Disgressed

They quite often hand out free stuff on Waterloo and other stations. I got a coffee-flavoured Pepsi Max at Blackfriars only the other night. That’s a poor shadow of the stuff you used to get back in the eighties, of course: I’m sure I remember being given three glasses of Beaujolais Nouveau on the walk between Cannon Street and Monument one morning (whatever happened to Beauj Noov, by the way?). It got to the point at Waterloo one day where there was a man standing begging for money for food about two yards away from a woman handing out free bars of chocolate. The contradictions of Thatcherite Britain laid bare before your eyes.

Anyway, you do still get a certain amount of stuff pressed into your hand, and I thought you’d like to see what I got recently. A set of stickers based on the Microsoft Office dinosaur campaign – and a Microsoft lollipop. Now I never thought much of that campaign to begin with – the proposition “our old software is rubbish: buy our new software” seems flawed to me. But – a lollipop? Do they think our software procurement decisions are made by seven-year-olds? (Er… somehow that didn’t come out as convincing as I intended.)

It was only to be expected that Bill Gates would turn his attention to the confectionery market eventually, of course: the strange thing is that it seems a straightforward, functional kind of lollipop. You might expect a Microsoft lollipop to be uncannily like someone else’s lolly design, but slightly too big to fit in your mouth and with a stick three feet long. Confectioners would be obliged by the terms of their Microsoft software licence to hand it out with other purchases: it would come bundled with a sandwich whether you wanted it or not, and in fact attempting to detach it would be lieable to damage the functionality of the sandwich.

Bill says: Yeah, punters are always disparaging the product, but I’m still the richest man in the world. You ate the lollipop, am I right??

At Clapham Junction the other night there was an announcement I’d never heard before. The train was delayed by about ten minutes, “…because of an emergency cleaning operation. Passengers are advised that they may wish to avoid joining the last carriage on this train.”

God knows what (Mr Creosote-style?) event can have suddenly rendered an entire carriage so ghastly that (even after ten minutes of emergency cleaning) the railway authorities – even they! – felt it might not be fit for human use. One of those things you don’t want to know, really. I was interested, though, by the implication that the great railway terminii of London can deploy emergency cleaning teams at a moment’s notice. Are these emergency cleaning squads an elite corps? Do you have to start on the ordinary cleaning teams, and hope one day to receive that special tap on the shoulder from a Marigold-clad finger? Scope there for a gritty new soap opera. More than gritty.

It wasn’t my train, luckily: as usual at that time of the evening the train was crammed to bursting with people. Even the last carriage, that indescribable hellhole of unknown abomination, was by no means empty.