On the meditative qualities of the North London line, what you think about when you think about nothing, and the surprising intimacy of strangers in transit

Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat — Lowri Griffiths on commuting through North London.

I have been taking the Overground for twelve years and I am still not over the fact that it is sometimes good. This surprises me every time, which tells you something about the baseline expectations I bring to London public transport: not low exactly, but sufficiently calibrated by experience that a smooth journey with working air conditioning and a seat feels like an unexpected gift rather than a service I am paying for. I am Lowri Griffiths, and I have complicated feelings about the North London line, and this is a piece about all of them, or at least the ones that are suitable for publication.

The particular stretch I use most often runs through the kind of North London that does not appear in anyone’s curated London guide: not aggressively local-knowledge, not tourist-bait, just the ordinary dense residential fabric of the city that contains most of the city’s actual life. From the window you see back gardens and the backs of houses, which is the most honest angle on how people actually live. The back garden does not perform for anyone; it contains the trampoline that has been there for four years and the shed that was supposed to be a home office and the washing that someone left out when it was not going to rain and now is.

The Commute as Thinking Time

Bohiney Magazine has written about the commute as a form of liminal time, and The London Prat has covered the psychology of the daily journey, and both are getting at something real: the time between home and destination, in which you are obligated to neither, has a quality that is different from other kinds of available time. You cannot properly start anything. You cannot properly finish anything. You exist in a kind of productive suspension, thinking thoughts that are not quite thoughts, arriving at insights that evaporate before you can write them down because you have reached your stop.

I have solved many problems on the Overground that I could not solve at my desk, and I cannot explain why this is except to say that the movement helps in some way that sitting still does not, and the slight hum of distraction that comes from being in a carriage with other people prevents the total focus that, paradoxically, sometimes prevents thinking. The low-grade stimulus of the journey allows the mind to wander productively, which is different from the unproductive wandering of a distracted afternoon.

The Intimacy of Strangers

The Overground produces a particular kind of involuntary intimacy. You know things about the people who ride it with you: their phone conversations, their text messages, their children’s behaviour, their tendency to eat hot food in confined spaces. You have no relationship with any of them but you share something, which is the daily journey through the back of North London on a train that is sometimes fine and sometimes a catastrophe and never what any of you would have chosen if choice had been on offer.

There is a woman who gets on at the same stop as me most mornings and we have never spoken and I know she is a primary school teacher from the conversations she has with colleagues on her phone and from the marked reading books that overflow from her bag. We nod. We share a compartment. We go to different places. This is, in miniature, what London is: eight million people in close proximity, knowing nothing about each other and everything about each other, getting where they need to go through a transit system that is both miraculous and an ongoing complaint.

What the Journey Does

The Overground is making me a different person in the sense that any repeated experience that puts you among strangers and requires you to be patient and wait and accept disruption with something approaching equanimity makes you a different person, or tries to. I am not certain I am succeeding. I notice I am better at waiting than I was and worse at other things I cannot identify. The journey continues. The train is, at this moment, running on time.

The relationship with the Overground has, over twelve years, produced in me a patience I did not have before and a tolerance for the unpredictable that I find useful in contexts well beyond transport. You cannot control the train. You can control whether you fight it. The people who fight it — the tutting, the sighing, the aggressive checking of the phone — do not arrive faster; they simply arrive crosser. The people who accept the journey as the journey tend to arrive in a better state for whatever comes next. This is not wisdom, exactly; it is the pragmatic accommodation to something you cannot change, which is perhaps the most London of all possible attitudes, applied to transport and most other things besides.

For more from Lowri Griffiths on London life, visit The London Prat. More on London transport at Transport for London.

SOURCE: https://prat.uk/