Disgressed

Somehow my present-buying never runs to plan. Partly, admittedly, that’s because there never is a plan, really. In June or July I often resolve that I will start the process early, but somehow the moment never quite seems to come. A couple of times I have tried the “here and now” strategy. This involves going to a large department store: you go in, take a deep breath (best to get past the predatory ladies spraying perfume everywhere first) and say to yourself: I am not leaving this shop until I have bought all my Christmas presents. I don’t care any more whether they are good or appropriate presents: I don’t care whether people like them: I am prepared to give everyone a leather tobacco pouch if that is what it takes to get the job done here and now.

The theory’s fine, but it doesn’t work. The last time I tried that strategy I spent four hours in the Army and Navy (I know it hasn’t been the Army and Navy for years, but I still think of it that way) and when I came out I had one item – which was for me. Somehow when you go in on this kind of mission, everything is the shop turns to ashes. Look, you think, I know I was prepared to settle for tobacco pouches, but they only have plastic Hello Kitty ones. Can I buy everybody bath towels? If I somehow make it a sort of jokey thing? But today the bath towels all start at £75.

Of course, nowadays you can do the whole thing on the Internet. I’m not leaving Amazon until I’ve got everything, even if I have to give everyone a copy of The Rhineland Gazetteer. That would be fine, once again, if I had started the process nice and early: but it turns out the Gazetteer is normally delivered in six to eight weeks. It’s not just obscure German reference works, either: it took them more than six weeks (this is true, I swear) to decide they were ‘unable to source’ Ice Age 2: The Meltdown: Gameboy Advance, which was stacked knee-high in the shop down the road.
But I am optimistic that technology can provide the answer. A large proportion of the presents I have in mind this year are in fact digital: CDs, DVDs, PC software, PS2 games – and why not e-books, too? Now the thing about a digital item is that, spooky as it may seem, all you’re actually giving people is a very large number. All there is on that disk, or whatever, is a stream of ones and zeros. You see the way my mind’s working?

“What d’you get me then?”

“Here: 1.4403289298971337735185171070103e + 42″

“+42 ? What is it?”

“Oh, you’ll have to unwrap it! I mean, you know, turn it into binary and apply the appropriate hardware!”

“Mmh. Definitely 1.4403289298971337735185171070103e ?”

“Plus 42. Don’t forget the 42. What are you looking like that for?”

” I don’t know – it just sounds sort of German, somehow.”

Don’t worry, though, gentle reader – I’ve got something for you and it is not a Gazetteer. It’s a computer! Yay! Yay? See that near-illegible number up there on the left? If you turn it into binary, you’ll find (courtesy of Roger Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind) you actually have a real, working, Universal Turing Machine! As Turing himself proved, it can do anything that any other computer can do (allowing for limitations of speed, capacity, and the absence of peripherals, of course).

That’s OK. Not at all. Merry Christmas!

It isn’t the poor erratic service… Wait a minute, what am I saying? Of course it’s the poor erratic service on the trains that gets you: but what makes it worse is the poor communication: the vacuous explanations, the absence of useful information, or indeed the complete silence.

Last weekend I was invited to speak to the London Philosophy Meetup group (a nice bunch of people, by the way). I took the step, unusual for me, of checking online what the train times were and set off in good time. As I got near the station, a lady approached and asked me where the buses went from.

“Well,” I said, perhaps a shade patronisingly, “From the bus stop. Down there on the main road.”

“Oh – the same place as the normal buses?”

Normal buses? A few more steps and my fears were confirmed: a scruffy piece of paper on the station door announced that as a result of work on the track there were no trains today. None at all. No indeed. But there would be replacement buses which would almost certainly get me to another station somewhere within hours. You can imagine the hopeless quality of the bus queue. In the end I got a lift to the nearest tube station, and I only arrived in time because I had instinctively allowed about an hour’s margin for error.

The next day Blackfriars was in confusion. Here optimism is the enemy: when a train fails, they don’t say so. They say it’s going to be five minutes late. Then about two minutes before the new departure time, they decide it’s going to be another ten minutes after all. It’s often half an hour before they concede that the train is, in fact, cancelled: half an hour in which you could have been getting somewhere on another line. This time, however, a train to Wimbledon via Sutton arrived no more than forty minutes after its due time. They just failed to mention that it wasn’t stopping anywhere else. Shooting right through your own station at full speed is curiously dispiriting.

One thing that particularly tries the patience is the way they use the monitors, intended for the latest information about the trains, for every kind of banal message. At this time of heightened security, please keep your bags with you. You may want to turn your personal stereo down. The platforms may be slippery because they have been made wet by the rain.

“Glad they cleared that one up,” a colleague remarked to me, “Otherwise I’d have been left wondering where all this bloody water on the ground had come from.”

All this stuff could be on posters if they really think it’s worth saying: the monitors are for information which is updated minute by minute, you idiots! The result is that you arrive at the foot of the escalator at Blackfriars: is the train on time, in which case you need to run up the steps; or delayed, in which case you can take your time: or cancelled, in which case you can turn with a low moan of pain and head for a different station altogether? No telling,because the monitor thoughtfully provided at the foot of the escalator is merely saying “A Merry Christmas to all our customers”. You could wait to see whether it flips over to train times, but then you might have wasted the vital two minutes in which you just had chance to actually catch the train. So you just have to run anyway.

In fairness, I think the drivers have become more articulate in recent years. Many of them used to suffer from a strange need to state the subject of their message in a separate sentence. They couldn’t say “The 6.30 to Reading is delayed because someone fell under it.”, they would have to say “The 6.30 to Reading. This train is being delayed. This is due to an earlier person-under-train incident.” Nowadays they are sometimes quite voluble. I was in a train at Streatham once when the driver had a protracted argument with the man in the signal box about where the train was going.

“Sorry for the further delay, ladies and gentlemen. Now he’s telling me that x, but I told him that y. I think I’m going have to refer this one. Anyway, I’ll let you know how we’re getting on and hopefully we’ll be on our way soon.”

“Just start the bloody train!” exclaimed a pin-striped man on my left.

“No – not if they’re going to make him go via Tooting!” responded a hatchet-faced lady on the other side.

Myself, I could do without the explanations of why a train hasn’t come, or gone, famously absurd and empty as they are (Michael Frayn once remarked on an announcement that a train was cancelled owing to a lack of rolling stock: I wish, he said, I could explain my absence by saying it’s due to a lack of Frayn in the office area). All I really need to know is: is it really coming, and when?