Yesterday afternoon I caught myself standing absent mindedly on the wrong platform just about to get on the wrong train. I think that means I’ve reached the transition point where the novelty of a changed situation has to some extent worn off, with the tendency to act very consciously waning, while a new habit has not yet established itself deeply enough. This is a dangerous period in some circumstance, like when, after carefully driving around in a foreign country on the ‘wrong’ side of the road, feeling more and more confident, suddenly after a week or so, you might just pull out from a parked spot and set off on the left. Or go round a roundabout anticlockwise.
The lesson here is that takes more than a week to establish new habits deeply, or rather to change old well established ones.
So I had to go back up the steps and cross over to the other side. Only after I had taken my place on the tube train did I discover that some anti social person had discarded half a bag of fish and chips under the seat. That smells horrible, so I got off at Canada Water and experimented with the Jubilee line instead.
The trouble with Jubilee line journeys to the east is that not all of the trains continue all the way to Stratford. Because of Murphy’s law, no matter when I arrive, the first train is always to North Greenwich only – that’s the station which was specially built for the hapless Millenium Dome which is of course long closed, so who would want to get off there? Changing there is not a good idea either, since the terminating train pulls into a different platform to the next onging one, so if you’re going to do that sort of thing, better to do it at Canary Wharf. Once at Canary Wharf, however, I decided to surface and take advantage of the range of goodies available at Waitrose. Back on the jubilee line platform, still well before the full rush hour, but the first train onwards was busy, so I had to stand most of the way. Then at Stratford there was problem with overhead line failure at Brentwood or something so I gave up and caught a bus.
The bus was crowded and had a drunk christian proselytising nutter annoying everybody, and by the time we got to Forest Gate some of the passengers had given up ignoring him and resorted to shouting back. So that was a pretty normal day then, really.
