Disgressed

“Move down!” The words are enough to make me grind my teeth, but yesterday I heard them dismissed with unusual dignity and cogency.

If you’re not a regular on London commuter trains, you won’t really know what I’m on about. Trains in the rush hour invariably get packed, and the people at the back of the queue, late arrivals, and all the hopeful people at stations down the line are faced with an immovable, impenetrable wall of bodies blocking the doors. Quite often, however, a small amount of space has been left between the seats in the middle of the carriage, and people rap on the windows and shout at the travellers inside to fill any remaining gaps and generally pack in even tighter so that more can squeeze on. Once or twice I have heard this done politely, but usually the tone is angry, indignant, and aggressive to a quite surprising degree.

I’m sure these people don’t normally bellow at their fellow human beings like this: I suspect that the officious tone has been picked up by imitation from railway staff, who take the view that it’s the customer’s selfish insistence on breathing that creates the problem, not the short, inadequate trains. There used to be a little red-faced bloke on Clapham Junction who enjoyed howling at the passengers to move down so much that he rarely waited for the train doors to open, or indeed, for the train to stop moving before he started.

It’s ‘move down’ that’s the give-away, I think. We used to move up: but then, in one of those mysterious shifts (probably about the same time the railway stations became train stations) the same activity became moving down. I’m fairly sure this started with staff and was then adopted by the more Quisling-like of the commuters.

Sadly, it seems to be a rule that the better-dressed the commuter, and the posher the accent, the more rabidly offensive is the tone in which the demands for downward progress are expressed. Cockneys, I’ve observed, usually display considerable reserves of patience and courtesy (I remember when the new Tesco opened at Bromley-by-Bow, being impressed by the way people moved their trolleys out of the way, formed orderly queues, exchanged cheerful remarks, and so on – a far higher standard of behaviour than I’ve ever witnessed in supermarkets elsewhere in London. Mind you, that Tesco was a real asset – people complain about Tesco, but when that shop opened, it made a difference to my life which was roughly on a par with getting central heating or television – neither of which I had at the time…. er… where was I?). Yesterday it was a stout gentleman who I took to be an East Ender who declined to squeeze up against the Somali lady and scrofulous youth standing next to him.

“Move down!” shouted a stock-brokerish character, “There’s space there – look!”

“Yeah,” said the stout man wearily, “Physically, yeah, I could move. It’s physically possible. But there’s standards, en’t there? If I was to sit on this young lady’s knee, which’d be more pleasant for me than her, if we were all to do that, if we got on the luggage rack, we could probably get twice as many people in. But we don’t do that, do we? There’s a limit. Your limit may be different to mine, but that’s up to you. Not me.”

The stock-broker made an exasperated noise, but the tone of his voice lost some of the commandant note.

“Well,” he said, ” I think that’s extremely selfish. There are other people here who have to get home tonight, you know.”

“Yeah, but not at any price. You have to recognise some time that the train is full. Otherwise, they’ll be riding on the bloody roof.”

Well said, that man.

I think you would have to have had a heart of stone not to feel for our neglected soldiers over the rescue of Norman Kember, the peace activist kidnapped in Iraq. General Sir Mike Jackson, the head of the British Army, put the unhappiness of the military into words, telling Channel 4 News he was “saddened that there doesn’t seem to have been a note of gratitude for the soldiers who risked their lives to save those lives”.

His words were endorsed by Major Bristleigh-Tache, currently serving in the Basra area. “I’m glad Jacko spoke out on this one,” he said, stiffly, “A lot of the boys have been a bit quiet and tight-lipped lately. I mean, how much does a bunch of flowers cost, for God’s sake? Or a notelet? I believe Terry Waite used to have lovely little notelets, with a panoramic view of Blackheath, and he had a very sensitive way of finding the mot juste, you know. I’m afraid, if we’re frank, we’re just not dealing with a man of quite the same stamp in Professor Kember’s case, are we? It’s the NCOs I feel sorry for – you know how a smile or a word means so much to them.”

Sergeant-Major Grout, on patrol in the “killing field” agreed. “It’s a bloody shame,” he said, ” It’s the men I feel sorry for. Sometimes I just have to tell them to go back to barracks, get in their bunks, and have a good old blub. It’s the old story, I suppose: always the civilian side that lets you down. At times like this we just feel like giving the whole thing up and going home. How would Professor bloody so-called Kember feel then – eh?”

I was looking through that august periodical, the Hexham Courant (one of the nice things about this internet business is that you can read other people’s newspapers, without looking over their shoulders and then having them them rustle it in an annoyed way when they notice you… where was I?) , and was intrigued to find that a new carving had been discovered on Hadrian’s wall. The same discovery was reported by the BBC. I’m surprised that something new can still be found on such a well-known site, but what interested me particularly was that the carving had been identified as Cocidius, a Roman war god local to what is now the North of England. The whole idea of a kind of Geordie Roman war god keeping out the Scots was intriguing. I think, in fact, that these local gods were far more common than I realised. When you think of Roman gods, you tend to think of the Olympians, with a few extra lares and penates and so on: but it looks as if typical religious practice in the Roman Empire was actually a much more local matter.

Cocidius (or Cocky Dick, as I can’t help thinking of him) was certainly well established along Hadrian’s wall. It turns out that at Bewcastle, over in Cumbria, there were so many images of him the place was probably known as the Fanum Cocidi, or shrine of Cocidius, a place which appears in the Ravenna Cosmology (a list of every town in the Empire). There are a couple of images of him, appropriately enough, on the modern army’s training estate in Northumberland.

The Romans liked to identify local gods with their own, and they equated Cocidius with Silvanus; that, however, makes him a hunting, forest-dwelling god, not quite like the more belligerent original. His name might or might not be to do with a Celtic word for red.

Some people seem to think he’s female: it would be as well to know if you were planning to take up the idea of “Cocidius” as a name for your baby…

Who do you think this is? He’s holding a palette and brushes, and he has a floppy silk thing tied loosely round his neck, so he’s clearly an artist. Luckily, he has his name on the plinth: Cuneo. Terence Cuneo, who died ten years ago, had a nice line in railway locomotives and other realistic subjects. He once painted Waterloo, in fact, so it may be appropriate that his massive statue sits there, well positioned to catch the eye of sneery French people coming off the Eurostar, and show them what a proper, British painter looks like.

It wasn’t all flatly documentary pictures of trains, I’m afraid: Cuneo also went in for pictures of mice in top hats. His career seems to have been given a boost by his painting the Queen early on; and that is no doubt part of the reason why the Princess Royal graciously agreed to unveil the statue.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m sure Cuneo was a charming man. Just because he was low-brow and artistically unambitious, and no better as a painter than many contemporary commercial artists who laboured in relative obscurity, doesn’t mean I begrudge him a big statue. At least it replaced the execrable Dali pastiche which stood there before. It’s just that so far as I know, this is the biggest statue of an artist anywhere in London (offhand I can only think of one other). If Terence Cuneo has a statue ten feet high, then somebody like Tenniel deserves an Ozymandias-sized one. When we get to Turner and Constable, we’re talking about colossi on a scale to put the Angel of the North into the shade.

An apology to the gentleman I gave directions to yesterday evening. I don’t suppose you’ll ever see this, and I’m not sure your English would be good enough for you to read it anyway. But I’m really sorry.

He and his family were standing around in that uffish way that tourists have when they don’t quite know where they’re going. As I came nearer he made a visible effort to summon up his linguistic resources and caught my eye.

“Excuse me,” he said, “Can you tell me… this is Westminster… I want to go… Trafalgar Square?”

As it happens, I am a really bad person to ask directions from. I cannot remember street names and my sense of direction is variable. I know how to go to places, but articulating the route clearly is another thing altogether. I’ve given some terrible directions to tourists in the past. I once got a family to turn round and go back in the opposite direction when five paces further would have revealed the British Museum just round the corner. An elderly Australian gentleman was once so amused when I took out an A to Z (“You live here yourself, but you still have to carry a map?”) that I decided I could do without it and sent him off towards Elephant and Castle instead of the Imperial War Museum. On second thoughts, I don’t regret that one so much.

“I can go… the train?” asked the tourist.

“Oh, well yes”, I replied, ” There’s no Trafalgar Square station as such these days, but you could take a District Line train to Embankment, change to the Northern Line, and go north to Charing Cross. But as a matter of fact it’s much quicker to walk – about five minutes straight up Whitehall…”

His eyes filled with despair, and I hurried off. Of course, my advice was quite accurate for once – the problem was, we were standing on the inner side of the barriers at Westminster tube station at the time.

Sorry.

If there’s one journey that ought to be final, it’s the one where they nail you into a box first. But for some of the citizens of Guanajuato burial has been just a temporary interlude. Grave space in that town is rented out, and if your family stops paying, up you come again. I don’t know what they do with most of the bodies, but a small proportion become mummified (‘dessicated’ might be more the word, and in a few cases just plain ‘decayed’) and these are moved to the town’s chief attraction, the Mummy Museum – there’s a pictorial tour (first page requires Windows Media Player, but you can skip it). One woman appears to have been buried alive in true Edgar Allen Poe style.

Actually sources differ as to whether this process still goes on: according to some the bizarre law which prescribed this treatment was repealed in 1958: others suggest that the museum has nevertheless made some further additions to its renowned collection of dead babies in relatively recent times.

The Guanajuato museum remained relatively obscure until 1970, when it played a starring role in the film Santo Versus the Mummies of Guanajuato, one of the series of popular Mexican zombie wrestling musicals starring Rodolfo Guzmán Huerta. In the film, wrestling skill proved unexpectedly powerless against zombies, who had to be finished off with special fire guns. The museum’s reputation was consolidated by its appearance in Ray Bradbury’s story The Next in Line. With all this attention, I don’t know how I managed to avoid hearing of the place until now.

The strange thing (alright, one of the many strange things about it) is that while an appearance in the Guanajuato museum is somewhat humiliating, a fate which people would pay to save their forebears from, people in Palermo were willing, until the 1920s, to pay to get into a rather similar enterprise, the Capuchin catacombs, which reliably induce mummification in corpses stored there and are open for tourists to visit. Many rich and successful people, Palermitans and others, made a point of being added to the permanent collection here – apparently Velasquez is in there somewhere.

I suppose the Palermo catacombs were aided by the Christian belief that resurrection at the day of Judgement would be a physical affair, involving the re-animation of one’s actual corpse – a belief which helped make cremation very rare until the nineteenth century, when space to bury people began to get scarce. The whole thing reminds me of Archy the cockroach’s conversation with an Egyptian mummy: what have you spent the thousands of years since your funeral thinking about, he asks. BEER, the dessicated king replies. When I’m finally dead, I want the process of dissolution to follow pretty promptly, and if the exhibits in Guanajuato and Palermo could speak, I think they would now say the same. Bring on the flame guns, Santo!