually produces, that some of the most interesting parts of my year have been delays. This is not a reason to delay trains. It is a reason to notice, when the train is delayed, that the noticing of what is around you is available and that the phone does not have to be the only available occupation.
More from The Daily Mash. SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
