According to my rhyme table you must be the two o'clock poet ... Sally Crabtree in action
As if passengers (let's not call them customers; customers have a choice) on the First Great Western network haven't already suffered enough, the second-worst performing train company in Britain has devised a way to make their journeys more agonising still. It has hired a woman called Sally Crabtree to be a "poet on the platform". Now, at any one of eight stations across central and western England, as you attempt to board a train - or wait disconsolately for one - you are liable to be accosted by a guitar-toting Pollyanna who will insist upon ad-libbing a song or a poem for you.
This amounts to granting official licence to the type of attention-seeking extrovert we who rely on public transport try our damnedest to avoid. But perhaps I'm being unfair. Crabtree in action may prove to be good value. If so, she'll be a glaring exception to the rules governing buskers, improvisational poets, performance artists, and women with pink hair.
Her YouTube clip - pert inanity made manifest - doesn't fill me with optimism, though. Nor does her MO of setting up a copper tree decorated with articles from which hapless passengers will be asked to select the subject of her performance. If I tell you that she has dubbed this prop her "poetree", perhaps you'll appreciate the depths of toe-curling tweeness to which I fear travellers will be exposed. "Like many writers and poets," says Crabtree modestly, "famously WH Auden, I am inspired by the reasons for our rail journeys." Yes, but Auden didn't waylay folk on the station and demand they listen to Night Mail while he strummed away beside a metal shrub.
This is the sort of initiative that only a corporation, a council or a quango - an organisation institutionally insulated from the wishes of those for whose benefit it exists - could possibly think a sound idea. A First Great Western spokesman promises it will "make poetry more accessible across a large geographic area." But the British generally detest being a captive audience for latter-day troubadours. Mainly because, when we think they're rubbish, even nowadays we remain too polite to do what we'd dearly like to do - and what other nations don't hesitate to do - and tell them to fuck off. If this isn't what the personal stereo was invented for, then it should have been.
As Crabtree observes, "We take the train for family visits, lovers' meetings or farewells, or interviews for work - journeys that can change the course of our lives." Which is precisely why we prefer the company of our own thoughts, and why we value the opportunity for quiet contemplation unintruded upon by inescapable exhibitionists. London's celebrated Poems on the Underground fitted in with this perfectly, and did poetry a good turn, too. A "poet on the platform" will merely make people grateful to get the hell out of there, no matter how wretched the train service... Ah. Perhaps First Great Western isn't so daft after all.
