Forget Brexit. If you want some depressing public opinion percentages, look no further than a survey published on Tuesday asking commuters if they’d consider ditching their cars for public transport: 97% said no. Almost as many said they wouldn’t switch even if such transport was free. Sample quote: “I tried taking the bus, but when it’s raining, you have to share with damp, smelly people, and that’s my idea of hell. Car for me, all the way.” Hell, it seems, is other people who think other people are hell.
As one of those folk who tends to get damp in the rain yet still inflicts themselves on others, I find such logic not just irresponsible but unfathomable. Instead I side with the likes of Darius McCollum, whose fandom of the New York transit system means he has been arrested 30 times for posing as an employee (he also, it should be said, has been diagnosed with Asperger’s, which may have affected his behaviour). He has the uniform, he sure as heck has the knowledge, and most of all he has the love. Down in the driver’s cab or up in that bus’s bothy, he says, he feels part of a community: everyone together, going in the same direction. Yes, life can be hard and wet and whiffy, but at least you’re a part of it, not isolated in your own little cocoon.
McCollum is the subject of a new documentary, Off the Rails, which is that rare thing: a movie featuring public transport in which nothing awful happens. Buses on the big screen are by and large for bullying children or stashed bombs. Thinking of taking the train? Mind the gap for cannibals and madmen eager to slaughter you in the sleeper carriage.
Such anxiety springs from the fact that most movies come out of LA, a city in which few people have ever been near a train or on a bus, despite the latter only costing a dollar a ride. But a crossroads is fast approaching: the release next month of The Girl on the Train – based on a novel set in the London suburbs – in which a rackety lush played by Emily Blunt sees bad things from the blurry window of her commuter train. Given the horror outside, those ill-ventilated carriages are, if not happy, then a pleasant-ish refuge.
But the movie relocates the action to upscale New York. The houses are swisher; the trains look cleaner; and instead of sinking a mini-bottle from Whistlestop at her seat, our heroine is necking a martini at the Grand Central oyster bar. Will the film compound or explode people’s anti-public transport prejudice? For train lovers – indeed for anyone who thinks it might be best if not everyone drove everywhere all the time – there’s a lot riding on this.
Ted’s excellent adventure
The experience of visiting an aristo’s mansion is often one of red rope, obsequious blurb and guides genuflecting in front of oil portraits. Not so, in my experience, if you visit the gaff of someone whose origins did not involve inherited wealth. A place such as Ted Heath’s Arundells, which is a stone’s throw from Salisbury cathedral and an unexpectedly irreverent treat. (Clem Attlee pepper pot: £5)You’re barely through the door and they’ve got you playing his old Steinway.
Every volunteer in every room brims with information and enthusiasm, and has the right level of respect for the clobber and its ex-resident. You’re shown into the sitting room and invited to pose for pictures in Heath’s teapot-print armchair. Here’s his desk; pull up a pew. You leave with unexpected affection and admiration for the man. Strange how a home, populated by other people, can humanise its owner far more than they ever managed to in life.
Mow money, mow problems
The £16,500 salary offered to whoever mows the Queen’s lawns has brought her some slightly unfair flak. It’s not a lot, for sure, but you do get free meals and accommodation at Buckingham Palace. Rather than bitching at her for not inflating her pay packets, why not suggest the Queen extend the offer of free accommodation to those in need but not in her employ?
I’m sure some of those would welcome a free bed for a few years, not far from Green Park.
