THE BIG METROPOLIS

Once or twice a year, I have to head out of my humble hermitage here in Lesser Blogfordshire and go to London for the day on a business trip. It’s for the annual trade show(s) for the business I happen to work in and it is seen as a necessary component of my working life.

Some might consider such a thing to be something of a perk, and many of my friends and colleagues in the industry do tend to stay overnight and involve themselves in the social networking that seems necessary for the wheels of commerce to keep on spinning or, at the very least, turning for a little longer.

Now, living as I do in this rural backwater of Lesser Blogfordshire, the prospect of being in the big city doesn’t fill me with any kind of joy at all, so I tend to slink in like a thief in the night and try to sneak back out again without anyone ever really noticing.

I know a lot of people who live in London rave about how utterly fabulous the city is but every year I spend a few hours there and head home feeling utterly defeated by the old place. It doesn’t help that, no matter how sparklingly fresh and clean my clothes were when I put them on in the morning, by the time I arrive at my destination I just feel filthy, although, to be fair, as part of the travelling is the getting there, not all of that can be down to London itself.

It didn’t get off to the best of starts. Heading into town from Lesser Blogfordshire was pleasant enough, as I got to share my train journey with the beloved for once, and despite my usual timekeeping angst due to the fact that I had to queue up to get a ticket, we had a happy enough journey in.

I had a long wait for the scheduled train journey I held a ticket for and so I popped into the platform’s café for a swift coffee and I ran into a couple of former colleagues from the company I used to work for once, and had a pleasant little chat, catching up and so forth which, as you’ll well know, is not really me at all.

Then the train before mine got cancelled and, when mine came in, this meant that everyone from the previous train was also on it and any previous reservations had been cancelled. I briefly spotted m’colleague surrounded by the folk who had swiftly overwhelmed him and left him unable to save me a seat nearby and headed off to find a seat otherwhere. Before that, of course, there was the slight spat that happened before my very eyes as one commuter with more gumption than me demanded that someone vacated the seat he had reserved and was being terribly emphatic in his insistence, despite being told of the new arrangements. Eventually the chap who had filled the seat stood up angrily and flounced away with an “Oh have it then!” whilst I had a terribly English “Well I’m not trying that” moment.

More mild commuter rage came later from the seat next to the one I eventually found, back in the “quiet coach” so I couldn’t even bring myself to switch on the phone for fear of it beeping with m’colleague’s frantic messaging of his own woeful travel tales. A woman nearby asked the ticket inspector to ring immediately as she needed assistance with disembarking at Euston but she had arranged this from the now cancelled train. Her response to the young lad’s polite enough question “Were you put on the train at Piccadilly?” was met with a frosty “I was assisted onto the train, I am not a piece of luggage!”

Which is fair enough, I suppose.

Mental note made to self on acceptable terminology.

Apart from that, London was achieved easily enough and my paper and my book whiled away the journey. M’colleague and I met up and, after a brief exchange of our tales of adventure, headed off into our nation’s capital with a renewed sense of purpose.

"Welcome to the Pleasuredome"
A theme park ride but without the "fun" part

I know that I’m not seeing it at its best on these trips. Arriving at a railway terminal, descending into a tube station and connecting to a monorail – kind of like a theme park ride but without the “fun” part - to get to an exhibition centre is hardly the brightest and shiniest way to view any city, but the place always seems to be so soulless and uninviting. M’colleague and I work in separate places and are rarely in the same space, but we spent a jolly enough few minutes trying to spot any green amongst the concrete as we chugged along on the DLR system.

I’m not one for glamorising the idea of a place, believing that you have to take it as you find it, but I really find precious little to love in the Urban Jungle and I really fail to see the appeal. Ultimately I really don’t have any “London Pride” or sense of “National Identity” with my nation’s capital and am happy to get out of the place as swiftly as I can once the business that has taken me there is done. Now, I’m sure that, as an international capital city, it serves its purpose terribly well and that those of the population that are bothered by such matters find it suitably admirable, fit for purpose and adequate for the task in hand, but crikey o’riley it’s a grim old place.

I’m not sure that easy access to museums, art galleries, theatres and monuments would ever be enough of a compensation to me having to actually live there. Once upon a long ago I did spend a late Saturday night/early Sunday morning walking around the streets near the monument with some friends, but I do believe that it’s probably my only happy memory of London.

Anyway, with the exhibition viewed, the overpriced luncheon eaten and the necessary chat chatted, I set out alone in the rush hour to head for home, essentially reversing the morning’s journey under cover of darkness and leaving m’colleague to spend his overnight stay socialising in the company of others in the business.

I did allow too much time for my crossing across town after compensating for an endless wait last year for a DLR train to turn up, and so, after braving the horrors of the Northern Line, I spent a soul-destroying hour or so in Euston station trying to decide what to eat and when to eat it.

“When” because I’d managed to actually blag a seat in the concourse and I needed to time it so I didn’t have to stand for too long after I’d relinquished it to go for my food.

Timing in these matters is everything.

“What” was slightly more difficult for there is a multitude of choices to be had to fill the stomachs of the weary traveller as they set about their journey. I queued briefly for an evil burgerzoid before changing my mind when I spotted a “healthy options” type hand-made sandwich shop as I walked off to have a look to see where the toilets were, even though I very quickly decided that things were really not all that desperate and so was able to decline the opportunity for a 30p pee.

A brief and fruitful visit to the newsagents for some supplementary reading materials and after some standing around and attempting to eat whilst obviously somehow managing to get in nearly everybody else’s way, the train was finally called and, with a great deal of relief, I settled myself down on a half-empty train and was soon heading back towards what I think of as civilisation.

So that’s me “Lon-done” for a little while at least, and I’m gratefully back home in my little green and pleasant corner of this land, far away from the hustle and bustle of the big metropolis and its strange people and their odd little metropolitan ways, and I really still can’t see what people see in the wretched place.

To each their own, I guess.