Once more the chugging of pistons ...

Six years ago the Metropolitan Railway celebrated 150 years of operations. Steam trains hauling vintage carriages delighted our eyes. This past weekend it was the turn of younger sibling District to reach that venerable age and as usual we had the pleasure of watching the old trains once again.

Metropolitan number 1 was fortuitously saved from the wreckers yards when London Underground (shame on them) were trying to get rid of it some 50 years ago. It was built at the turn of the 19th century to haul the express services from Baker Street to Aylesbury, and beyond to Verney Junction. It led a preserved train of "Chesham" set carriages dating from 1890 and had the electric locomotive Sarah Siddons at the back in case a bit of extra puff was needed.

I loved the driver's enjoyment of his role - he waved nicely to us as he passed - and his bowler hat, waistcoat and red scarf.

The introduction of new signalling systems on the Underground means that there may be no more such runs (unless maybe they stick a modern S stock carriage at the front, which would totally ruin the effect). Indeed, this particular journey only went from Ealing to High Street Ken before turning round, so not a lot of real smoke would have got into the tunnels.

Quaint though the train may be to our eyes, a hundred years ago people really did commute into central London from way out in the countryside in just such a way.

We Have Been Here Before

Some things change and some same exactly as they were. Some fourteen years ago this very column was established with a principal aim of documenting the daily irritations of commuting. At the time my normal journey was on the Piccadilly from beautiful Ruislip into West London. Typical pieces like "New fares, old problems",  "Communications and Stupidity" and "Not a good morning", to select just three examples from the many penned up to late 2006, expressed the frustration of coping with cancelled trains, trains that were supposed to go to one destination but which were rerouted to another, utterly inadequate information and blatant lies about there being a "Good service" or only "Minor" delays.

This evening a fellow commuter let rip with precisely the same complaints on precisely the same line, indeed at the same station (Acton Town) where many of my pieces were born.

This tweet was one of about ten fired off  by "Lofty" this evening but the picture says it all. A crowd of weary commuters standing on a cold platform waiting for a train when they should by now have been well on their way home.  His invective includes the staff, although to be fair they are as often in the dark about what is going on as the passengers. I went through exactly what Lofty went through one grim evening back in October 2005 and you can read all about it in "Having a Laugh"

A Present from Siberia

High pressure is settling over northern Europe and easterly winds are set to bring some severely cold days for the rest of this week. Once this would have been of some concern but with my commuting days behind me I can take relaxed (if not smug) attitude to it all whilst still thoroughly sympathising with those who must still go through it.

Here, courtesy of Twitter, BBC Travel and Jaymesh Patel, are a couple of snapshots to encapsulate this morning's fun and frolics for those attempting to reach central London from parts out west.

We had a little snow this morning in beautiful Ruislip, about enough to disturb any gnats strolling on the pavement and it's all gone now.

The blizzard strikes Ruislip (not)

While the eastern United States suffered snowstorms that shut down flights and cities, and northern UK had a bit of the same, we in beautiful Ruislip awoke this fine morning to find a light dusting of the white stuff. I waved a scraper at my car windscreen and most of it fell cleanly away - fortunately there was no ice underneath.

It's been cold for the past few days, temperatures dipping below zero most nights, in sharp contrast to the mild and wet January, and it feels more like winter ought to.  The Met Office people speak of blocking systems and diverted jetstreams and the like but really it is just business as usual. However whether the milder start to the year has pushed plants into a premature growth that the frosts will kill off - we will see in a few weeks time.

And speaking of commuting, which I wasn't, the Met line has been suffering a bit with all sorts of problems. Yesterday, when Mrs. Commuter and I went Londonwards, there were some gaps in the service so we had sprinted up the steps as a train came in; coming back a couple of hours later a signal failure at Moorgate had paralysed the line and it was running with severe delays. We took a Jubbly in the hope of catching a train that might start at Wembley Park but by the time we had got there the Met was running through trains again.

Summer Lightning

The English summer has arrived with a heatwave, the traditional English batting collapses in Test Matches and a furious thunderstorm that woke up Mrs. Commuter and myself at 2:00 am. Although a centimetre of rain fell (lit by intense electrical discharges that made our darkened bedroom resemble a photographer's studio) today has been hotter still and will probably be the warmest of the year. Once upon a time it would have been my melancholy lot to spend all day in a hot airless office, at the end of the day to trudge up the baking canyons of the London office blocks to a station and wonder if my stifling and sweaty train would arrive on schedule and, when it finally did arrive, whether it would make it all the way or be diverted (due to an "incident" twenty miles away).  But not any more. Today your correspondent was sprawled out at home watching the Tour de France (and reading e-books during the interminable ad breaks). So I am unable to report what it was like at the front line of commuting today. I could easily invent a few lurid details, I suppose, but you only have to browse through some of the back issues of this column and you could do just as well by yourselves.


Written a little later from the above, at 18:30.
You really couldn't make it up.  Here is the TFL service status for right now.

Yup.  On the very route on which I used to travel each day (until that great day in 2006 when my office moved to Waterloo) there is currently no service. Just think, I would have left my office say at 18:10, reached Barons Court and found a seat, with luck, on an Rayners Lane bound service at, say, 18:25 and just after we pulled out of Hammersmith (last chance to switch to another line) our train would have been diverted to Northfields. And there I would be, sweltering and abandoned at Acton and not knowing whether to go back into Central London or hang around on the platform. Happy days, what?

Commuting causes anxiety - Official

I've been writing about it for a long time and now the Office for National Statistics has confirmed, as reported in the Guardian yesterday, that commuting causes unhappiness, compared to working from or near home. Furthermore the level of unhappiness increases for each minute of a commute, although it tails off and reduces for people doing extreme commuting (journeys of several hours).

All pretty obvious, really. Commuting is a fairly unnatural sort of experience. Throughout human history until very recently people worked where they lived. When you commute you are no longer in control but dependent on the service of the transport provider. You are often forced into uncomfortably close proximity to other people. It can be difficult to concentrate on anything other than the rigours of the journey. Modern technology - in the form of tablets/smartphones/music players - as well that old standby of something decent to read can help but never fully alleviate the problem. People travelling by car or on wheels were happier than those going by bus or train, and cyclists the happiest of all (but I am sceptical about applying this to general commuting because typically cyclists do not have a long distance to cover; for someone like me to try to cycle into central London would be exhausting, extremely dangerous and more stressful, due to the nature of the main roads, than almost anything else).

As for those making very long journeys - that is not so much commuting, more choosing to live a substantial chunk of your life on the move and requires a very different mindset to that employed by the rest of us.

I am not sure quite what the point of the survey is, given that it tells us nothing we did not already know.  If you are interested in further research, my groundbreaking study Why doing nice things makes us happier than doing unpleasant things is available on request for a modest 25 bitcoins [whatever they are: Ed]

One to forget

Not a good journey on the tube today. I made one of my (now infrequent) commutes from beautiful Ruislip to Farringdon. All seemed to be going well as the air-conditioned "S" stock train, destination Aldgate, arrived at Baker Street. Alas, appearances can deceive. We remained at the platform for a while. Our driver informed us that due to signal failure at Kings Cross we might be delayed a while longer. Then, after several minutes, he told us that our train was terminating where it was and if we wished to continue we must use the Circle Line.

With these grim words about seven hundred people abandoned ship and thronged up the stairs to change trains. There was a wait until a Circle train arrived - it was almost totally full so not many could squeeze on. Fortunately there was another close behind with enough room to take us. And just as well because not only were the station staff making announcements that if we did not all move down the platform they would close it to prevent overcrowding (no hint of an apology that it was their system that had failed, it must have been that it was all our fault for actually wanting to travel) but twice during the wait it was announced that a good service was operating on all lines. Twice, whilst the Met suspended service from Baker Street and there were severe delays on the Circle and Hammersmith lines (as was posted on the tube website not very long afterwards).

But of course the best was to come. We made good progress up to Kings Cross, stopped just short and then limped in. And having limped out, we stopped in the tunnel and waited there for some ten minutes. Today was perhaps the hottest so far this year, about 30c in London. The Circle Line trains are of venerable stock that is not air-conditioned. On arrival at Farringdon, about half an hour late, sweating and uncomfortable, I could reflect on how nice it is not to have to make such a journey on a regular basis.

Once upon a time...

...when I used to commute daily to central London from beautiful Ruislip, this would have meant a long and, in this torrid heat of our long-awaited summer, unpleasant journey home.  But not any more. End of story.

The main event

Continuing the commuting theme from yesterday, and why not, since this used to be the raison d'etre of this blog, let me update you with today's little unpleasantness on the Metropolitan. A morning journey to my client in Farringdon was marred by delays caused by a broken water main in the Finchley Road area.  This meant a slow journey with plenty of stops between stations, sometimes enlivened by the utterly pointless recorded announcement "This train is being held at a red signal and should be moving shortly", followed by the utterly inane "Stand by for further announcements". You know, when you are on a train, there is not a lot you can do other than await the next announcement, unless you have the mp3 player on at a decent volume.

Anyway we got there in the end, and at least as our Baker Street bound train reached Harrow there was an Aldgate on the adjacent platform, with the driver actually watching those of us who crossed to it (sometimes they keep their eyes rigidly ahead and move off whether or not passengers are in-transit and most frustrating it can be). So it was a seat for the journey rather than standing on a crowded Central Line from Baker, and for this small mercy let us be grateful.

The power of the net

In the bad old days when I commuted daily, I often moaned about the problem of what strategy to adopt when faced with delays. And by delays, I don't mean actual gaps in the train schedule but the word itself. When you enter a tube station and see on the electronic displays (or the trusty old hand-written white board) that there are "delays", or, God forbid "severe delays" on your chosen route, what should you do?

Well, we now have ways to beat the system. The combination of the net, a tube app and a smart phone equips the traveller in a way undreamed of just a few years ago. So this morning, on my way from beautiful Ruislip into central London, and faced by those dreaded words "severe delays" and "no service between Baker Street and Aldgate" I made a cunning plan. A Piccadilly came in almost at once - fine, I took it on the grounds that if things looked bad I could stay on it pretty well all the way. But this is a second-best option, it is way slower than the Met and nothing like as comfortable. Decision time was four minutes away when the lines divide at Rayners Lane. By then I could see on my phone that Mets were running in good numbers and some were going through to Aldgate. So I debarked at Rayners to take the Met that I knew was a couple of minutes behind. Arrived at Harrow to find the train on the adjacent town-bound platform was out of service and lots of evidently disgruntled and just-turfed-out passengers waiting for us. Naturally my train was a slow one and we were quickly overtaken by a fast Aldgate that was almost empty but that is pretty well par for the course in these parts. My point is that on arrival at Finchley Road my phone told me there was another through train behind us and once more I debarked and changed trains.

Not too long ago this would have been too much of a risk. I would have remained on the Picc and emerged much later to change at Kings Cross with my back aching from those low spongy seats.  So thank you for the modern communication systems that empowers us hapless commuters in these difficult times.

The utility of the commute

Interesting article in The Guardian by John Lanchester, examining the meaning of commuting and experiencing an Underground trip starting before 5:00am. His conclusion about why we commute and whether it is worth it is worth noting. You should read it for yourself but this little snippet summarises one argument - "So you commute, which is a drag, in order to have the house and holiday and lifestyle that makes you happy " and he goes on to invoke the theory of utility. Now this is something I know a bit about, because utility is a technical term used by economists and I studied this benighted subject at a world-leading institution. (U. of Cambridge if you must know) [Kilburn Tech was good enough for me, actually: Ed]  and Mr Lanchester doesn't quite get it right. He opines that the theory must be wrong because "happiness studies" show that commuting, trading off the cost and effort of the daily journey to afford a better house in the suburbs, does not make people happier. Well,  the theory of utility is a wonderful piece of circular reasoning. It is based on an unprovable axiom that people behave rationally when making consumer choices. Therefore choosing to commute must increase utility because people choose to do it and therefore they must be happier (you know, really, deep down) This is genuinely what the great economists of the past - Marshall, Pigou, Pareto, Walras and others who worked in this field - thought. By this argument the theory cannot be wrong.

Actually the theory of utility, a major plank in the theory of markets, has nothing to offer when considering commuting. We do it because there are only so many places in the centre of cities to live and therefore most of us must live away from them albeit many of us have jobs which are in the centre of the cities. How far you choose to live is perhaps up to you, trading off cheaper house prices with the increased time and cost of travelling in, but few of us have any choice about the fundamental decision to use a public transport network to get to work in the first place. Choice is at the heart of utility theory so it really should not be used in this instance. Like almost all of classical economics, it is irrelevant to the way we live today (and was just as irrelevant when it was formulated at the end of the nineteenth century). The theory is right in a particular sort of economy but nobody on this planet has ever lived in it and nobody ever will because one of the fundamental requirements is that there is no future, only a continuous present.  If you would like to know more, you know how to get in touch [Careful, this could open the floodgates: Ed]

Anyway, Lanchester's observations on how people behave on the Tube are well worth reading so I commend his article to you.

The words and the deeds

As my morning Met train approached Harrow-on-the-Hill this morning, my fellow passengers and I were greeted with a positive deluge of helpful information from the driver. He told us where our train was going (a slow train to Baker Street, and this is germane to the issue), advised us which platforms to take if we wished to go to Amersham and even where to go to catch a Chiltern Line to Aylesbury Parkway.  The idea that anyone might be going to Aylesbury seemed pretty outlandish - the idea that they might not know how to do it and were relying on the driver to explain it was, quite frankly, bordering on the grotesque.  But never mind that, he then told us that due to a speed restriction we would make a slow approach into the platform and apologised for the inconvenience.

What a courteous man. And as we crawled at walking speed into Harrow there was a nice fast train to Aldgate waiting at the adjacent platform. I, and most of my companions readied ourselves to debark and catch it. Now I am sure that regular readers can fill in the next line but for the benefit of newcomers to these parts, just as we were ready to open our doors the other train closed its, and off they went. Bingo, my journey time lengthened and an uncomfortably full Circle Line to take at Baker Street in place of a comfortable seat on a through train.

You see, that's the thing about travelling on the tube. Plenty of genuinely useful words but when it comes to practical co-ordination of train journeys, well, the lights are on but not only is there nobody home, they've gone away for a long holiday, cancelled the milk and given the au pair the rest of the summer off.

A conflict of information

Farringdon station was pretty crowded Tuesday night. There had been points problems at Aldgate earlier and gaps had appeared in the service. The westbound platform indicators, however,showed a Hammersmith train due shortly, with a couple of trains behind, one of which was to Uxbridge (terminus on the route to beautiful Ruislip). Gladdened at heart, I joined the throng only to have my hopes dashed by the platform assistant who announced, a number of times, that the indicators were wrong and that we should all take the first train and change at Baker Street for points north because there were no following trains.

Now what to do? Useless to check the internet because it would show the same information as the indicators. Which to believe? The Hammersmith was due in 1 minute and the Uxbridge in 2. The announcer continued to tell us that the system "was not in real time". I followed the crowd who packed out the Hammersmith and loads of us emerged at Baker and surged up the steps toward the Metropolitan platforms. Where, not really to my surprise, the Uxbridge that had been behind us all the time came in less than a minute later and half-empty.

I don't suppose the announcer was deliberately lying. I guess they wanted to shift as many people as possible onto the first train. But had I known the truth I would have waited for the Uxbridge, had a seat all the way and not had to make the mad scramble at Baker.

It's these little dilemmas of strategic choice that make travelling on the Underground such a stimulating experience. The weighing up of the alternatives - the likelihood of a seat, the best place to change trains, the best place to be to get the train one wants, the degree of belief one puts in official sources of information be they human or electronic - is this not a mirror for the great choices we must all make in life with the concomitant stresses of decision making and cost-benefit analysis? [Funny, never thought of that before: Ed]

That's the way to do it

I promised, in my last missive, to report the moment I completed an effortless journey from beautiful Ruislip to my new office at Farringdon. It happened this morning and again on the return. On the morning run not only was my train from Ruislip bound for Aldgate, so need to change at all, but on arrival at Harrow there was a fast Aldgate awaiting us. And get this - there was time to cross the platform to board it, there were seats going and it left promptly.  The return was even simpler for, reaching Farringdon somewhat later than usual having had a farewell drink for a departing colleague, an Uxbridge appeared within three minutes and I was able to read horror stories on my little smartphone undisturbed.

So we can draw a neat line under this particular affair and file the papers away under "S" for "sorted". [er, what papers? Did I miss something? :Ed]

Crush Hour

I made the mistake last night of leaving my new office at Farringdon at 5:30pm for the return to beautiful Ruislip. Exacerbated by extensive roadworks that funnel pedestrians into a narrow corridor of pavement, the crowds who knock off at that time formed a dense mass of marching commuters blocking the access streets to the station. I hoped that most of them would be using the national rail services but few went into the gleaming new station entrance that serves those lines; the rest piled into the old Victorian station and crammed down onto the tube platforms that were already full.

A reasonable service was running, or so it seemed and soon after a full-to-the-bilges Hammersmith left, a fast Watford arrived with just enough space for your correspondent to squeeze into. This train then had its terminus changed to Harrow - no sweat for me because I have to change there anyway but not so much fun for my Watford branch travelling companions. It almost goes without saying that as we arrived at Harrow, coming into the platform normally reserved for Uxbridge bound trains, there was a Watford train adjacent, and of course this train moved off exactly as the doors opened on my train.

Oddly enough, most of the debarking passengers stayed on the Uxbridge side, and when our train arrived a few minutes later there were loads of us waiting; the arriving train was also packed so it was standing room only the rest of the journey.  I gather there had been a problem in the morning with a defective train but I don't know whether this had a persisting knock-on effect. I had been mildly affected by that one as well - arriving at Harrow on my inbound journey I had hoped to pick up a fast Aldgate train. One arrived on cue. The announcer said it was an Aldgate, the train's external display said it was for Amersham [the opposite direction: Ed]  and, as everyone crossed the platform to board, the driver told us it was terminating there and we all got out and went back to the slow train.

I have not yet managed to switch effortlessly to an Aldgate at Harrow on this, my new regular commute but who knows, this happy event may well occur soon and when it does you, my loyal followers, will be the first to know.

Return of the Strap

Readers whose tastes run to what I believe is known in certain circles as "discipline" will be sadly disappointed if they continue with this article. For the strap to which I refer is a device to make it easier to retain one's footing on a moving train. In the olden days all the tubes had them, often rather sinister sprung jobs with shiny black spherical handles, somewhat like what I imagine a cosh to resemble. The phrase "straphangers" was invented to describe a line of commuters in a packed train, each clinging on for dear life to one of these and trying not to trap their fingers in the spring. I found an excellent picture showing the straps - and a comment from a reader saying he thought they were used as coshes during the second world war - on the Flickr pages of IanVisits.

Well, we have new version of the old strap and they are being installed to the "S" stock trains on the Met right now. I saw my first examples yesterday and courtesy of the District Dave site you can see a picture of them. The photo makes them rather sinister, like a line of dangling nooses into which travellers who have finally given up the bitter struggle to get in on time can end it all, but don't worry about that, they are not that big.

And now to my new journey from beautiful Ruislip to work. My office has moved to Farringdon and it is the Met line all the way. The only complexity is that, in the morning most trains in from the Uxbridge branch stop at Baker Street :  so - do I change at Harrow, with a good chance of having to stand all the way (clever link back to the strap hanging theme here) [nice one: Ed] or go onto Finchley Road, hop off and wait for the next Aldgate, or to Baker Street where if the train comes in on platform 1 one must either walk through to the Circle Line or go over the steps to platform 3?  And coming home - take the first train which, if a Circle, requires a change at Baker Street and a hair-raising race up the steps, through the main concourse and down again to catch a train that is starting from there (this happened yesterday and whilst I was lucky to get an Uxbridge just before it left, I saw a fellow commuter bound down the steps only to see the doors close in his face), or hang around waiting for a through train to Uxbridge (these run only in peak hours and most of my journeys are off-peak)?  There are other options and possibilities but 'twould be tedious in the extreme to describe them all, much as you probably want me to, so I shall desist. [Thanks: Ed]. Decisions, decisions.  And not helped by the tube internet information system which sometimes describes all southbound trains as Aldgate when they are not, or simply as "unknown".

Farringdon station itself is fascinating - one of the oldest stations on the line and indeed one of the oldest metro stations in the world, but with a huge new station building for the National Rail lines and massive construction going on around it for Crossrail.  Footbridges snake across the lines at odd angles. At the end of the tube platforms an unmarked tunnel leads to the National Rail platforms. The tube lines bend away so sharply at this end that, although fully in the open, incoming trains are invisible until the last second of their approach. Yesterday as I waited for my Met train, passengers just a few feet away (but separated by a barrier) were waiting for trains to Gatwick and Brighton.  Brighton for me means starting at Victoria, passing Battersea Power Station and calling in at Clapham Junction, the way that God intended. One of my earliest and favourite computer games was called "Southern Belle", written for the Spectrum , and it simulated driving a steam train along that route using the most basic of graphics but with such atmosphere that one could easily imagine it. A diesel from Farringdon? No. It won't do. Just look at this screenshot and marvel

The pleasures of Pimlico

I have lived and worked in London pretty well all my life. I have used the tube to commute to most of my working destinations. So you might think I had travelled on every line, main or branch and graced most stations with my transient presence.  But you would, as must be obvious from the hackneyed, yet strangely attractive and compelling, way I have set up this line of reasoning, be wrong.  There are many parts of the great underground complex that I have rarely used. Some never. And today I travelled a route that I think I have only ever done once before, down to Pimlico via the Victoria line, for a meeting.

The Viccy is clearly a high-frequency route with the trains shuttling in at intervals of a minute or so.  And just as well because what I had not expected was the huge volume of people switching between the Jubbly and the Viccy at Green Park, the essential interchange on my migration south from beautiful Ruislip. This was early afternoon, mind you. Not the peak hour for shops to close or office workers in the metropolis to leave their desks. Yet there were throngs pushing through the platform exits, jamming up the corridors, filing endlessly down the stairs and effortlessly filling the trains, no matter how quickly the latter arrived.

The journey home was pretty slick though. Arrived at Pimlico, straight on a train. Transferred at Green Park to the Jubilee and again straight on a train. A piece of nifty footwork secured a seat so I remained until Finchley Road, disembarked and lo! the first Met was going my way and coming in even as I took up my place on the platform. I did notice that on both southbound and northbound journeys the Jubblies and the Mets take no notice of each other. Arriving southbound off a Met, I crossed to the waiting Jubbly and the doors shut in my face. Going home, as I took my seat in the Met a Jubbly came into the platform hard on the heels of the one I had vacated. Did we wait for passengers to cross the platform? Hell no, we were off even as they were coming out. Now this doesn't matter much for Jubblistas because they get one train every 1 to 2 minutes but it is a much longer interval on the Met. I hardly ever travel by the Jubbly so I really couldn't care much but it must be galling for regulars.

[so what was your original journey to Pimlico all about then? Your readers will want to know: Ed]  Sadly I have no recollection. This must remain one of the great unsolved mysteries of our time. Or I could make something up. I'll revisit this one the next time I am stuck for material and on a deadline. [Good idea. Although we don't actually have deadlines on blogs, do we?: Ed]

Bye Bye Bakerloo

That's it. Finished. This evening I made my final commute on the Bakerloo up from Waterloo to Baker Street, thence to catch a shiny new S Stock Met to beautiful Ruislip. This weekend my office (actually the office of my client because I am officially a self-employed consultant, and let me say at once, in the wake of certain allegations about highly paid BBC personages and others, that I do not hide behind a service company and I pay full income tax on my meagre earnings [good to clear that one up: Ed]) moves to the up and coming, media friendly, go-getting and buzzing neighbourhood of Hatton Garden in London's fashionable Farringdon district. Well, we had to because they are finally going to knock down the Tower Building (aka Elizabeth House, facing the Shell Centre) in which we have been perched this last 6 years, high above Waterloo station, and put up some stupendously dull office blocks to replace the stupendously dull office block that we are vacating.

So goodbye to some of the slowest, jerkiest and most irritatingly unresponsive lifts in London and let us look forward to next week, when I visit the new office for the first time with just a simple flight of stairs into the basement (which, I hasten to add, does have windows) but alas no glorious views over to St. Paul's on one side and the sweep of the many railway lines leading south from Waterloo on the other.

It will be exceedingly pleasant to remain on the Met for my entire journey and, with luck, on the same train. Perhaps it will inspire the inner muse to reach heights of unrestrained verbiage as yet undreamed of by those who merely edit the creative thoughts of others. Naming no names, of course. But it rhymes with 'bed'. And starts with 'e'.

2003 revisited

The searingly hot summer of 2003 will be long remembered as providing one of the longest and most unpleasant weather conditions for many years. We have had few such summers since, and certainly 2012 has been wet and cold in comparison. Yet once again, this week, Europe is sweltering. Paris was 38c today whilst even in beautiful Ruislip we were looking at 31 or so. Just mowing the lawn in the late afternoon induced a stream of sweat [no unpleasant personal details please: Ed] and a disinclination to do any more. Thankfully we had our summer holiday in Switzerland last week because it is pretty damn hot even in the Alps right now.

Commuting on the dear old Met has changed fundamentally for the better this year, now that the air-conditioned "S" stock trains provide 100% of the normal service (although I still gripe about the removal of a third of the seats compared to their venerable "A" stock predecessors), and the Jubbly also offers a cool way into central London. Alas no such comfort on the Bakerloo whose oven-like conditions can hardly be described for fear that my readers will accuse me of hyperbole and sensationalism.  Oh well, my office is supposed to be moving sometime soon and with a bit of luck it will be "S" stock all the way in and out in future.

An Olympic commute*

[* warning: misleading title: Ed]

I made my usual journey to Waterloo yesterday morning, returning to beautiful Ruislip late afternoon. Trains were fine, though crowded on the homeward leg, weather most pleasant, nothing to report really. Except that this was the first "working" day since the Games began on Friday evening and was my first chance to see how the system would cope.
The morning inward leg was a typical summer's day, noticeably fewer people actually going to work more or less balanced by tourists. Coming home, as usual whilst waiting for a Met at Finchley Road the Jubblies were shuttling through at the rate of about 3 every 5 minutes, so full marks there for the service to Stratford. The Mets were full, almost everyone seemed to be a non-native and many debarked at Wembley Park so I guess they were all games-goers, but there was little sense of it. No flags or scarves in national colours, no chanting, no flaunting of approved sponsor products (or guiltily hiding away of offending materials).
So from this utterly non-representative sample, I can report that the Tube is coping well and Londoners can go about their business much as usual. This has been AnthonyG for Ramblings, somewhere in Ruislip, and now back to the studio.