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Characters on the tube

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19:52 / 08.04.05

I love travelling on the tube, because there is always someone wonderful to look at.

In fact, maybe I am another stereotype - the person who looks at everyone because they are so interesting but is actually making everyone really cross by staring at them.

19:56 / 08.04.05

And there is always some sort of art student with a really big portfolio and a really sad and tired looking businessman who generally looks like he feels he hasn't done as well as he wanted to in his career.

Or maybe that's just the story I make up for him.

And a media girl from Soho who clearly earns a fortune and spends most of it on bags, shoes and make-up from Liberty.

20:05 / 08.04.05

And someone asleep. With their head slowly dropping down to one side on to the shoulder of the person sitting next to them, just until it nearly hits, at which point the neighbouring person makes a sudden movement to ward them off which wakes the sleeper up for a minute and then the whole things starts again.

This is fun! Or maybe I'm just making people up now.

The thing about the tube is that it's full of everyone. We are all of us there somewhere, being someone's stereotype.

nedrichards is confused

20:19 / 08.04.05

Haus, how can you be knocking on shrews? Shrews rock!

As for tube stereotypes how about a frequent tube traveller showing irrational hate towards the nuclear family units that fill the system up in the school holidays even though its off peak and clearly *nobody* apart from them should be using the system. After all they've organised their life specially to avoid rush hour. Ah, that's actually me. Damn.

20:54 / 08.04.05

Haus? Knock shrews? I'm sorry, clearly I have been deluded. I was under the impression that Haus was a shrew in a former life.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

02:35 / 09.04.05

I'm not sure why, but in my experience drunk people tend to vomit on trains more often than the tube... Not sure why that is...

Maybe it's to do with the view- you don't get such a sense of motion looking out of a window at a black wall rushing past as you do when it's trees and bridges and stuff. Just a guess.

07:46 / 09.04.05

As someone who spends the vast majority of their working day with non-native English speakers, I always try and figure out what language the foreigners are speaking, and do I understand any of it?

On that note there's always a group of Brazilian EFL students (probably studying at my school) and a group of French/Italian/Spanish/German teens on a school trip on the tube.

There's also always a set of parents or a two moms out with their giant strollers/baby bag etc. who need about five years to get everything they have with them off the tube. I know I should be more sympathetic to them, but I'm not.

Oh and there's me, taking too much space and hoping to put all my bags on the seat next to me until someone stares me down with a glare.

08:15 / 09.04.05

I had a nasty experience on the tube, and apologise for it now. I was coming back from a party to let a builder in to an ex-girlfriends' house, I had only managed about 3 hours sleep if that, and was full of various alcohols, so bought a lucozade to get me through the journey. I managed to make it to three or four stops before destination, when I felt really bad, and needed to get some air. But the tube wasn't going to let my off just anywhere. It was a real mental battle to stop myself from being sick, and I lost. But I managed to keep it all in my mouth until the tube stopped. Anyway, I thought I'd make it up to the ground level and get rid of the contents of my mouth, but I accidently swallowed some, then had a coughing fit, which I tried, I really tried to hold back - to no avail. I am sorry to anyone that witnessed a man throwing up bright orange sick at the stair end of the clapham common tube station one saturday morning at about 8.30. Really, I am.

13:04 / 09.04.05

You mean you held it in your mouth almost all the way up to the top? That's fairly impressive in itself. I was a whisker away from the same fate once myself. I could feel it rising in my throat, but I just managed to get onto the platform in time for some air and I recovered.

13:10 / 09.04.05

I heard Iris Murdoch interviewed on the radio when I were but a lad and she said she liked to sit on the Circle Line and go round and round for hours, watching the people, writing observations, perfecting a perplexing paragraph. Not being a great philosopher and novelist, I haven't that excuse, but I do enjoy surrepticious surveillance of my fellow passengers. But never on the Circle Line. It is evil. That's why it's yellow on the tube map.

Have you read A Word Child Xoc? I read it before I'd been to London so I may have got the wrong impression from it, but it was about an alcoholic who would ride the circle line for something to do, and apparently there were two stations that have bars on them (not sure if that means on the platform or elsewhere) and he would wait until opening time and get off at whichever one he arrived at first and go and get pissed. This was set (an no doubt written) 20-30 odd years ago though so things might have changed since then. I can't think of any stations with bars on the platform anyway. The circle line always reminds me of that book.

13:23 / 09.04.05

The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt (an excellent book which I thoroughly recommend) also features the main character travelling on the Circle Line for hours and hours... IIRC to keep her small son warm, because they were too poor to pay for proper heating.

I can think of a couple of other books which deal in part with the unpleasant aspects of travelling on the tube; in Her Name Was Lola by Russell Hoban, Max is assialed by a demon which causes him to talk to himself and smell appalling, resulting in his being ostracised on the (I think) Piccadilly line; and is it in Mr Phillips that the protagonist faints on the tube?

ONLY NICE THINGS

15:27 / 09.04.05

I was under the impression that Haus was a shrew in a former life.

Alas, no. But always a friend of shrews. Always.

09:19 / 11.04.05

Money shot = the Lady of the Northern Line

Yay I remember her! - is it the lady who used to sit on a seat on the Bank branch train going south at rush hour and put her backpack in the seat next to her and whenever anyone made noises about her moving it so they could sit down she'd shout "No! Nobody sits here!" or something like that, putting her arm across the seat just to make sure she was understood.

If anyone laughed she would get really nasty and say something like, "My aim is to make your day as miserable as possible", and she'd start flicking people's newspapers. When someone did confront her and give her a hard time, she suddenly became like an old woman and begged them, "Be good to me!".

I miss her and would love to hear that she's still carrying on her work without having sought any professional help.

Whisky Priestess

17:56 / 11.04.05

YES the mother-with-enormous-buggy (always at least 10x the size of the child it contains). And always during f***ing rush hour. You *know* they're not taking the kid in to work so WHY are they on the tube??!

*Sob*

I am a tube-mouse spotter though. And I have been guilty of doing my make-up and, in extreme cases, getting changed on the tube. The secret is pretending you're invisible.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

18:01 / 11.04.05

Not quite Tube-related, but near...

I'm starting to learn from my friend who always sees the big burly guy with his feet across both seats when there are people standing up as "a challenge". More often than not, he'll move 'em, and all the people standing will (as once did I) make those funny "why the fuck didn't I think of that?" faces.

My next trick will be getting the fucker to move by going "oi! fuckface! There's an old lady here! GIDAADAVIT!!!"
I think I need to work out a bit first, though.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

18:02 / 11.04.05

Sorry, meant to use the phrase "on the bus" there at least once. Would have made the first sentence make more sense.

19:13 / 11.04.05

On a tangential note, has anyone else read253? Not so much a novel as a collection of 253 one-page stories about the 253 people on a normal London Underground train. The author explores the connections between the people, some of whom know each other, and the backgrounds. It's a good read, one that's highly recommended to people who make up little histories for their fellow passengers.

19:35 / 11.04.05

I take the city bus much more often than the subway (or the "T" as it's known hereabouts). If you take a given route reguarly you actually see a lot of the same people over and over. I used to take the 59 and everyone on it knew each other by first name and well enough to make small talk s.a., "How's the new apartment, Lisa?!" Though I rode it for a year and a half I studiously avoided becoming part of the social circle, because the bus ride was my cherished quiet time that I used for reading books. I am NOT a chatty person in the morning. But there was something pleasant and comforting about that group of bus regulars.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

20:01 / 11.04.05

Grey Area: I've read bits of it. And one day I shall have read it all. It's wonderful. (What my mum would call "a toilet book"- you read a few pages at a time, or in the case of Ryman, 253 words or whatever. It's ace.)

10:55 / 13.04.05

Oh just thought of another one. The religion ones, you know the one's who spend the whole journey telling everyone else in the carriage they are damned to hell if they don't find Jesus.

I always feel like saying 'well he shouldn't play hide and seek then'

And I'm another mouse spotter as well. I think underground line mice are unbelieveably cute.

11:00 / 13.04.05

Not strictly speaking a tube character but the bloke who walks around outside the entrance to oxford circus station with his megaphone asking "are you a sinner or a winner". You know the one - looks a bit like Paul O'Grady....

11:04 / 13.04.05

oh yes I know him. He has some friends who stand by the clock tower on the roundabout at Victoria with a portable PA and the phrase Jesus is Lord (or something like that) written down the outside legs of their trousers in those iron on letters.

11:06 / 13.04.05

Thw winner-sinner guy goes to football matches as well. He jokingly claims to have got millwall to the FA cup final last year by promising fans big rewards if we behaved ourselves at another match earlier in the season.

11:16 / 13.04.05

B3ta interview with Mr Winnersinner.

This actually turns into a bit of a puff piece, rather out of sync with the real, rather aggressive guy in question.

Regrettable Juvenilia

11:53 / 13.04.05

Are you sure?

Favourite colour?
Any colour, but black is for the devil.

12:07 / 13.04.05

I used to be entertained by those funny chaps in the blue jackets who would wave those white plastic sticks with round bits on the end every time a train was about to depart. How did they manage to be at so many stations? Are they some sort of club?

12:12 / 13.04.05

What, you don't think black is for the devil? Tsk.

12:43 / 13.04.05

I once saw a person, as they sat on a bench on the platform, perform oral sex on a guy. He was standing, and had wrapped his 3/4 length coat around the first person's head as it bobbed in and out of sight. I suppose they were trying to be discreet but it was hardly working.

That was on the TTC (Toronto Transit Commission, obviously in Toronto) That was the most outrageous example, but I have seen other stereotypical transit perverts and exhibitionists.

12:52 / 13.04.05

I just remembered an unsavoury incident. One morning I was coming home from a very late night, the tube station had just opened and there were a handful of us waiting on the platform for the first train. I was sitting two seats down from a guy who was sitting there in silence. Then just as the train was arriving there was a loud splash and I glanced over to see a large puddle beneath his seat and a great deal of liquid dripping from his trousers onto the floor beneath him. He put his head in his hands and stayed where he was, not making a move for the train.

I am still trying to understand what happened. Surely if you piss yourself then it would drip out slowly? It was like his bladder burst out through his flesh or something. Very weird.

Less searchable M0rd4nt

13:10 / 13.04.05

Maybe his waters broke.

13:14 / 13.04.05

A colostomy bag? A brand new goldfish? Water ballon falsies?

16:48 / 13.04.05

When working in London, one of my coworkers came in one morning looking very happy. He explained that whilst packed into the Tube during rush hour, an anonymous, but friendly stranger had reached over and given him a handjob...

...does this happen often on the tube?

Whisky Priestess

19:20 / 13.04.05

Male or female?

02:42 / 14.04.05

Male.

16:44 / 15.04.05

I know this isn't much of a sterotype, but seeing as this thread is all over the place anyway I thought I'd tell you of some of the only strangers I've ever spoken to on the underground, and the reason why I never talk to people on the underground.

When I was around fourteen or fifteen I had to travel from my home in Brighton to my dads home in Walthamstow to see him. I'd been travelling unaccompanied for a while, and I was taking my sister with me, she's two years younger than me.

We were approaching the last stop, and the only other people in the carriage were this old couple, in their sixties. They said hello and started chatting, and then this old lady leans over and says "Isn't it nice that its only white people on the train for once?"

I wasn't so confident back then so I didn't tell her to fuck off like I should have done, just clammed up. But I've been convince ever since that the city is too populated with weirdos to talk to any of them when you can't run away.

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