Disgressed

Snow at last. I say ‘at last’, but actually, the timing is not particularly unusual: we’re conditioned to expect snow around Christmas, but in most years I can remember it has come in January and/or February.  Elizabeth, however, and to a lesser extent Sarah, have been waiting hopefully for some time. Partly this is just the natural excitement and the theoretical prospect of snowballs and snowmen, but they also have a deeply-held conviction, strongly reinforced by the standard clichés of children’s television, that if it snows we may be trapped in the house, or at the very least the schools are likely to close. At Elizabeth’s school they had a minor power cut in one section of the school on Tuesday and this created a strong presumption among the pupils that school would be cancelled, followed by utter despondency when it wasn’t. According to Elizabeth feeling reached such a pitch that one of the less high-powered pupils let out an involuntary groan in the middle of a maths lesson and exclaimed:

“You’ve got to let us go home, Sir!”

That may not have been a particularly well thought through move, but in a way you know, I think that pupil spoke for the nation. This is what people often miss when they ask why Britain gets so badly disrupted by trivial weather problems. You know the sort of thing: in Norway, they have snowploughs out within five minutes; in Germany the trains run regardless of falling leaves; in America they laugh at black ice. Why oh why should a mere 25mm of snow, evaporating altogether within a few hours, lead to significant disruption of the British travel system.

Because we want it to.

Alright, not everybody, and no-one wants to spend hours waiting for a train, especially if it’s the one taking them home. But a day off – or make it a week? Most of us are secretly hoping it might happen, and the staff of the railways and other transport services feel much the same. That’s why they do their best to extend the opportunities for weather-related disruption. No snow? But there are leaves on the line, eh? Now for one thing I suspect the leaves are only there because the railways no longer look after their embankments in a way that would have been mandatory in the nineteenth century (What, sir, you allow trees to grow by the line? Will they not catch fire from the sparks? Send a dozen labourers to chop them down – it will only cost sixpence, after all!). For another, we all know that if a train runs over a penny left on the track it gets turned into a flat, hot, smear of copper. What’s going to happen to a wet leaf?

Yeah, but you know, they might build up and the train might sort of slip, and after all this is health and safety we’re talking about here? Can you put a price on human life? (And if the trains are cancelled we can pop back home to change our clothes and head down the pub.)

I note also the friendly pretext by which disruption on one line can be extended to the others. OK, there’s nothing even slightly wrong with your line. But the driver and other vital staff can’t get in because their trains are disrupted.

They do their best, but even the railways need something to work with. As I look out of the window I see a warmish dryish day. There isn’t even the possibility that drivers might suffer impaired vision because of the bright sun (watch out for this excuse, currently undergoing secret trials near Carlisle).

Come on. A nice big blizzard overnight?

On the trains, the year has been slow getting into gear for some reason, though I think the wind-generated chaos yesterday puts the seal on a return to normal (my train was about 70 minutes late, though I’m glad to say I didn’t wait 70 minutes for it, and did not need to attempt the tube or join the despairing people sitting hopelessly on totally immobile buses).

But I knew things were getting back to normal last week when I saw an unusual version of the crossover manoevre being attempted. This is something that happens as people are boarding a train, especially when people are particularly keen to get on first, as happens at stations like Clapham Junction where there are often just one or two seats left vacant by people getting off. Actually, most people are always keen to get on first, but the more thoughtful among the commuting community know that if you’re in a crowd getting on to an empty train at a terminus, you don’t actually want to be first. Being first gives you your choice of seat, but it means you have no control over who sits next to you – and trust me, that’s far more important.

Anyway, it is an unspoken convention in these circumstances that the people nearest the door on either side get in first, followed by a fairly orderly, pseudo-queue progression of those further away. You may have been waiting half an hour, but if someone who only turned up a moment ago ends up by the door, they have the right to go first. This is understood.

Now you would think that the person on the left would turn left on entering, and the person on the right turn right, but more normally they don’t. This is because they are seeking out the few vacant seats: they can usually see one on the opposite side, but they can’t see round the corner to spot whether there’s one on their own side. Rather than risk walking into a section of the carriage where there are no seats, they typically opt to go across diagonally to the one they can see. Since the person on the other side is going through the same experience, the people from left and right typically cross over as they enter (pointlessly, of course, but what are you going to do?).

Now sometimes it happens that one of the two is baulked momentarily by the other, or perhaps they catch a glimpse of a perfect seat on their own side and suffer a moment of indecision. Whatever the reason, when someone hesitates the person coming up behind sees a gap and may attempt, as it were, to overtake them on the inside. This rarely works, because the person in front usually has time to shove back into the lead – but you often see it attempted when the pressure is on.

Last week, that was exactly how it happened. A large sporty-looking man with a grey moustache crossed over one way and bagged a seat; a young man with small glasses which somehow made him look a bit like a disguised SS officer started to cross the other way and paused. As he did so, a young lady dressed like a minor guest at a June wedding reception stepped smartly up and started to overtake him.

Some residual gentlemanly instinct, or possibly honest fear, prevented the SS officer from shoving his elbow in front of her, but he was clearly unhappy.
“Hey!” he said, in a slightly effeminate voice with a trace of a Welsh accent. The wedding guest raised an eyebrow and screwed her mouth up slightly.
“What?” she demanded.
Yeah, what? You could see the SS man, taken by surprise. had no answer. He knew she was in the wrong. We all knew she was in the wrong. But how could he explain what she had done that was wrong? If you’ve borne with me through all the explanation above (and thank you, by the way), you’ll see why that wasn’t easy. He could give up on the details, and just say something like ‘you cut in on me’, but let’s be honest, in the context of a mob of commuters that’s going to sound a bit wimpish and whiny.

There was an awkward silence for a couple of seconds: then he just sort of sighed, and she went and sat down in the last free seat.

Sorting through the emails which had accumulated over Christmas, I found one from Lawrence Toms urging me to vote for Sheep Poo Paper in Yahoo’s Best Finds of 2006 poll. I’m afraid I was too late to do so, but I see that even without my help, the Poo people ( www.creativepaperwales.co.uk ) managed to win the ethical category.

The business, you realise, is not the supply of toilet consumables to the ovine population: it’s a paper-making business and one of their most popular lines is quite literally made from sheep poo. Grass is hard to digest, and although sheep are pretty good at it, it seems there are enough long cellulose fibres remaining in that which they leave behind them to provide suitable raw material for paper. It’s an extremely green process because it produces paper without the need to cut down any trees, and produces as a by-product a splendid liquid feritiliser. The company appears anxious to contact anyone who would like to take more of this fertiliser away (anyone?).

It sounds splendid, although I must say that if they have large vats of sheep poo continually boiling down to half their original volume, I don’t think I should like to live down-wind of them. They emphasise that the poo is nice and fresh, which obviously helps a great deal.

They like their product so much, I think they may have missed the main marketing angle. Wouldn’t there be something appealing about writing off indignantly to the local authorities about something, and concluding your letter ‘PS – this is written on re-cycled sheep excreta’? Better yet if you could somehow manage ‘The self-addressed envelope you have just sealed (by licking, as I fervently hope) was made from boiled sheep droppings; the glue was made using some very nasty parts of dead goats’.

As a bit of a bureaucrat myself, I can imagine the letter you could never send in the opposite direction: ‘Sir, your letter of the 22nd did not appear to be written on paper confected from the cathartic expulsions of the equine digestive system. However, I must tell you that in my eyes, and indeed my nostrils, it might as well have been.’

Both of them, in fact. You know you’ve had a good Christmas when you sink into your armchair and a loud snapping sound is followed by a slightly uncomfortable sinking feeling. On turning the chair over, I discovered the end of a zig-zag spring protruding where none should protrude. It turned out that two springs were broken.

The old suite has served us well, really, and if its age is beginning to show you can’t really complain. But having recently lashed out on a new carpet and a new desk (bespoke – how posh is that, eh?), we should like to hang on just a little longer before replacing it.

“I can probably bodge that up temporarily somehow.” I declared confidently. I have some form in the furniture business. Many years ago when I had only my own tastes in interior decor to consider I took an old bed apart and reassembled it as a chair. No ordinary chair, I may say: it was sort of triangular with a long plank up the back, painted black with brass fittings, and not especially comfortable to sit on. It looked like the throne for a futuristic school production of King Lear circa 1974, and it sat there dominating the flat and deterring potential girlfriends for a couple of years or so. I think it’s still at the back of the shed in disassembled form.

Anyway, a couple of springs? No problem. I had a secret weapon, too: wire coathangers. They’re really great, you know: you undo the twisty bit just below the hook and then you have a length of slightly bent wire which is easy enough to bend and snap with a pair of pliers, but robust enough to be some actual use in binding things together, holding them up, or whatever. I’ve used them to make temporary light fittings, toilet roll holders, and many other useful objects.

In no time I had fashioned a small link which would connect the two sections of broken spring together fairly securely. A certain amount of insulating tape was also required to ensure that the links didn’t slip off sideways – but that shouldn’t require great strength or anything.

It worked fine. For about 24 hours. Then, as I sat down there was another thunk and the same slightly lowered feeling. Another look through the large hole in the dust cover underneath the chair revealed that my repair work was essentially sound, but that the spring had found an unexpected way of slipping apart – easily fixed by some further work.

It was on the third day that Katharine began to express doubts.

“Perhaps we’ll just have to go to those upholstery people in Wallington we used before?” she suggested, “They were pretty good, actually, weren’t they?”

So I was forced to fall back on the power of the Internet. You can get all sorts of stuff easily these days that would have required hours with the phone book and a long journey to a small shop in a run-down area of a town you’d never visited before in the old days. Accordingly, I rapidly found The Upholstery Shop which sells zigzag springs online in a variety of sizes (one site I looked at only offered big springs which you were supposed to cut down with a hacksaw – ha! What kind of hopeless makeshift is that?).

Moreover, the site has a nicely reassuring tone, which was helpful so far as Katharine was concerned. You can easily replace your broken springs with these, it said. Even if you’re a cack-handed moron, it implied. If I had left it alone with Katharine, I suspected it would have leant in close and whispered:

“Between ourselves, Madam, last time your husband looked in the bottom of that chair the spring came loose again and sent the jagged broken end straight at his eye. He’s a good, fast flincher, obviously, but we really think as a matter of safety you ought to get some unbroken springs…”

I’m sitting pretty again (alright, not pretty exactly, but perhaps we can say significantly less unattractively than previously).