Commutation

For the second day in a row I have come to work via the Jubilee Line, getting off the overland at Stratford and then tubing into Westminster, changing to the District for a couple of stops and arriving at the office at something like the time I aimed for. It is a far less stressful route than taking the overland to Liverpool Street and then hoping for a sight of the Occasional Circle Line, which is beginning – especially since it is part suspended for engineering works – to be regarded as the mass transit equivalent to the Loch Ness Monster. A lot of people believe it exists and that it has been seen, but there is no hard evidence and the photos are grainy and unreliable.

The difficulty at the moment with the Jubilee Line is the eternal heat around here. It is a forty minute sauna in working clothes, which leaves me feeling somewhere between an old lettuce and a chamois leather by the time I get to Victoria.

It has proved to me one undeniable truth: I may well be a lardy boy and horribly unfit, but my ability to wilt in soggy clothes is second to none. I am Olympic class.

Well, we shall know in two years if that’s true. Stratford is, of course, the centre of the Olympic Village for 2012, which means that for two weeks (or is it a month? Please don’t let it be a month) in that year, every tourist in England will be clogging the area like a crowd of expensively dressed zombies. Assuming, of course, that RMT don’t call a strike over the filling of the sandwiches in their luxury canteen or something equally important, like they usually do.

Commutation

For the second day in a row I have come to work via the Jubilee Line, getting off the overland at Stratford and then tubing into Westminster, changing to the District for a couple of stops and arriving at the office at something like the time I aimed for. It is a far less stressful route than taking the overland to Liverpool Street and then hoping for a sight of the Occasional Circle Line, which is beginning – especially since it is part suspended for engineering works – to be regarded as the mass transit equivalent to the Loch Ness Monster. A lot of people believe it exists and that it has been seen, but there is no hard evidence and the photos are grainy and unreliable.

The difficulty at the moment with the Jubilee Line is the eternal heat around here. It is a forty minute sauna in working clothes, which leaves me feeling somewhere between an old lettuce and a chamois leather by the time I get to Victoria.

It has proved to me one undeniable truth: I may well be a lardy boy and horribly unfit, but my ability to wilt in soggy clothes is second to none. I am Olympic class.

Well, we shall know in two years if that’s true. Stratford is, of course, the centre of the Olympic Village for 2012, which means that for two weeks (or is it a month? Please don’t let it be a month) in that year, every tourist in England will be clogging the area like a crowd of expensively dressed zombies. Assuming, of course, that RMT don’t call a strike over the filling of the sandwiches in their luxury canteen or something equally important, like they usually do.