London Tube Gems (Autumn)
- Ursule Demaël
- Feb 26, 2023
- 7 min read
Updated: Mar 11, 2023
My inspiration for doing this mostly comes from Annie Ernaux, who has devoted entire books to the seemingly mundane, simply sitting down and lending an attentive and analytical eye to scenes of everyday life like the supermarket. One line from her:
J'ai arrêté mon journal.
Comme chaque fois que je cesse de consigner le présent, j'ai l'impression de me retirer du mouvement du monde, de renoncer non seulement à dire mon époque mais à la voir. Parce que voir pour écrire, c'est voir autrement. C'est distinguer des objets, des individus, des mécanismes et leur conférer valeur d'existence
And so, whenever I sit on the Tube, I look and sometimes I write down about it, with bare down stripped style, trying only to lend the gift of attention to what I could have easily decided to neglect.
My sister is over for the weekend. As we sat on the Metropolitan Line in the morning, she nudged at me and said look ahead. There was a man sitting upright, almost with his back too straight, wearing 3D cinema glasses. She whispered in my ear: I don't think he got the memo that you have to return the glasses at the end. I laughed solidly for a few minutes, it almost threw me back to times in primary school where you had to find a way to bottle up your laughter so the teacher wouldn't notice.
We went to the Barbican after this. There were dainty effects of golden light flooding in the library rooms, amidst concrete and potted plants. There was an old man playing the piano with headphones clapped onto his head, silently hunched over. I wanted to take a picture, but it strangely felt like it would be pinning an insect down with a needle. Outside, some of the water had frozen solid in the fountains.
On the Tube back, I read a line from To The Lighthouse about someone living in St. John's Wood, literally as soon as we departed from the St John's Wood Tube station. It was one of these passages you stutter on because you keep forgetting a bookmark, and end up reading three times over before you realised you had read it already. Maybe the passage was just waiting for me to read it in the right conditions.
This morning, I tried to focus on people in the Tube but there was nothing particularly noteworthy. I suppose it is the whole purpose of this though, to exercise attentiveness, and in doing so to always find something you can decide to make noteworthy. What do I see?
There is a row of four men, then one woman sitting with a backpack on her lap, then one teenager. All are wearing dark clothes, puffer-style jackets. One of the men is reading a newspaper that has some gossip about Prince Harry on the cover. He has glasses with yellowish frames. The woman next to me is playing Candy Crush. I hadn't realised this game even still existed and that people actually still played it. I will probably forget this Tube ride.
A girl at Bond Street, very elegant, with two small Dior bags, a ring with emeralds or jades on her middle finger. She looks lonely. We look at each other a few times, although never really crossing eyes. There are many people with poppies for the November Poppy Appeal. I am surprised that this relic of the past still lingers, I wonder why the Poppy Appeal is such a big thing here in Britain. There is a girl with her mother, both fiddling with her jacket pocket on which the zipper is stuck.
I get out my copy Blindness, I finished it earlier today, but read over some passages with dog-ears to pass the time. This book has left me overwhelmed, realising all that I would lose were I to become blind. I take breaks to scrutinise people, almost drinking them up.
"If I ever regain my sight, I shall look carefully at the eyes of others, as if I were looking into their souls, Their soul asked the old man with the eyepatch, Or their minds, the name does not matter, it was then that, surprisingly, if we consider that we are dealing with a person without much education, the girl with the dark glasses said,Inside us there is something that has no name, and that something is what we are"
On the Tube, there is a man sleeping with his head folded almost all the way into his lap. Behind his black hair, his scalp is very red. There is a woman reading a book on her Kindle, with a huge font size. From the only sentence I catch, "she executed a perfect curtesy", the book looks bad, like it is filled with words from a thesaurus to try to make itself sound smarter than it is. There is a man with a single ring on his right hand. I often look at the rings of people, the patterns of fingers they wear it on. I notice if it is silver or gold, whether they play with it to flaunt their engagement. The most unusual pattern I have noticed is a woman with seven rings, on all fingers except from her two thumbs and one middle finger, on which she had a striped tattoo instead. There is also a girl reading an Adiche book, she marked her page with a fold on the top right corner, she is around halfway through.
"Apologies... the train will now be terminating at Baker Street.... due to the train not having a good day. Apologies again". Way to ruin your morning.
There was a delicate moment on the Tube today. A mother walked in with her little blonde daughter eating popcorn from a plastic Tupperware. I saw a girl opposite, perhaps a few years older than me, smiling at her. The notable thing about this was that the little girl was visibly looking in the other direction, and it made me realise how often people emote in public, not for actual social communication, but because it is the way emotion bleeds out of them. There is something about seeing someone emote even when they are alone in the feeling that they experience that is deeply tender and endearing. I looked at the daughter, still facing the other way, then I looked at the girl, and we both smiled at each other.
On the Tube today, one teenager took a lipgloss out of her hand bag and dolefully applied it to her lips. Another girl cast a discreet glance at her, then took a lipgloss out of her own bag, and also put it on, almost as if putting lipgloss on was a contagious thing like yawning. I wasn't sure if I should do it as well. In the end, I did take my own lipgloss out of my bag and applied it to my lips. None of them seemed to notice.
The arc of your career is like a non-random walk in the mathematical space of the London Tube network. There are several routes which will get you to your destination, and all you need is an overall idea of the end area you want to reach. Some trajectories would be clear miscalculations, but in some cases backward blunders might ultimately get you to a station via an indirect, but faster route. The success of your journey all depends on your reward function: this could be speed, cost, number of changes, but you can decide what you optimise for. When you're lost, ask for help rather than trying to figure out yourself, some people are much more savvy at navigating this network than you. Lastly, you could apply many graph theory algorithms to find the most optimal path to sail through it, but you can also decide to welcome some uncertainty, and spend a bit of time sitting down to watch a curly-haired child flick through his picture book for just one more station.
My phone has 1% and I'm too worn out to listen to music. So, I simply watch people, tell myself I will put my writer goggles on. There is a woman wearing very tacky Prada Milano glasses. She has polished nails with acrylic, although they have really grown out, and now there is a large chunk of freshly grown bare nails. I am actually impressed that the acrylic stayed so pristine when she clearly has had it for a long time. She also is listening to something with old-school earphones, the ones with wires. I think it's slightly weird that I'm looking at a stranger's nails on the Tube, so I look away and close my eyes.
Two men stride in to the Tube. I am sure the rest of the carriage, like me, is delighted to find out that one them works as a UX/UI engineer. You still go gym bro? You're looking good. Yeah I do mate, only three times a week, not six times like I used to. The more you know...
There is a woman who makes a call as soon as we arrive in Baker Street, she probably just got reception again. She is calling "Hubby UK". I wonder if this means Hubby's UK phone number or if there are several hubbies, and this is the UK one. There is a guy who walks in with a DEFY GRAVITY beanie and holding a tote bag of Book of Mormon. At St. Pancras, there is a young pair of siblings looking at an A5 sized Tube map, the girl laces her arm around her brother. Later, right in front of the hospital, I see a kid who gets off the motorbike behind his dad. He has a huge pink helmet with a white band in the middle. His face is very pale. Most probably a cancer patient. Our lab is next to a hospital for paediatric cancers, mostly brain tumours. I want to go up to him and say: I wish I looked as cool as you on the motorbike. I think back to those siblings in the station.
Two women are talking in front of me. One of them speaks with a hushed voice, it seems like she doesn't want to be having this conversation in public. She hesitates a lot, revs up a sentence and then lets it dwindle, terminates her sentences suddenly, answers obliquely to her friends' questions. At some points she said something, and abruptly finishes her sentence with "etc". I wonder what was hiding behind that "etc".
On the stairs at Green Park, a man swept his coat open to grab his wallet and shed a smell of laundry detergent. It is the same detergent my childhood friend used to have. I remember it very well. Since we wore identical school uniforms, navy blue, same logo, same size, we could only discern what belong to whom by smelling the detergent on them.
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