District and Circle

The weekend before someone in a hurry knocked her over at Victoria train station. She went flying twisting on her heels as she hit the ground. Slightly inebriated she gathered herself up and carried on walking to the train. The two-hour train ride passed uneventfully and she got home, by now in some considerable pain. It turns out she had fractured her ankle and broken some bones in her foot. All because someone was in a hurry. When the tube strike crippled the transport network in the city last week, thousands of commuters stood like confused and lost sheep stuck outside train stations, groaning at bus queues and ringing to warn already absent bosses they would be late. Business leaders estimated it would cost the economy £50million a day. The city had been forcibly slowed down. I normally move like a silent, slightly uncomfortable country bumpkin from one carriage to the next, then onto a new train, unaware of the true distance of places in the blackness of the underground. Bus people are different. Used to the constant stop start of the bus, they accept the journey and take their time reading and people watching from the space above the ground. I too was pleased to be out of the hostile tunnels. It was just as he described it in District and Circle. But I had rushed then - anxious to arrive on time to hear Seamus Heaney read his own poetry. His lyrical Irish tone captivated the audience and that poem, which sits somewhere near the beginning of my autographed book, summed up the hurry which pervades London life...a crowd half straggle-ravelled and half strung like a human chain, the pushy newcomers jostling and purling underneath the vault, on their marks to be the first through the doors.