Books that Kindle disloyalty

I’m a great fan of reading books electronically. 

Not that I thought I ever would be. I remember long arguments with one of my sons, in which I maintained that nothing would ever replace the facility a physical book, with real paper pages, gives you to flick through it looking for a passage that struck you or which you just want to re-read. 

Well, I was wrong. 

Noble. Majestic. But the user interface leaves a little to desire

It’s just amazing to be able to go on holiday with dozens of books, but without a case that wrenches your arm from your shoulder or makes you liable for excess baggage charges. Indeed, you can stick the whole collection in your hand baggage. You can even carry it in a (reasonably capacious) coat pocket. 

Nor is the experience anything like reading on a computer. On the contrary, today’s electronic book screens manage to create an experience not just spookily similar to that of a printed page, but rather superior to it, at least in clarity of typeface and ease of reading.

Still, there are drawbacks. There are areas where the printed page retains its advantage. One of them, as it happens, comes when travelling. The airlines still don’t let you use your electronic equipment during take-off and landing in. 

Amazing. Are they really saying that we still use navigation systems so vulnerable that a £130 Kindle can flummox them? Are they telling me that terrorists could bring down planes by just having a bunch of them simultaneously phone home from on board?

Cabin crew persist in rigidly enforcing the prohibition of electronic devices. I don’t mind not reading if I’m leaving, or arriving at, a place I don’t know well. In all other circumstances, familiarity has bred contempt, and I want distraction from the instant I’ve sat down to the moment I stand up again. That means I need at least one physical book.

The other advantage of print is that there are simply certain books that have never made it to Kindle or its competitors. And some of those books, whatever the radical modernists may think, are rather good. You want to read them? You have to settle for paper, whose day, it seems, is not quite gone after all.

But sadly I’m beginning to feel disappointed with its limitations. I who was always such a strenuous champion of the joys of riffling through its pages, now frequently catch myself looking for the search function in a printed book, when I want to find a particular passage. It leaves me deflated when I remember there isn’t one. Flicking through the pages is fine, unless you actually have no idea where the passage was.

The sad thing is that I’m finding myself increasingly prone to this kind of electronically-distorted thinking. The other day, studying a map in a London Underground train, I realised I was looking for the cursor that would show me just where on the line I was. And once more had a sensation of disappointment that there wasn’t one.

London Tube Ads: on the way to extinction?

It may be that I was thrown by the fact that even the adverts that line the walls alongside Tube escalators are turning digital now. My grandfather used to print the paper version in years gone by, and he did his work with loving, artistic care, let me tell you. 

These days we increasingly get movies instead of posters, the displays carefully timed so that you don’t miss any of the unfolding action as you move past successive screens. It's like TV adverts even when you're away from your TV. 

The effect is to leave me wondering why, if they can do that, we can’t have a “you are here now” on the Tube maps in the cars.

Frightening. I who strove so long for tradition have been infected by the digital fixation of our time.

It leaves me guiltily uneasy at my own disloyalty.

You don’t have to be Orpheus to descend to Hell, you just need a ticket

Most major cities pride themselves on putting in underground railway systems.

Odd, really, since when you plunge into any of them they generally turn out to be pretty ghastly places. They show how right most religions are to place Hell underground.

The London tube is one of the worst. It always seems to be horribly crowded.

Now I know it’s a bit of a paradox to say that. I mean, if I weren’t there to experience how crowded it was, it would be marginally less crowded. But like most others, I suspect, I view myself and anyone with me as travellers, and everyone else as a crowd.

Even without the crowd, the tube is painful. It’s hot and clammy and claustrophobic, partly no doubt because it’s really squeezed into its tunnels: there are often only inches between the edge of tube cars and the tunnel side.

The London Tube: no margin for comfort

Still, in being uncomfortable, the London underground’s no worse than most others.

For instance, I’m always amazed that people write in such flattering terms about the New York subway. It’s always struck me as desperately old-fashioned, noisy and bone-rattling. Badly out of place in the home of technological innovation.

As for the Paris metro, it’s particularly dismal. First of all, it stinks. I don’t know whether it’s burning brake pads or what, but the smell is one of the most unpleasant I’ve come across in any city’s underground system. Everyone always looks absolutely miserable too; again, I realise that I’m guilty of some kind of solipsism here: I regard all the others as being miserable, and making me miserable by contagion, but I appreciate that others might see things the other way round.

Occasionally, underground systems can be quite interesting. For instance, before the wall came down, the Berlin U-Bahn had quite a few ‘ghost stations’. These were closed stops on the eastern side of the wall, their names still in Gothic script from the thirties, no adverts up on the wall or the tattered remnants of posters decades old, dim lighting, armed police on the platforms making absolutely certain that no-one got off the trains from the west or, more important, tried to get on.

Ghost station on the U-Bahn in the bad old days.
Fascinating but spooky

That was pretty spooky and interesting, but it wasn’t exactly pleasant.

In fact, the only metro system that I’ve been on recently and found relatively tolerable is the one in Madrid. It’s one of the more modern ones, so that’s perhaps not so surprising, but it does show that things could be less awful.

What makes the Madrid metro more attractive? There really is space in the tunnels around the carriages, and the carriages themselves are wider. Stretch out on the London tube, and even I with my short little legs am practically touching the passenger opposite. In Madrid there’s space between the rows to fit in people, legs, luggage, whatever.

Madrid Metro: room to breathe. Until it fills up at least

The greater width and the clearance in the tunnels makes the whole system much airier and fresher. That’s helped by air conditioning which is actually switched on from time to time. And they even have mobile signal down in the tunnels.

It still isn’t exactly fun, particularly when the carriages fill. But it’s a lot better than Paris or London.

Still, to be fair to poor old London, at least the tube does have a couple of jokes associated with it.

‘Do you know the way to Turnham Green?’ is one. The answer is, of course, ‘Leave ’em out in the rain.’

And the classic ‘Is this Cockfosters?’ to which the answer is ‘well, it’s certainly not mine.’

And the tone of that joke probably reflects pretty accurately the quality of the experience of travelling on the system.

Unusual passenger in Madrid

The Northern Line: adventure and delight



 You can keep the Metropolitan, Piccadilly or Circle Lines, along with the Central, Bakeloo, Jubilee and Victoria Lines. To me, in the London Underground system, the only one that really counts is the Northern Line. As its name implies, it's the line you take to travel North. Except when you're on it to travel southwards. It covers all of London right out to the northern suburbs. And right down to the southern ones.



The Northern Line, serving North London. And the South



It was the line that my mother used when she was living in London, at her parents’ place more or less half way between Golders Green and East Finchley stations. And so it was the line that we used most frequently on the many occasions in my childhood when we went to stay with my grandparents.

It was the scene of a significant rite of passage of that childhood. One day, when I was eight (if my memory serves me), I helped myself to some money that my father had left on his bedside table. I think it was about two shillings, which translates into ten (new) pence in today’s currency, which would cover one tenth of the cost of my daily newspaper.

With this fortune in my pocket, I walked resolutely to the 102 bus stop on the main road and waited for a bus to Golders Green. I particularly liked this trip because there was a stop, at what later came to be known as ‘Henlys Corner’, which was close by a statue of a sartorially challenged winged female representing Victory. She gave the place the name we used then, which was ‘Naked Lady’. It always tickled me to hear the conductors yell those words up the stairs, in their distinctively London accents.

At Golders Green I did my calculations carefully. I could get a child ticket to Chalk Farm, for four (old) pence – basically nothing in today’s money – and still have enough money to get back, including the bus fare. So that’s what I did. Not because I wanted to go to Chalk Farm, but just because I wanted to prove that I could get all the way there, and back again, without any catastrophe and without getting lost.

I have to admit that at Chalk Farm, I came to the surface, looked around, bought my return ticket and headed straight back again. I couldn’t actually think of anything to do at Chalk Farm but, more to the point, I also began to get nervous at having travelled so far on my own, if the truth be known.

Anyway, I walked back into my grandparents’ house not long after, full of pride at having pulled off this achievement, a real journey involving two modes of transport, all on my own, without suffering harm or losing my way. Brilliant. My sense of triumph was slightly marred by the realisation that no-one had even noticed my absence, but hey, that didn’t reduce the scope of the achievement at all, did it?

Today all this came flooding back to me as I spent nearly an hour and a half on the Northern Line. That’s because I went from Kentish Town in the North to Tooting Broadway in the South and back again – forty minutes each way.

And the line didn’t let me down. It gave me another one of those little moments to savour. A highly pregnant woman across the aisle from me was wearing a badge bearing the official logo of London Underground and the legend ‘Baby on Board’.

Wonderful, particularly as she had, indeed, been given a seat. It seems so much more sensible a use of the ‘Baby on Board’ message than putting it on the back of a car. After all, what’s that suggesting? That if you didn’t have one up I’d happily run into the back of you?

A pregnant woman wearing the badge on a coat. Now that’s useful, original (for now) and, most important of all, witty. Good old Northern Line. It hadn’t let me down.