Disgressed

One of my colleagues was telling me earlier on how nice she thought it was to have some new rolling stock on their line at last. In particular, she said, having video cameras in carriages made her feel safer. Hm.

A few weeks ago, I got on a train at London Bridge which was fitted with cameras, and indeed had notices proudly announcing the fact. Just as the carriage doors were closing, a middle-aged sort of man, in a bit of a hurry, gave a small shove to a youth of fairly respectable appearance. Not violently, you understand, or with malice; it was more a matter of making a space rather than waiting for one, really. The sort of thing that happens about thirty times to everyone on a normal journey.

But the YOFRA was not inclined to see it that way. It seemed he detected an insulting tone in the shove, or the MASOM’s expression: at any rate, he shoved back, hard. I don’t know whether MASOM’s expression had been insulting to begin with, but there was no doubt that his lip was curling into a sneer now. He growled something curt, and shoved again.

I think all the thirty or so people crammed into the small available space with these two assumed that the whole thing was going to subside again. Years of watching David Attenborough have made us all aware that in Nature violent combat is rare: a show of aggression from both sides, a quick check on each other’s fighting status, and it’s all over. Unfortunately this turned out to be one of those difficult borderline cases. Both parties were confident that if it really came to it, they would be doing most of the beating, and the other person would be doing most of the being beaten. YOFRA grabbed MASOM and an awkward scuffle began. I could record the accompanying dialogue – I remember it fairly well – but it was rather lame. I suppose we’re not very well trained for these occasions. We all know what sort of thing to say when we pick up the phone, or when recognising an old friend: but deciding what to grunt at someone you’ve somehow got into a fight with is more difficult. Should you try to be frightening? Or laid back and contemptuous? Or should you just shout “Get off me!” in a tense, quavery voice at irregular intervals?

There was more than a hint of the playground about the whole thing, but it soon became clear that although neither side was really escalating the violence, they weren’t going to stop either, until they were stopped by some external intervention. In a minute, I thought, the train will pull into Waterloo East, and one of them will get off. That was when I noticed that the train hadn’t moved. It became clear that the railway staff on the platform were well aware of what was going on (the scuffle was right in front of the video camera, but the occasional loud slam against the closed doors would surely have attracted their attention in any case). They had decided that the train could not move while a fight was in progress aboard it: on the other hand, they could not open the doors either, since then they might get involved in the imbroglio. Regrettably, the passengers would have to be sacrificed in order to ensure the safety of the staff. We were going to be locked up in there until it was all over.

At length, a small lady somewhat older than either of the combatants managed to part them. I suppose they felt they could take notice of her without losing face, or maybe she reminded them of a dinner lady or something. After things had quietened down, apart from the odd exchange of insults through clenched teeth, the doors finally opened and a young man in uniform appeared.

“What’s going on then?” he asked, smiling broadly.

Very broadly. I doubt if there was another man half as pleased with himself anywhere on the railway network. Video cameras: for your safety and convenience, or at least, for the entertainment of platform staff. I don’t think I was the only person whose mind was momentarily crossed by the thought that if anyone deserved a really good smack in the mouth, it was him.

But I’m not a violent man, and I shouldn’t dream of acting on such primitive impulses. Well, yes, since you mention it, I suppose his antlers probably were a bit bigger than mine.

On this site from good old UCL, you can get two maps like these, showing the distribution of your surname between British counties. I wasn’t surprised to see that in 1881 one of the hot spots for “Hankins” was Northamptonshire – I was born in Peterborough myself; and since moving down here I’ve discovered that there have been Surrey Hankinses for a good while. But Herefordshire was a surprise. Moreover, while in general we’ve been spreading out (this is true for all the names I’ve looked at), the Herefordshire branch appears to have become more concentrated since 1881.

It’s gratifying to see that although we are mainly in the southern half of the country, we have also established a presence in Caithness to complement the one in Cornwall.

I think the most striking thing about these maps is that they show how many names were still quite narrowly concentrated in one part of the country in the nineteenth century. With some I’ve looked at – Katharine’s maiden name, “Finney”, for example – it seems quite plausible that there really was one original ancestor only two or three hundred years ago.

It’s been a bit of a bad-tempered week. I don’t generally regard my self as someone who shouts at people in public, but I’ve ended up offering some constructive feedback on a couple of occasions recently. There was the man who kept resting his back on my hand where I was hanging on to the rail in the train, and then pretended he didn’t speak English (oh, come on: he was pretending!) There was the man on the bike who rang his bell at me so that he could have undisputed use of the pavement.

More remarkably, I’ve had two occurrences of a phenomenon I’ve noticed a few times recently – the delayed horn-blast. I was standing at the zebra crossing near Carshalton station the other day, and there was a car sailing towards me, doing no more than thirty, but goodness, it would clearly have been an inconvenience to stop, so he sailed right on past my nose. The car behind, going about the same speed, decided to follow his example, assuming the driver actually noticed the crossing at all. A third car appeared.

Now you must accept my word for it that I was not pulling some juggernaut suicide bid. He had plenty of time to decelerate and stop. At most, I was gently reasserting the existence of the crossing. Anyway, I crossed the road in front of him. After I’d crossed and was on my way, he set off again, and then, ten yards down the road, he blew his horn. It can only have been at me, though drivers coming the other way must have been puzzled.

The second case occurred when I was walking Sarah to school. There is a place near us where the road narrows: it is just possible for two cars to pass in opposite directions, but only just. Vans or anything bigger, forget it. So naturally people just drive on the pavement. Some do it discreetly, putting a couple of wheels on the kerb when absolutely necessary and watching out for pedestrians: but many occupy the whole of the path automatically, as if by right. Often, as on this occasion, pedestrians are faced with what amounts to a traffic jam standing on the pavement. We were walking carefully along the foot-wide space remaining on this occasion when the traffic began to move again. I gave the car next to us, which was edging forward, a couple of slaps with the flat of my hand, merely to announce our presence, really. Of course, drivers are usually shocked to discover that there is in fact no force-field around their car, and that humble pedestrians can actually touch it. You could sense the confusion in this driver’s mind: they didn’t stop, though. As it happens, they were only able to move a foot or two, and we walked past. As we were about to disappear round the corner – a blast on the horn.

What was going through these people’s minds? The normal human reaction in these circumstances would of course be one of immediate blame-transference: it must be the fault of the mad fool who is risking people’s lives by walking on the pavement and using zebra crossings. I think what happened here was that the immediate circumstances were such that even the most creative of minds would find it difficult to devise a case for such a transfer. Even the most self-righteous driver finds it hard to blow his horn at a schoolgirl for walking on the pavement when he wants to drive there, or at a pedestrian who is on a zebra crossing. But the urge to vindicate oneself is so strong that as soon as the immediate circumstances changed, they needed to get their horn-blast in, even though by then it was irrelevant.

I have a feeling this delayed-reaction phenomenon is going to become a regular feature of dealing with motorists.