Monday 26th January 2015

Over the past year or so, they've done quite a bit of redevelopment of Brighton train station, which frankly was pretty overdue. Train stations in England - and, I'm willing to bet, in many other countries over the world - are pretty odd places. They're meant to be the gateways of whatever city or town they're in, perhaps even representative of that town. But more often than not, you'll find that train stations quite often open out into the backs of buildings, on the edge of town. As soon as you arrive in a place, the place has turned away from you, demanding that you leave. Plus, there's been an increasing tendency recently (as there has been with the high street) to ensure that all stations look pretty much the same, with a WHSmith at the end of every siding. Seriously, I think WHSmith has only survived in business this long because people are forced to buy an overpriced bar of chocolate every time their train is delayed. It can't just be the sales of GCSE text books and misery memoirs. 

But I digress. Recently, they've been doing a lot of work at Brighton station. I think throughout the seventies and eighties, there was a lot of effort to hide the victorian structures with cheap looking metal and plastic. There then came a point where they clearly realised that the cheap looking metal and plastic looked - well, cheap. So. They've been stripping it all back, exposing the victoriana, making it look slightly more unique. They still haven't got rid of the WHSmith, they've simply relocated it, which isn't really committing to the idea. I know there are rents to be paid, and a high street business has a lot more money than the local newsagent, but I'd much prefer to see a privately owned newspaper stall at train stations than WHSmith. There's still one at Hove train station (or, at least, there was the last time I checked), and it's brilliant. In fact, I'd go further. I'm not much of a drinker, but I miss the idea of a proper old pub at each train station (not a Wetherspoons, obviously - if you have to have a Wetherspoons, you may as well do it properly and allow Burger King to sell beer). And of course, a tea room, so that Trevor Howard can spend the rush hour saving enigmatically beautiful women from being blinded. You know, like in the good old days. 

But you can't go back. Progress marches on. Technology improves. Apparently. The latest part of the improvements over at Brighton Station is to do with the ticket office. Up until now, buying a ticket mainly involved lining up with everybody else on a Monday morning, silently muttering to yourself about why none of these idiots took the time to buy a new ticket on Friday evening when there was less of a queue, refusing to accept any such criticism for yourself (you were busy that night, come on, you've got a life, right?) and waiting until one of the harried cashiers were ready for you. 

All that has now changed. Before you get to the door, there is now a monolithic steel and chrome structure, all beeps and digital read out, looking very much like the tall obelisk that terrifies the underdeveloped natives in 2001: A Space Osysdey. And so it proves with this computer at Brighton, where a crowd of bewildered commuters are now spending mornings gibbering wet-eyed and incoherent at this unexpected change to their morning regime. Now what happens, instead of lining up and taking your chances, you are prompted to take a ticket with a number on it, and wait to be called. This means that at best you feel like you're about to buy some organic ham at the deli counter at Waitrose, or at worst hoping to get a cheap flat screen telly at Argos. But with a lot less guarantee that your product is going to work.

Presumably this thing was introduced to make people's lives easier. To ensure fairness for all the passengers, so that people who rocked up late to get a ticket wouldn't simply jump the queue. But also - and I suspect this is the main draw - to ensure that passengers no longer spend their transaction time moaning and bleating about how long it takes to get served (there really is no sense of irony amongst train passengers. Occasionally no sense, full stop). In this last aim, of course, everything has failed quite spectacularly. For a start, now that everyone has a numbered ticket, there's not actually any need for them to line up. They can instead sit on any of the benches that have been provided (another result of the refurbishment of the station). But nobody can quite trust that, so everyone lines up anyway, mainly in the only doorway, meaning that everybody blocks the exit of anyone else. Plus, every second customer spends about five minutes to complain about the ineffiency of the new system, that it all seems to be taking a lot longer, and that everyone will be delayed as the ticket office has to put up with a lot of complaints (like I said, not a lot of irony). 

I do feel sorry for the staff at the ticket office who have to politely respond to each new varariation on the same complaint, and tow the party line (I suspect they secretly think its as stupid an idea as anyone else). But the deed is done, and everyone has to deal with it, at least until the monolith gets broken (I've got a fiver on mid-April). Until then, the train has left the station. 

Your Number's Up

They've changed the lock on the bike shed at work. Well, I say bike shed. In reality, it serves all manner of purposes, including housing the snow plough that they finally invested in a couple of years ago to ensure the place never again had to be shut down because of a particularly heavy snow fall. And, of  course, it's worked like a charm: the place has indeed not had to be shut down because of heavy snowfall. But that's mainly because we haven't had any. 

They've changed the padlock, but not the code. This should be a good thing - the padlock will no longer get rusty in rain, or do whatever it did in very cold weather which meant that it just gave up and refused to move like a sulky teenager who's locked themselves in the bedroom with a bag of Doritos and a box set of Girls. Now that the padlock has been changed, everything should be shiny, new and effortless, and the whole putting my bike away thing at the start of the day, and the retrieving my bike at the end of the day thing (both very similar things) should be events that are so mundane that they don't really deserve to be called events. 

If I'm honest, they still are mundane that they don't need to be called events, and certainly not of enough interest to be written about on any public forum (such as this blog, for instance), but at the start and end of each day, I find myself getting needled, rattled and frustrated. These are three feelings you really don't want to be having at either end of the day. You kind of expect them during the day, that's part of the deal, that's why you have endless cups of tea and migraines as coping mechanisms, but the simple act of getting or leaving your bike shouldn't be a source of frustration. 

It's particularly annoying at the end of the day. I have exactly nine minutes to get out of work and catch the train. If I miss that train, it's nearly always impossible to get the following train, because that one is stacked with excitable college kids and gently glowering building site workers. There's not even enough space to claim 'standing room only', and even when there is, most of the kids elect to do this curious thing where they're going to stand in the doorways of the train for the entire journey, even if they're on the train for fifteen stops and forty minutes. Even if, after a while, entire carriages have eventually become empty. It becomes difficult to get on such a train if the doors are blocked in such a fashion, and downright impossible if you've got a bike in tow. People who are needlessly blocking train doors get curiously uptight about letting you on with a bike. 

All of this becomes of paramount importance when I'm trying to get my bike out of the shed. If I can make the nine minute journey to get the earlier train, I manage to get the connection that's pretty much empty. It feels like I'm getting a train in the middle of the afternoon, only used by mothers on their way back from toddler group, and youngsters on their way to sign on to the dole. It's a different world. It still depresses me that it took me the best part of five years to discover that it was possible for me to make this connection. But in order to get to this train on time, I need to simply - get - my bike. No fussing, no messing about. Certainly no enraged tumbling around of the numbers for the twentieth time as I attempt to unlock the padlock from the bike shed door. 

Because the problem with the new padlock is that it doesn't quite work. I should be clear here. If we judge a lock purely and solely in its effectiveness as just that - a lock - then it's a fine lock. A dandy, there are very few locks that are more secure than this lock. The cast of Ocean's Eleven would be befuddled, confused, and finally exasperated by this lock. It wouldn't be as great a film, but it might certainly be on par with Twelve and Thirteen. The aspect in which the lock fundamentally fails is the whole un-locking part. It just doesn't. It refuses. It doesn't refuse entirely, of course, but confusingly, you have to wriggle the numbers around slightly so they don't quite match up in the correct order. Once you've managed to guide all the numbers in exactly the correct position (by which I mean the slightly wrong one), the lock will effortlessly and easily slide open. Like it was meant to in the first place. I don't have time for this sort of thing. Literally, I don't have time. I have a thirteen minute journey to cycle in nine minutes. The amount of time I've got for screwing around with this padlock is one minute, tops. 

But here's the thing. The really frustrating thing. Because, being me, the frustrating thing can't just be the frustrating thing - there has to be another frustrating thing on top of the original frustrating thing, just to put a highlighter pen to the whole, general frustration of the thing. Because, despite the fact that the new padlock is stupid, ridiculous, and unhelpful, despite the fact that it only works if you nuance the tumblers in some secret way that is only clear after doing ten years of mystical chanting and Zen like meditation - despite all that: I'm the only one who has a problem with it. Everyone else who uses the bike shed on a regular basis - and there's at least six of us - have no problem with the padlock whatsoever. 'You just have to wraggle it about a bit,' they declare, cheerfully. WRAGGLE IT ABOUT A BIT?!? I rage, in my head. This is supposed to be a security measure, this is supposed to be the thing we rely on to ensure our bikes don't get nicked. Surely it can't all depend on things being wraggled about a bit? 

I don't have time to say any of this, of course. I have a train to catch. In less than seven minutes.

The Long Walk

I was late for work today. Not by a great deal, but enough to make me tetchy and nervous. That's the thing when you rock up late to your job, you imagine (at least, I do) that everybody else is sitting in judgement, darkly commenting on your inability to do basic things like know the time. No matter that when it happens to someone else, you really couldn't care less. But it makes no difference: I still assume that my work colleagues have less than flattering things to say about me when I'm late. Actually, I assume that they have plenty of stuff like that to say even when I'm early, which probably points at some underlying paranoia stemming from the fact that my parents didn't buy me a BMX bike when I was a kid, and is probably more a complicated series of neuroses than we really have space to get into here.

Actually, talking about bikes, it was a puncture that caused my lateness this morning. I cycle to Hove station, and then cycle from West Worthing station in, well, Worthing, to work. Both cycling bits of the journey take just under ten minutes each. However, if I find myself without a bike, and have to walk, both take about half a hour each. That's a hour added to my morning journey, which isn't the best way to start your working day.

The closer I got to work this morning, the more frustrating this became - to be so close to my destination, a route that usually takes only about eight minutes, but to know that it was now going to take the length of an episode of The Big Bang Theory to get there, was pretty annoying. I began to wish that I could be taller, so that I could take longer strides, and have at least an outside chance of arriving on time. This would have advantages and disadvantages. True, I would get to more places more quickly, but once I'd arrived, there would be more people asking me what the weather was like up there.

A few years ago, I knew an extraordinarily good looking woman who happened to be reasonably tall - around six feet. The combination of these two factors meant that men who were attempting to hit on her in night clubs were fairly unoriginal in their approach. 'You're really tall!' they'd declare happily as their opening gambit, presumably under the impression that she hadn't spotted this physical anomaly for herself. After a while, her reply ended up being equally unoriginal: 'I know!', she'd answer, in the tone of voice one normally reserves for conversations with toddlers and victims of recent head trauma. She's married now, and I'd be willing to bet that the man who won her fair heart did so by the simple expedient of managing to find something else to discuss when they first met other than her height.

If we're honest, however, a hour at both ends isn't the worst hardship that can be added to my working day. I'm pretty sure both my parents had to walk even longer to get to school each day. Of course, this was rural Ireland in the 1950s, and they didn't get to catch a train for the middle portion. While we're at it, the train can be a bit of a strain, too, when you're carrying a bike. Even when you restrict yourself to those sections of the train that are specifically designed to carry bikes. People seem to delight in standing directly in the doorways, thereby getting in the way of everyone else trying to get on or off the train. This is even more exasperating when you've got a bike in hand, since many people seem to think that, as a cyclist, you absolutely shouldn't be allowed on board.

But, anyway. I shouldn't moan. I need to save my energy: it's nearly home time, and I've got a long walk back.