There is a sneaky back entrance to London Victoria station that I’ve taken to using. It’s near the end of Platform One, and it takes you out onto the corner of Hudson’s Place and Bridge Place. It avoids all the crowds outside the main entrance to the station and on Victoria Street, and because it’s much quieter, you also avoid those really annoying characters spamming you with the London Lite and other similar vacuous drivel wherever you turn on the way back in the evenings.
Obviously you still have to negotiate the crowds inside the station, but once you’re out, the twenty minute walk to Millbank up Vauxhall Bridge Road, Francis Street, Greencoat Place, Greycoat Place and Great Peter Street is about as pleasant and stress free as you can possibly get in central London during the rush hour.
My daily commute consists of a fifteen minute bike ride to Horsham station, fifty-five minutes on the train into London, and a twenty minute walk from London Victoria to the place where I spend most of my day staring at a computer screen before repeating the process in reverse. When you’re spending a little over three hours a day getting from A to B and back again, it’s essential to have a suitable means of humping your assorted bits and pieces around, so before I embarked on this particular adventure, I paid a visit to Millets in Horsham town centre and bought myself a rucksack that I thought would fit the bill perfectly.
At the time I thought the rear airflow system of the Berghaus Freeflow 20 rucksack was a bit of a killer feature. My old rucksack (which was ten years old and falling to bits) had been giving me a sweaty back on my bike all summer, and I figured that since my daily quota of exercise was just about to double, anything to reduce that effect would be more than welcome.
Unfortunately, this comes at a price. The struts that hold it away from your back seriously reduce the amount of space that you have at your disposal. Most of the time it isn’t too bad, but sometimes it seems very inflexible somehow. There are occasions when I want to be able to take a couple of books with me as well as a change of clothes for the journey home if the weather deems it necessary to do so, or maybe even just stop off for some shopping. Thanks to the way they curve away from your back, my Microsoft Natural 4000 keyboard almost refused to fit into it at all. Helpful, that was not.
So last week I went and bought another new rucksack. It’s a different Berghaus model, without the rigid struts this time, which makes it much more flexible, as well as giving it a a slightly higher capacity of 25 litres instead of 20. Despite the lack of air flow between it and my back, so far it hasn’t been making me sweat like crazy, but then again, I have been getting a better diet in recent months than I was a year ago, when I was having KFC for lunch almost every other day.
I’ve made a few observations after ten weeks of daily commuting to London.
The unpleasantries of the rush hour can be alleviated somewhat by choosing your train carefully and getting on at the right place. I always catch the 07:25 train to London Victoria at Horsham and go for the rearmost carriage, and so far I have had a 100% success rate at getting a window seat. Most of the stations between Bognor Regis and Crawley have short platforms, and consequently the front of the train is generally much more packed out than the rear. I do not recommend getting on at Littlehaven: its platform is only four coaches long, but more people get on the train there than at Horsham, and it can be a bit of a crush at times. Then you have to jostle past people through several coaches in order to get a seat.
This effect is even more pronounced on the way home in the evenings. On Thursday I made the mistake of going for one of the front four coaches, and even though I had a seat, it was not a pleasant experience. The entire Littlehaven crowd pile in to the front four coaches right from the word go, rather than spreading themselves more evenly through the train and moving forward once we get to Crawley. This means that the back of the train is definitely the place to be if you are disembarking elsewhere.
I avoid the Underground like the plague. London buses may be a bit of a lottery in terms of overcrowding — I’ve had both good and bad experiences on the 507 — but at rush hour, the Underground is guaranteed to be so packed out that it makes a Kenyan matatu look like an intergalactic void. However, as I am working just under a mile from Victoria, it is cheaper, less crowded and more healthy to walk, as well as giving you a good bit more elbow room at only minimal cost in terms of time.
Finally, the best place to sit in a train is near the middle of a carriage. You get a pretty smooth ride there, whereas by contrast you get jolted about quite a lot near the ends of the carriage. It’s much the same reason as why the middle of a boat is where you’re least likely to be seasick: the carriage acts a bit like a lever, so the ends tend to wiggle about a lot more. Another thing about the ends of the carriage is that they can be a lot noisier if the doors at the end get jammed open.
I was delighted to learn last week that I have been accepted as a member of 9rules. If you’ve never heard of it before, it’s an exclusive network of quality blogs run by Paul Scrivens, Mike Rundle and Tyme White. They don’t just accept anyone and everyone — only blogs with consistently good quality, design and content get accepted, so it was heartening to know that someone thinks I’m doing something right. They set the bar fairly high — you need to have been blogging consistently for at least six months, and they look for well thought out, thoroughly researched posts, and a good, consistent, easy to navigate design that is appropriate to what you’re writing about. So if you are one of those types who writes detritus like “omg lol chk out this youtube vid lmao rotfl” or posts those inane quizzes that tell you which Star Wars character you are, forget it.
There are some pretty interesting people in the network, such as Joe Anderson, who writes about a variety of issues related to general technology, Web 2.0 and “the” Wikipedia, and Lorelle van Fossen, whose blog about blogging is very well regarded within the WordPress community. Check out neverhappen.com too — it’s a daily photoblog with some absolutely stunning photography.
Needless to say, this will keep the pressure on me to come up with good quality content. The fact that I’m working in London for one of our Very Important Clients for the next three months puts even more pressure on my time as well — I have to set my alarm for half past five in the morning in order to catch the 07:25 train. However, a 55 minute commute each way does give me an opportunity to jot down some ideas for interesting content, even though the train can be pretty full and elbow room can be at a premium sometimes.
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Posted at 08:00 on 22 July 2009.
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