by TfL says I live in the best city in Europe for a late night out, and the drivers say I may have to walk home from it.
LONDON, England – The first thing I do each morning is check the TfL status page, the way other people check on a sleeping dog, and today every line is a calm green with the look of something planning something.
Morning, Kitchen
My flatmate Gideon is standing at the counter holding his phone at arm’s length, which is how he reads bad news and also how he reads menus. “Have you seen this?” he says. I have, because I read the news in bed before the kettle has had a chance to form an opinion.
The announcement of eight 24-hour Tube strikes by RMT drivers has landed. Each one starts at noon, and the run stretches from late November well into the new year and on to the end of February. The row is over London Underground’s plan to squeeze the working week from five days into four, with longer shifts and slightly fewer hours overall.
TfL calls the change voluntary. The RMT says it would strip existing protections away whether drivers opt in or not, and wants guarantees for anyone who stays on the current deal. The other drivers’ union, Aslef, has already accepted the roster changes, so the whole thing has the feel of a flatshare where one housemate has signed the new rota and the other is still standing at the fridge saying “define fair”.
If the pattern of earlier strikes holds, there will be no service on parts of the Circle and Metropolitan lines, or on the Central line between White City and Liverpool Street. That last stretch is my entire commute. I would call it a coincidence, but a coincidence suggests it was an accident.
“Four days a week,” says Gideon, wistfully. “I’d settle for four days a week of anything. I’d settle for four days a week of being in the building.”
Midday, The Office
My editor, Marjorie, has left a sticky note on my monitor: “400 words on the strikes by three. Fair to both sides. Funny to neither.” It is the best brief I have ever had and also, I suspect, a description of the entire British press.
I write for The London Prat, where the rule is to get the facts right and leave the exaggeration to me. I try the opening paragraph four ways. Version one is angry, version two is sad, version three is a pun about “signal failure” that I am deleting before anyone sees it, and version four is a sandwich.
The office kitchen has a poster of a lighthouse with the word PERSEVERANCE underneath. I look at it the way you look at an ex at a wedding. I would swap it tomorrow for one of the motivational quotes that a farming site wants to put up in place of the feed store posters, which at least admit that effort and results are different animals.
- Words written about the strikes: 212
- Words about the strikes that I would let my mother read: 31
- Biscuits eaten in the name of research: 3
Afternoon, A Surprise Compliment
Just as I am about to hit the wall, the news sends a cake. Time Out and TfL have published a joint report called London After Dark, and it says London comes first among European capitals for nightlife and late-night public transport combined, with a score of 80 percent.
The detail is where I get my pleasure. London did not win either category on its own. It came fourth for nightlife, behind Paris, Berlin and Madrid, with 75.9 percent, and second for late-night transport behind Vienna, with 84.1 percent. We are, in other words, the city that wins the trophy by being second-best at two things, which is also my school report, my career and my approach to the pub quiz.
The report drew on nearly 6,000 survey responses from 26 capitals, and nine in ten people said they enjoy longer nights out because the night Tube and Overground are still running in the early hours. Night services have averaged about 81,000 journeys a night since they launched in 2016. I like to think that I am personally responsible for about nine of those, mostly on a Friday, mostly asleep against a window.
Gideon reads this over my shoulder and says, “So we’re the best nightlife city in Europe and the drivers are on strike.” I tell him that is what a European capital is: a party and a dispute with the same venue.
Evening, The Pub
We meet Honor and Dev at the Crooked Ladle, a pub with a carpet that has seen things. Honor has made a spreadsheet of the strike dates and colour-coded them by how likely she is to be stuck in Zone 3 at midnight. Dev has contributed a plan to cycle, which he has had every winter since I met him.
The conversation turns, as London conversations do, to how we would get home if the whole system stopped. Honor says walking. Dev says cycling. Gideon says he would simply stay at the pub until the line reopened, “like a lighthouse keeper, but with crisps”. I say that I would write something about it, and everybody nods the way you nod at someone who has said they will take up running.
This sort of thing is why I keep a diary at all, and you can find more of my daily notes at The London Prat for as long as the Central line lets me get to the office to write them. If you want the long tradition behind a paper like ours, the British Onion page is a decent place to start, and if you want a London-sized helping of the same thing, our London news written for laughs is on the shelf.
I get home, check the TfL status page one last time, and find all the lines still green. I know better than to trust them. A green line is just a strike that has not told you its plans yet.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
