The Broken Tube and the Kindness of Strangers

There is a saying --- I think it's Finnish or Icelandic, which probably means it's neither --- "Keen is the eye of the visitor." So I'm seeing more of London right now than I will once I've settled in more.

One of the things I'm seeing is an underground system that's always under some strain. From my previous trips to London, I remember seeing the whiteboards set up at various stations announcing the closure of one line or another, but I think I was actually inconvenienced only once. Yesterday, though, tube troubles were a theme of my day. The other chief theme was the kindness of strangers.

I managed to get a few hours of sleep on the plane, and woke up to blue skies and a city gleaming in the early orange light. "That's a good reason to book this schedule," said our seat mate. "That view of London in the morning."

We left two of our bags at the Excess Baggage office and set off with three bags apiece to get the keys to our flat. I had a small wheeled bag full of books, my biggest bag --- a little over thirty kilos --- and my laptop case strapped to the big bag. Holly carried her backpack and two rolling suitcases. We weren't just burdened. We were exhausted. We'd been giving up sleep in favor of hours devoted to putting our things into storage, cleaning the house, and packing. On the plane, Holly hadn't slept at all.

We planned to ride the Piccadilly line to Green Park and from there take the Jubilee to the property manager's office. A few stops short of Green Park, the train driver announced that an unattended bag had been left in the Green Park station. The station had been evacuated and was closed to trains until the security issue was resolved. As Holly opened the tube map to figure out an alternate route, I suggested that we just ride the Bakerloo to Queen's Park. She could leave me at the flat to wait with the bags, and she could go unburdened to get the keys.

I will pause here to note that the Toronto subway system makes excellent use of escalators or lifts, which are an excellent help to riders who are infirm or are lugging thirty kilo bags across the city. In London, riders with thirty-kilo bags are left to struggle on their own, or to rely upon the kindness of Londoners. Fortunately, the kindness of Londoners is in abundant supply. As I started up a long stairway in the Piccadilly Circus station, alternately moving the sixteen- and thirty-kilo bags one step at a time, a young man behind me said, "Need a hand with that, mate?" He took the lower end of the heavier bag, and we fairly ran up the steps with it. Cheers, mate! The same thing happened at the Queen's Park station when we arrived there. I struggled. A stranger stopped to help carry the heavier bag.

A walk through Queen’s Park left me sitting alone on the front steps of the flat, surrounded by luggage, watching a team of tree surgeons remove a tree from a neighbors yard. As they finished up, one of these young men nodded to me. "Throw you out, did she?"

"Not that I don't deserve it," I told him.

When Holly returned, it was finally her chance to get some rest. I set out at noon to retrieve the two remaining bags. I expected the journey to take a while. The Heathrow trains run only to Hatton Cross because of construction, and free bus service provides the final link to the airport. This slows things down, but to a reasonable degree. On the way back, however, the train from Hatton Cross halted before Boston Manor, proceeded very slowly out of that station, then stopped again. And stayed stopped. Then proceeded to the next station, then stopped. Slow progress to one more station. Then the driver announced that there was a problem with a train in the Acton Town station. That problem would soon be resolved, but further up the line, there were signal problems at Holborn. The Piccadilly line was to be closed, and trains already running would go only as far as Hyde Park, under severe delays. We were strongly advised to transfer to the District line.

I was again hauling heavy bags. Twenty and thirty kilos. The burden of the intelligentsia: When we pare our household down to the bare minimum, the bare minimum includes a lot of books --- books that I am teaching from, books for researching my novel, books for Holly's research and teaching. And Holly's copy of the latest Harry Potter.

The transfer to the district line was easier than I feared. I just had to wheel my bags across the platform. But at Earl's Court, transferring to the northern branch of the district line, pulling the heavier bag into the train proved too great a strain for the handle. It broke.

My transfer at Paddington involved a lot of walking. The corridors in that station are narrow, and there are barriers that act like median barriers on the highway, keeping the pedestrian flow to one side. With two suitcases behind me, I was like a wide load on a mountain road. There was no getting around me, and I was slow. Thanks to the broken handle, I had to stoop a little to roll the heavier bag, and the bag hit my heels with every short step. Whenever there was a break in the barrier, I paused like a good truck driver to let the faster traffic zip by, except that the rush-hour flow was steady. Every time I started up again, I was blocking someone. Blessedly, I reached the end of this passage to find...escalators!

At Queen's Park, I faced stairs again. A man with a Chinese accent said, "I am helping you," as he took hold of the heavier bag.

From Queen's Park station, I started my slow trek with the ow! bigger bag ouch! hitting my ow! right heel with damn! every step. Half a block to a side street. Up a long residential street. Half a block to the park entrance. Through the park gate. A young woman talking to a boy on a bicycle looked my way. She picked up her skateboard and said, "Can I help you?"

Janine is Australian, a nanny, and a paragon of helpfulness. "Well, what's going to cost me but five minutes of my time?" she said. She walked the lighter suitcase across the park for me, as her young charge followed us with the skateboard and bicycle. When she discovered that she had actually left me with the more difficult burden, she offered to swap. I resisted, then relented. Janine and Sam brought me all the way to my front gate. It was six o'clock. It had taken exactly six hours to collect two suitcases.

A cab would have been horrendously expensive. Right now, especially since I am earning weak dollars and spending strong pounds, I have more time than money. But I might have to re-do that calculus. Or I might take (duh) the train service from Heathrow to Paddington station. I opted for the subway only because it was more familiar and I already had my Oyster card.

Odds and Ends

As I write down the prices of things, I realize that I don't know how to write the symbol for pounds. An L with a line through it? Two lines?

Every time I have been to London before, I have been a hazard to myself at pedestrian crossings. Even when I remember to look both ways, I'm confused by where turning traffic might be coming from. I don't recognize a car that wants to turn into the lane where I am about to step. For once I will be in London long enough to re-train by brain about where to look for traffic. Meanwhile, I am very crosswalk compliant. Londoners may be crossing against the light, but I'm not going to step into the street until the green walking man lights up.

This traffic problem gives me added appreciation for Tom Morikawa's driving feat day-before-yesterday. Tom is renting our house in Eugene while we are here, and with that comes the use of our car. It has been fourteen years since Tom has driven a manual transmission. Like the Brits, the Japanese drive on the left. So when I took Tom out for some driving practice, he was re-learning how to drive a manual transmission, getting instruction on how to do so in a foreign language, driving on the "wrong" side of the road...all while being jet-lagged.

Sitting across from me on the Heathrow train were a man my age and his two daughters. They looked European but were speaking a language I could not place at all. One of the girls played music on her cell phone, song after song that sounded like Arab pop, but wasn't in Arabic. So they were Muslims, probably.

Finally I asked and offered my guess. "Bosnian?" (But I'd expect to recognize a few words in Bosnian.)

"Albanian," the older daughter told me.

Ah. My guess was at least in the right part of the map, but as far as linguistic lineage goes, well, I have no idea what other languages Albanian is related to.

Finally, two observations from packing up our household for storage. Observation one is that we own too much stuff. I've been trying for years to trim my possessions, but even so, there is just too much. We took carloads of things to donate to Goodwill. We filled our trash and recycling bins, and I drove one trunkful of things to the dump. But we still own too much of the sort of thing that might come in handy one day, or books that I might eventually have a use for, or extra shoelaces acquired at an excellent price. Here in London, we have the opposite: nothing in the kitchen yet beyond the installed appliances and an empty bottle for drinking water from the tap. No sheets for the bed. No pillows. No towels. Everything to build up from scratch. As much as we need things, packing up our worldly wealth in Eugene makes me reluctant to buy here. I did buy a cat litter pan today. It is European sized. We hope our American cats will adjust to the European standard of smaller sizes. (I have known cats who reasoned, "All of my feet are in the litter box, therefore it is safe to empty my bladder." This logic did not always prove to be reliable.)

The other observation is about travel I have made for meeting people in my field. I come home from conferences with my pockets full of business cards, but I also come home to writing deadlines, so the cards are set aside somewhere, and I may not see them again until I am excavating my office for a move or because the mess has finally become intolerable. By then, I have forgotten what I talked about with these people, or I just don't have the time to follow up. I'm beginning to think that travel I undertake for business may not do much as much good as would staying home and writing an extra chapter or story in that time. Kris Rusch and Dean Smith don't like taking time from their writing for publicity. The best publicity for their writing, they like to say, is more writing. I'm beginning to come around to seeing things this way myself.