LEAF IT

I couldn’t find the car the other morning.

Well, that’s not strictly true, and I shouldn’t really start off with a lie even if it does make for a more “dramatic” introduction. Still, as the first rule of, oh, pretty much all professional journalism seems to imply that you need to grab ’em with a sensational headline and then let the banal reality creep through afterwards, who am I to argue with history?

Oh yes, I remember, I always believed that I had better standards than that.

Perhaps we ought to start again…?

The car was, either surprisingly or unsurprisingly, depending, I suppose, on your own experiences of the neighbourhood in which you live, exactly where I had left it when I got up one morning after a particularly stormy and wind-blown night.

Unfortunately, just for a second, I didn’t recognise it and, because I’m getting very old and addled, I had one of those slight moments of doubt when I wasn’t quite one hundred percent certain where precisely I had parked it when I had arrived home the evening before and so I almost had a bit of a panic about the fact that it might have been stolen overnight.

It was, however, merely wearing a disguise. Not a mask or a fake twirly moustache, or anything as surreal as that, just a coating of autumn leaves that had adhered to it because of the sheen of water that was also covering its every surface.

And, because we had had that first blast of autumn (although it was difficult to tell after the non-stop first, middle and last blasts of summer…), the leaves were everywhere, covering the ground, the roads, the pavements, the walls, the gardens and, of course, all of the other cars. In some instances, in fact, it was getting rather hard to tell where the car ended and the road began, such was the quantity of leaves that had fallen to create a soggy coating for what seemed at the time to be the entire world.

It almost felt as if all of the cars had got together to try out some kind of a “camouflage exercise” to see whether we could still find them, and whether we loved them enough to care, but mine was still easy enough to spot and I peeled what leaves I could off the windows, wondering for a moment whether you can be fined for letting leaves fall off your car and onto the carriageway, like you can with heavy snow, and then carefully made my way to the station, because that soggy and leafy road surface was as dangerous as hell.

Ironically, there was a bit of a rush on to get to the station on time as they’ve just started their alternative timetable which is scheduled for this time of year where all of the trains run five minutes earlier. This is generally believed to be the “Leaves on the Line” timetable to compensate for the fiasco of a few years ago when it was a fairly common excuse, much seized upon by comedy writers, for the trains running late or not at all.

Now, I’d always believed that they time-shifted the timetable by that five minutes so that, when they were running late, they’d still be running to the usual time, if you see what I mean…? So I thought that it was set up like that to give the rail company a little bit of breathing space on those mornings where there were indeed “Leaves on the Line” and the many and varied problems of traction that might come along with that particular phenomenon. Perhaps I even thought that the driver had to stop every so often and clamber out of his cab with a shovel in his hand and go and get the leaves from under his wheels, but that’s not, apparently, what the “Leaves on the Line” Autumn timetable is about at all.

No, I’m reliably informed that it is just that the trains have to run a little bit slower to compensate for, perhaps, the lack of traction, the slippery-ness of the rails or the fact that it might take that little bit longer to stop, and so the mathematics of time and motion means that, if they set off slightly earlier, and travel slightly slower, the morning commuter train will still arrive at its destination at more-or-less the same time as it always does, i.e. late…

It’s all quite clever really, although I’m now thinking of all those exam papers from when I was younger of the “If a train leaves London travelling at 87 m.p.h…” variety.

Timetables are funny old things, really. It’s so easy to reschedule a mechanical device so that it sets off just a little bit earlier, but human beings are creatures of habit, and so the same people still seem to be walking up that same hill towards that same station at pretty much the same time as they always do each morning.

Some of them just have a slightly tired and desperate look in their eyes, that’s all, that speaks volumes of the stresses and strains involved in getting everything in their lives organised with slightly less time in which to do it, whilst trying to get out of their own homes just before they left for work that day.

It’s a look that says “I’ve run around like a mad thing to get out earlier and that didn’t work, and if I miss this bloody train…” and having to think of another excuse to tell their boss when they fail to get in on time.

“Leaves on the line, leaves on the line…”