Well what do you know. I've had a rough couple of commuting days and moaned about it in public. Today all was sweetness and (quite apt, given the time of year) light. This morning I had to speed up a trifle to get straight on a London bound Metropolitan (probably several minutes late but I should care?). The Bakerloo was on its usual good form. Arrived at work early. Coming home, straight on a Bakerloo at Waterloo and at Baker Street the raw pleasure of finding that the next three departures were for Uxbridge. I let the first one go as it was crowded and settled comfortably into the second no more than two minutes later.
I also had the esoteric, one might almost say eldritch (and I don't find many opportunities to employ that particular word) experience of listening to an audiobook, Edgar Allan Poe's grisly Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. I love that wholly unnecessary suffix. Did Mr. Poe fear that his readers might confuse his obsessive tale of dirty doings on a whaling ship in 1827 with the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Ruislip*, an obsessive tale of dirtier doings in the rear carriage of a stalled Piccadilly train at West Ruislip Sidings in 2007? Probably not.
*I suppose I had better make it abundantly clear that I am not the author of this tale, nor have any plans so to be. Further, to the best of my knowledge and belief, it does not exist, and has never existed, and for the sanity of the world, it never will.
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