Disgressed

Something strange has happened at the Eat nearest to my office. I noticed before Easter that the place seemed to be completely packed full of people, so I have avoided it recently. But it is one of my regular haunts: the sandwiches are good (more chicken in the Thai chicken baguette would sometimes be appreciated, perhaps) and so are the crisps. So today I decided to brace myself and face the unusual crowd.

Once I got inside it became apparent that it wasn’t really any more crowded than before. The difference was that people were standing still instead of seething around restively. It wasn’t so much a crowd as – a queue. Somehow orderly queuing must have broken out around three weeks ago. Now before this happened, it was more or less chaotic. You grabbed your sandwiches from the shelves and fought your way to the counter. There would generally be one or two people waiting in front of each member of staff, but really it was more or less a free-for-all. Sometimes you would suffer the Post Office effect – you know, where everyone else seems to get served while there’s a permanent blockage in front of you: but then when you move over the blockage shifts, too. Occasionally a small hint of suppressed ill-feeling would be noticeable on the face of the old lady you had just nipped in front of. But by and large, it worked: you would be in and out within two to three minutes even at the busiest times.

Today, it was a different story. There was a single long queue, and when people reached the end they went to whichever member of staff was free next. That sounds eminently sensible, but there are two problems. First, the queue completely blocks the shelves of sandwiches. You have to keep saying “Excuse me!” (or the popular “Excuse me, please!”, a phrase which actually sounds less polite to me for some reason) and shove your way through bodily or dance around looking for a natural gap. Second, and more mysterious, everything has slowed down to half pace. One of the blokes behind the counter finishes serving someone: he pauses, looks up, and meets the eye of the next person in the queue. They smile and walk towards him.

“Hello!” he says.
They put their sandwiches on the counter and smile again.
“Take away?” he asks, redundantly.
“Yes.” they reply, patiently.
He picks up the baguette and looks at it searchingly.
“Lettuce and Mayo?”
“Thai Chicken.”
“Ah yes.”

And so it goes on. Instead of sandwiches and money flying in all directions, the gentle art of conversation is being inexpertly revived.

I don’t really understand why this is happening. Is it that the soporific period in the queue causes a change of attitude? Or is it some subtle feature of fluid dynamics, which dictates that an orderly movement actually achieves slower progress? Anyway, the result was that I spent getting on for twelve minutes in there today. Perhaps I’ve got the causality the wrong way round – perhaps they’ve just got new and slower staff, and the customers have begun forming a queue in order to pass the time while they’re waiting. I think I might be looking at Pret until order breaks down again.

I was fascinated to come across this collection of more than 6000 phonograph cylinders, all available to listen to in MP3 format (requires Quicktime).

It’s a different musical world we’re dealing with here; military marches, sentimental or pious songs, jaunty humour, ragtime and cakewalks. A search for “rock” brings up:

“Angels roll the rock away”
“Rock-a-bye your baby with a Dixie melody”
“Rock me to sleep, Mother” (2 versions)
“Rock of ages” (3 versions), and
“Sing rock-a-bye baby to me”.

The collection is dominated by Edison recordings, so alas I cannot revisit the cylinder of Florrie Ford singing “Antonio” which a teacher once memorably played on his phonograph for us at my school. There seem to be quite a few working phongraphs still about, but more surprisingly the latest high-tech model dates from 1998. This is the Archeophone, a French machine which plays old cylinders better and with less wear than the original machines,and has been used to digitise thousands of recordings.

The cylinder format, as a matter of fact, used to produce less wear than the early disc recordings (which were cheaper), largely because the needle was physically driven across the cylinder, while discs relied on the groove to pull the needle along. When Edison doubled the length of his recordings, customers were supplied with some additional mechanism to make the needle move at half the original speed (these days they’d force you to buy a completely new machine and every recording you already owned all over again in the new format). Of course, the speed of the needle on a disc also varied as it approached the centre, while cylinders went at a nice even speed.

Why is it then, that cylinders disappeared so comprehensively, leaving the disc and the tape, in various guises, to battle it out for supremacy as a recording medium? There are a number of technical issues, but really I think it comes down to two basic flaws. One is that you can only use one side of a cylinder. The other, probably the real killer, is that cylinders just don’t stack as well as flat discs. If only floppy cylinders had been possible – but it was difficult enough to make robust rigid ones.

There was one of those little dilemmas that crop up from time to time last Thursday morning. Rising from my seat at Clapham Junction, I was surprised to see that there was no-one waiting to get off at the door nearest to me. Instead everyone was attempting to get off via the door at the other end of the carriage. A bit strange, but presumably, as happens from time to time, the nearest door had failed to open.

Not so, gentle reader. In fact a young man, unshaven and somewhat smelly, was reclining against the door, evidently drunk or possibly otherwise rendered comatose. The problem was, he was actually leaning on the door: if you pressed the button and opened it, he would roll out, possibly onto the platform, with nothing more than a sharp crack of skull against concrete; but he might slip down into the gap between the train and the platform with disastrous results. The alternatives were speaking to him – not likely to have much effect; and attempting to physically rouse or move him – and quite apart from the risk of his taking it amiss, you really wouldn’t want to get physically engaged with someone who didn’t seem to have had a bath or a change of clothes any time recently.

What would you have done? Bolder, or, let’s face it, just nastier than my fellow travellers, I reached for the button; but before I got there he looked up and said, quite clearly:

“Clapham Junction? Thas where I’m supposed to be…”

He didn’t seem able to get up, or even crawl out, but he lifted himself just enough to avert the imminent risk of falling out. I stepped over him and headed for the Waterloo train.

It’s always a pain putting the clocks backwards or forwards, but in Sri Lanka the whole cosmic balance is at stake.

Originally, Sri Lanka put itself in the same time zone as India. This makes sense since India is Sri Lanka’s major trading partner; unfortunately the Indians had made a quirky choice: whereas time zones are typically an exact number of hours ahead of or behind GMT, India went for +5½ hours. This was apparently based on splitting the difference between the east and west of India: but the half-hour was an irritating anomaly: twenty years ago, Sri Lanka changed to the more mainstream +6 hours.

This has never been accepted by the rebel Tamils in the North, who carried on using Indian time. More surprisingly, the Buddhist authorities also strongly oppose the +6 regime, which they say moved Sri Lanka out of alignment with its proper time, and led to many misfortunes, including the tsunami. With that kind of opposition, (and the commercial convenience of being on the same time as India) it perhaps isn’t surprising that as of this month, all of Sri Lanka is back on +5½.

I don’t really understand the Buddhist angle. All time zones are to some extent arbitrary: if you wanted to avoid conflicts with nature altogether, you’d have to stick with ‘real’ time, which, since noon is defined by the sun, sweeps continuously around the world like sunlight, without sudden increments.

Arthur C. Clarke (still very much alive, since you ask), resident in Sri Lanka for many years, is implacably opposed to the reversion, finding the extra half hour a perpetual annoyance when trying to work out the time elsewhere in the world, and dismissing the religious objections as nonsense.

The picture, incidentally, is of the excellent clock tower in Colombo: almost certainly the only city clock tower which also functioned as a lighthouse (no, really). Apparently it also shows four different times on its four faces – which must be handy in the circumstances.