Returning home to Hobart from the warmth and hustle of life in a big city I find myself remembering other cities and other transport systems, I have struggled through. I wish someone had given me some helpful travel advice about the intricacies of getting around London, for example.
When using the London Underground for the first time on your own without a carer, you need to be prepared to find yourself relying on a power greater than your own to get you into the bowels of the earth and out again. It seems easy enough, just find the familiar red circle symbol and start your journey. But be warned: feelings of panic may start to arise, as you find yourself being impelled down the stairs by the pressing throng, for the Underground will always be crowded, no matter when you travel. Try to set your own course though, for before you proceed you will need a ticket and everyone else will already have one. You won't need cash, but you will need a ticket--and any number of machines will welcome you to embrace them, touch their screens and get yourself the magic Oyster card that opens up all barriers to you;
just as long as the machines don’t chew up your credit card, of course.
It may be that it is here that you will first call on higher powers to please get you through the automated machine process and then again to please make sure your card works as you touch it against the yellow circle on the barriers, so that the gates will open and not trap you in the middle with a fuming crowd of pressing passengers behind you.
But have faith and you will be through.
With more faith you may even work out where to go by consulting the schematic map to plan your journey, decide on your line, see what platform you must descend to, begin that deep frightening descent via steep escalators into the steaming underground, pass through another decision-point--southbound or northbound? and finally arrive on a platform. Here electronic screens will tell you that there will be three trains in the next two minutes and you must work out which is yours. You hope you are right as, you find yourself unceremoniously pushed onto one of these trains, where, a squashed minion in a clammy horde, you peer up from beneath sweaty body parts at yet another computer screen. You stare obsessively at it, for it informs you of the train’s destination and of the next stop. You pray again that the next station will be the one you expect from your planning, for, if it isn't, you are travelling in the opposite direction and will need to get off and start all over again.
You find (thank God) that you are travelling in the right direction and you can relax. But then you see that the screen is informing passengers for the next stop that, if they are in the last carriage, their doors will not open and they must move through the train to get off! What carriage are you in, you ask yourself, especially as the screen is now telling passengers in the first carriage that their doors will not open.
By the time you realise that you must be in a middle carriage you find you are finally getting close to your destination, but not before your train makes a diversion round a loop, which, luckily for you, includes your station. You might have boarded a train on the right line, in the right direction, but making its diversion round a loop not including your station. Or you could have been a passenger on the train that split in two the next day, or you might have been informed, after boarding the train that it would not today be stopping at your station (it being Saturday) and then you really might have had reason to panic.
But no, thankfully, you arrive at the station you want, disembark and are carried by the crowd to the Way Out escalators. Once at the exit barriers you press your magic Oyster against the yellow circle and it works! You are through and have survived your tube experience with only a deep dent in your credit card to remind you of its traps for 'senior' players and the ominous thought---what will your time be like next week on the Paris Metro?
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