1 Across, F**k

Famously, the internal telephones at MI6 during the fifties and sixties were always busy for the first hour of the business day, as pipe smoking men with initials instead of names ‘phoned one another for assistance with the that day’s Times crossword.  That, at least, is how the story is reported in Peter Wright’s memoir ‘Spycatcher’.  One would hope, of course, that this is, if not an outright case of a writer being ‘economical with the truth’, then at least having the courtesy to disguise the real purpose of the exercise, that during those decades crosswords were used by the security services to, not as you might imagine communicate hidden messages to agents, but rather to keep Oxbridge Commie Pooftas preoccupied with matters cryptic rather than Cyrillic, and above all prevent them doing the will of their red paymasters.

I fucking hate crosswords.

And they hate me.

But I hate them more.

I am also truly awful at them.  This is possibly (probably) because I lack the education and the lateral thinking abilities to realise that ‘Trojans mince with alacrity’ means ‘Effervescence’, but is more likely the result of their being situated towards the back of the newspaper.  This means by the time you reach the crossword, you will have read about who has been doing what to whom on an international, national and personal scale.  Then it’s the horoscope ‘No chance of getting nine across today, you fuckwit’ and onto the puzzles.

When did the puzzles become so difficult?  Crosswords?  Sodyouto?  What happened to join the dots?

Get angrier and angrier and angrier, give up, turn page.  Sports.  Set controls for ‘incandescent’.

There are, it’s fair to say, different types of crosswords.  Mixed ability, so to speak.

General knowledge.  If you can answer three questions on round two of ‘Mastermind’ or any question, at all, in any series of ‘University Challenge’, this is the one for you.

Quick.  By far the most satisfying, but can go very wrong very quickly.  The thing about quick crosswords is that those that set them like to establish a theme.  So once you realise that all of the answers are the surnames of characters from the popular soap ‘Crossroads’, you’re away.  However, if the theme of the day is ‘something other than ‘Crossroads’’, you’re fucked.

Cryptic.  The only one that matters.  A proper crossword.  The clues are things like ‘Lakes sailed by cheeses’. And the answer will probably be something like ‘Buzz Aldrin’.

How?

How the fuck is that even possible?

I once went through a period (‘Moon river’ (6)) of buying a daily paper, keeping it, then the next day sitting with the crossword, and the solution, to see if I could work out how ‘angry owls’ becomes ‘defenestrates’.

The answer?  It fucking doesn’t!  I am now convinced that the cryptic crossword is a ruse perpetrated on us by people, and I’m not saying they are all working in the intelligence community, to do two things.  To keep us busy, and to keep us in our place.

That’s why I make a point of, just now and again, picking up a copy of ‘The Times’ and, in the space of a ten minute train journey, ‘completing’ the crossword while chuckling to myself.

Of course I don’t, I’m not fucking insane.  But I would be, if I had to work out what ‘Woodland folk’s banquet, enjoyed quietly’ (9) means.  (I check the next day, the answer was ‘Archbishop’.  ‘TWF!’ (Anag.)).

Of course I admire the mental agility of the sort of people who set these things.  And indeed those that solve them.  But I can’t help but think that they are in competition with one another, or even cahoots (Mr Toad’s exclamation! (7)) and that the whole thing is a male-dominated attempt to find the dominant male, judged on who has the biggest lexicon.

That being the case, the only setter I continue to look on with favour is a red one, and until the news gets so unpalatable that they start using cryptic clues for headlines, I’ll leave the puzzles to men who measure their masculinity by how hard a clue is, and how long it takes them to solve it.

Who's been sitting in my seat?

I bet Portillo doesn't have to put up with this!

In possibly the greatest rehabilitation of a personality since Paul went from tax collector to apostle, Michael Portillo is now better known as a presenter of charmingly inoffensive soufflé-weight documentaries about train travel than as The Hammer Of The Poor.  Essentially, the format of ‘Trains to Charming Places’ is that Michael, sporting a wardrobe that makes one question his sexuality and clutching a guide book as outdated as the ideas he had when in the Cabinet, takes trains hither and yon and stops off to discuss heritage trades like being a farrier, fletcher or cooper (back when these were trades and not merely surnames.  Presumably following the tradition of names deriving from trades, a century hence Tommy Callcentre and Susie Barista will be common enough names) before announcing ‘look at my bright trousers and tremble’ and ambling off towards the station.

Anyone watching this programme for longer than the necessary time (which is the length of time it takes to press the button on the remote to take you to the next channel) will note that when the presenter makes his train journey, he is inevitably in a not terribly crowded carriage.  This of course makes perfect sense as crouching across from the presenter is a cameraman, sound guy, director and the girl who fetches the paninis.

Anyone who commutes on a regular basis will know that such space is far from the norm, but then again the programme probably wouldn’t have the same relaxed air if Michael were standing in a vestibule (loom it up, it’s the right word) between carriages with his nose rubbing the camera lens, thanks to the overcrowding.

Neither does Michael apparently have to find his won seat by excavating a pile of used Metros and the debris of what appears to be a takeaway Medieval banquet.

Naturally, railway companies have to make huge profits somehow, and the latest trend appears to be charging ridiculous ticket prices and only employing cleaners every third day.  This means that you usually have the opportunity to play the Goldilocks Game when alighting, in other words ‘which anti-social fucker has been sitting in my seat’.  If you are lucky, it’s somebody who has carefully refolded their copy of the Metro before dropping it on the floor, if you are unlucky, it is somebody who has either breakfasted on the flakiest pastry ever made, or is a leper.

Occasionally though it’s just a single coffee cup.

What, Watson, can we deduce from this.  Firstly, that the drinker favours decaf, as their coffee has obviously not given them the energy required to bin the fucking thing.  Secondly, that there are either an oligarch or a fare dodger, as it is unlikely that anyone purchasing a ticket at today’s prices can also afford store-bought coffee.  Finally, that they have joined the growing tribe of adult litterlouts (yes, leaving a coffee cup for somebody else to clear away, when you actually have to walk past a bin in the carriage to exit, is littering).

Cardboard coffee cups are the new fag butts and as such are the very worst and most offensive sort of litter because coffee, like fags, is a product consumed by adults.  Crisp packets and sweetie wrappers are annoying litter but one can almost understand why Little Fuckers, sorry, why children, discard them, it’s because they are careless, have not been brought up properly and have never spent a Sunday morning tidying their front garden by plucking Haribo wrappers out of their hedges.

Commuting, I think, makes one more intolerant of stupidity, be it passive aggressive littering, leaky headphones or the inappropriate use of the mobile ‘phone in any carriage, actually, on any train I am in or on or even waiting for.

Which is why it would make for a magnificent conclusion to the series to see Portillo completely lose his fucking mind with an annoying fellow traveller who has their shitty music on too loud and beat the little prick to death with his Bradshaw.

Now that I would watch.

Commuting with nature

It’s becoming obvious that commuters have not got the sense that God gave a goldfish and that their memory span must be about the same as that apocryphally attributed to that piscine pet.

I base this deduction on two incidences of observed behaviour.

First, the carriage crowd.  This is the little knot of people that form on the platform at the point where, once the train has stopped, the carriage door will open.  This allows them to spring lithely from platform to carriage and thence to seat, the better to spread their enormous, pale, office chair shaped arse cheeks onto a vacant seat rather than what must, given their imperative to do this, be the alternative – finding themselves standing at a point equidistant to two carriage doors and, unable to decide which one will offer the better chance of getting a seat, scuttling crab-like from side to side until the doors close leaving them on the platform in a lather of indecision.

It’s fascinating and alarming that the crowd can remember, every morning, at which point on the platform the carriage doors will open but cannot remember, every morning, that people will be wanting to get off the train.

If you are on the train and getting off at any station short of the train’s destination, you will be faced with a wall of people.  It is the closest an unfamous person will ever get to exiting the stage door and finding a crowd there, except they don’t want either your autograph, or their money back, they just want to get on.

The carriage crowd are not, let me be clear, wholly without an understanding for the needs of the emerging passenger.  They do grudgingly leave a gap narrow enough for you to pass through, if you can convert yourself into a stream of anorexic particles, or a Rizzla paper.  Your alternatives are to slather yourself in Vaseline and apologetically slither your way out, or do what I do and stick your leg out and then follow it with the entire weight of your body, just like Indiana Jones does when he takes the ‘leap of faith’ in ‘Last Crusade’.

The second type of behaviour exhibited is when the carriage crowd try to get on an already full carriage.  If you fill a glass with water, and then very very carefully slightly overfill it, then surface tension will mean that you can have a few micrometres of water above the level of the glass.  That’s how full commuter carriages get, but that doesn’t stop people trying to join them.

This is achieved by two methods.  The first is waiting until the breathing of everyone in the carriage is synchronised and everyone is breathing in, before flinging yourself on and hoping that the carriage doors shut before everyone breaths out and you are catapulted back onto the platform.  If the doors close, you are mashed against the glass like the world’s ugliest Garfield doll but hey, at least you’ll be at your desk on time.  The second is to bellow ‘can you move down please’ because fuck, yea, the people wallowing in all that prairie-like space wouldn’t think of doing that themselves.

What’s amazing is that nobody bellows back ‘no, can you not just get the next train?’ but instead everyone collectively shuffles a micron and makes room.

This is the twenty first century.  Let’s put aside that by now, by rights, we should be commuting by jet pack.  The commute should be relaxed, ideally completed sitting at a table while you are served a hot breakfast that concludes with a cigarette, coffee and an early morning digestif to take the edge off.  At least, given the price of the fucking fares, that’s what I think commuters should be entitled to.

Perhaps the commuters are not to blame after all and what is happening here is the suppression of uncomfortable memories, but on a daily basis rather than those adults who can’t watch one of those clip shows about seventies television without getting an unexplained twinge in their bottom.  It would explain an awful lot, starting with why they never think that getting an earlier train might be an idea.

Say again?

Back when wireless internet networks were complicated, expensive and rare, they were usually to be found in commercial spaces. Geeks developed a secret code called war chalking to inform other geeks of where they could get free wireless internet. These days, mobile devices that can access wireless internet can also detect wireless networks but back in the day, you’d need some savvy software and a Pringles tube. It’s true, the Pringles tube, an aluminium cylinder, was a sort of cross between a metal detector, a radio triangulation device and a dousing rod. Quite how you mashed it up with your heavy-as-a-housebrick old school laptop I have no idea, but I bet chewing gum was involved.

So, geeks would prowl the streets, detect wireless networks with no security passwords and would then chalk on pavements or walls that a network was available. The war chalking was evocative of the secret signs that American vagrants would leave outside the homes of folks during the recession, signs that could be interpreted by others such as ‘food for work available’, ‘angry dog here’ or ‘wireless network will be available here next century’.

There have always been secret signs. The problem with most of them is that they are a one way thing. One by sea, two by land may be all very well, but does it allow for the recipient of the message to send something back along the lines of ‘I am standing on the beach frantically waving my towel because my cover has been blown and I want to come home right now!’? Possibly not.

Railways, of course, have plenty of signals. Famously, when they go wrong or don’t work at all, this can lead to problems. Just this week some criminals decided to steal a load of copper wire. The problem was that it was live and providing power and information to loads of trains that were supposed to be leaving Waterloo. The result was a lot of inconvenienced commuters. But signalling equipment is notoriously delicate. For instance, it freezes when, er, the temperature drops below freezing. Obviously the design geniuses who keep a national network of thousands of trains running simultaneously are too clever to consider slathering the signals in gose grease between November and April to ward off frosted signalling.

More informal signals have been spotted on the platform of the station I commute from this week. The mysterious message sent via strategically folded chocolate bar has been added to. A lone wrapper has appeared adjacent to, but quite separate from, the original wrapper totem. This, I think, is some sort of coded conversation. What does this new reply mean? Could it be an invitation, a warning or simply somebody thinking that this is how we dispose of wrappers now?

Whatever it means, the effect is that in addition to having to run in a manner so undignified it makes a squid being fired out of a cannon into a brick wall look like an exercise in coordination just to catch my train, I now have to build in time to se if any new ‘message’ has been posted.

The wet nose of the law

I've seen enough teevee programmes with titles like 'police, camera, beating', 'cops 'n' cars', or 'you're nicked scum' to know that if an officer asks you something you don't make a run for it and hide in a dustbin (thermal cameras will find you), you don't try and hit the policeman (CS gas) and you don't answer back (taser).

I have also seen a documentary about police dogs. These come in two flavours - Alsatians who do 'crowd control' (a dog is snarling at exactly crotch level - do not antagonise) or the rather dopier sniffer dogs, usually spaniels, who are trained by sniffing out treats and so look wildly happy whenever they find some bloke with semtex or smack down their pants.

However, I love dogs, especially gundogs and spaniels in particular are a family favourite.

Which is why, when I was walking through the station past a half dozen policemen and their sniffer dog, and the dog came up to me with his tail going wildly, my natural reaction was to lean down, ruffle his ears and say 'hello!' In that special 'talking to dogs' voice.

His handler was not amused. Apparently it's not the done thing to fondle an officer's ears when they are on duty, especially as the dog loved it and the tail started doing even faster.

His handler, rightly assuming that I was unlikely to be capable of carrying enough drugs to elicit that sort of response from the dog, growled 'just keep walking' and I strolled off with that 'just patted a dog, feel pretty cheerful' feeling, while pondering if my trousers might have the same chemical signature as crack. Or bacon.

Manoflage

Sat on the train this morning next to a woman who was, as occasionally happens, putting on her make-up.

You never see a bloke doing this, do you? Possibly this is because blokes, as a rule, don’t wear make-up. On the occasions that they do, you don’t want to be sitting next to them. Could you, for instance, stay sitting next to somebody who started applying green, black and brown stripes to their face? Possibly, but only if they were not also muttering under their breath.

I suppose a chap may be putting on his make up for work – although this only applies if you are a) a clown or b) in a KISS tribute band.

Sorry seems to be the hardest word

In the unlikely event that the young woman I almost trod on when getting off the train the other morning is reading this – apologies for almost treading on you.

I did say ‘sorry’ at the time, honestly. It’s just that it was early in the morning and my voice, rather rusty from several hours of not being used and several hours of red wine abuse prior to that, turned a cheery, apologetic ‘sorry’ into a growl that even scared me – so I’m not in the least surprised that you gave a ‘no problem’ smile but there was a flicker of apprehension in your eyes.

I am not at my best in the morning. To be honest, I am frequently not at my best but mornings are a particularly bad time in that the undertaking of normal social exchanges, like the one above, result in my coming off like a loon. This is, I think, in part because of the media. Before crime shows dominated the telly schedule, I looked like an inoffensive, gangly bispected bloke. Thanks to CSI etc. the world now knows that the gangly bispected bloke is the one with the lock-up full of dead cheerleaders. Thanks television.

So, AM social interaction best avoided I think. Apart from picking up my coffee and doughnut from Krispy Kreme, which is always a pleasure. This is because as I wait behind somebody buying their double dozen I occasionally run through what Hollywood calls the ‘cute meet’ scenario in my head. The ‘cute meet’ is when a couple are thrown together by a shared experience, for instance reaching for the same last doughnut and then getting into a ‘you have it, no you have it’ before the doughnut guy chops it in two and they pair bond over their doughnut and waddle off to have fat wheezy sex.

The reality is, at best, the bloke would say ‘you have it’ and the woman would say ‘thanks’ and that would be it, because I have learned that you do not get between a woman and doughnut. Or, more likely, it’s a hair-pulling, scratching rollaround fight over the last original glazed. Which is, of course, a ridiculous exaggeration…nobody would get into a fight over an original glazed. A custard filled chocolate coated though?

Postcard from Bay of Naples

Naples is a shit hole. How do I know – mainly the smell but also because you can catch a hydrofoil out of it – that’s right, even the boats leave Naples quickly.

Naples is connected to Pompeii, Sorrento and Capri, as well as the Amalfi Coast, by a network of ferries. Best of these are the hydrofoils that hammer across the Bay like speed-boats on steroids. The hydrofoils are, basically, how commuters get from job to home and yet they seem to be a hell of a lot more stylish than the trains I get in the morning.

But they are full of commuters. I can tell this because I can smell my own (when you get the smell of Naples out of your nose) and because while I was running from stem to stern, looking at Naples vanishing into the distance, gawping at Vesuvius or watching Sorrento creep closer, the commuters were reading books or files. Also, I was the only one drinking beer before noon.

I can see one eventually getting used to a view, no matter how spectacular and reading a book rather than looking at the coast…but it takes something special to not keeping your eye on an active volcano – possibly a really good Grisham.

The blog entry now at platform 1...

Trains are by far the most romantic form of travel. Air travel had a brief flirtation with glamour but that ended when Concorde was removed from service. All the flat beds, showers in departure lounges and head massages in the world can’t disguise the fact that, even in the premium first cabin of a modern passenger jet, you’re still breathing the recycled exhalations of the proles back in super-economy and still possibly at the mercy of some bearded freak with a sharpened spoon.

First class travel on airplanes sells itself as luxury but the truth is that the huge passenger airplanes of today are really just big cattle wagons with wings. If first has beds, does economy now consist of a penny hang with a beverage cart option?

Rail, however, appears to be getting more and more luxurious. The newly refurbished St Pancras station has the longest champagne bar in the world! Train late? Who cares! Trains mean excitement, spies, the lady vanishes, nazi agents, stylish murders, brief encounters and assignations in the sleeper cars. Airplanes mean not being able to take your swiss army knife on board with you – a problem as it means you have nothing to fight off gremlins with.

Trains are great. Stations…less so. Recently there was some sort of train trouble on my morning commute and during a fifteen minute wait on the platform I and everyone else was subject to a audio torrent of announcements, all recorded. The first was apologising for the delay, the second reminding us to keep a look out for suspicious packages, the third telling us we can’t take bicycles on the train and the fourth making other announcements about delays and then the whole thing started off again! Bloody hell.

The worst thing is that the apology is so obviously computer generated. It’s maddening that something without a soul says it’s sorry – it’s like your VCR apologising if it records songs of praise over the porn tape you put together through recording the ten minute free view on the Hot Channel for two weeks. Even creepier would be if it was actually programmed to feel sorry. You just know that one day it would get into therapy and channel all that sorrow into aggression and the next thing you know you have a computer with a chip on its shoulder directing you to the wrong platform out of spite and laughing. That’s why I’m uncomfortable with anything more technologically advanced than a kettle.