beneath london

I hear you like games.  Here’s a game if you aren’t from London, been to London, or are in London.  Also, you’re not allowed to google the answers.

Guess which one of these are not the names of actual places:

Cockfosters

Gasbreath

Dongslap

Tooting

Merkin

Itchface

Horishfartfordwelshire

A few of these places you can find in the famous “London AZ”, a kind of atlas you see tourists, and long-time Londoners peering into on intersections throughout the city.  I was unsure if I needed glasses until I opened one of these to a random page and was confronted with what can only be described as surrealist art.  Each page is a mishmash of tiny overlapping lines, words, and colours.  The roads are so tightly packed together, and in such a random layout, it would give a chaos theoretician an aneurism. 

If you are lost in the center of London I don’t recommend this book unless you plan on lighting its 1000 pages on fire to create a smoke-signal to alert a rescue team.  Of course the rescue team will probably get lost and be forced to light itself on fire in order to alert a further rescue team.

No, what you can do if you’re lost in London is ask a friendly local for directions.  Here’s an example of me asking a friendly local for directions:

“Um, excuse me.  I’m looking for the Exmouth Market.”

“The what?”

“The Exmouth Market.”

“You mean the Exmouth Market?”

“Yes, the Exmouth Market.”

“Well, it’s pronounced Exmouth.”

“Right, Exmouth.”

“Exmouth.”

“Right.”

“Exmouth.”

“Okay.”

“Exmouth.”

“Fine.  So, you know where it is?”

“No.”

I find this kind of behaviour ironic because British people themselves have no idea what each other is saying.  Quite a while ago I commented on the fact that I often found myself translating between two British people in Prague.  Well, the major difference here is that they don’t even bother with a translation.  They, through some kind of faulty psychic connection, imagine what the other person is saying and then act accordingly.

A conversation between two British people is less a conversation, and more two people having a monologue at each other.  This is so much so that I think that major policy decisions — like staying out of the EU, and invading Scotland — are made by total conjecture.

One person that totally transcends the incomprehensibility of the British dialects (there are approximately 987 of them, ranging from Cockney to Jimblewhist to Lying on Your Back in the Middle of the Sidewalk and Gurgling Your Own Vomit) and that is the person that does the announcements on the Underground — or “Tube”, but what everyone else in the world calls “metro”.

This is a curiosity because the very place where you must be able understand the information, as a matter of sanity, is the very place where you can’t understand anything the person on the PA is saying.

“THE CIRCLE GJURBINGTONFURTHS MELLLLL SVERBERCROCHANKS BODY ON THE TRACKS WILL BE DEPPLEDONG HABER KUNNINGMYER ZBEVER UNTIL SUNDAY.  PLEASE USE THE SUPPERBUBBLE TO KLAKKINGHORNFITHEL.  MIND THE GAP”.

The result is millions of people (yes, usually there are that many people on any given platform) are left awkwardly not making eye-contact for fear that someone might ask them if they understood the announcement.  Not that they’d understand the question in the first place.  What happens then is a sort of zombie-shuffle to the nearest opening where they ride an escalator up 23 stories to the surface and blink perplexedly in the sudden non-daylight.


Weekends are all about the operators, service-people, and staff of the London Underground.  These are the days when they are able to get back at the rest of London by arbitrarily scrambling the whole Tube system. They shut down some lines, half-close others, and invent entirely new ones that get you as far as possible from where you want to be.  The inevitable chaos is "mitigated" by posting "maps" that have been designed by 4 year-olds with attention deficit disorder.  Through an elaborate CCTV (Closed Circuit Television) system throughout the Underground they can amuse themselves by watching well-dressed, dignified people dissolve into sobbing, screaming messes on any number of of the city's many platforms.

Another interesting fact about the London Underground —  and what I believe illustrates the whole system — is that they announce when a certain line is actually working.  This means that the default setting for the entire Tube system is “broken”.  Also, this announcement: “THE CENTRAL LINE IS IN NORMAL OPERATION TODAY”, is pretty much the only thing you can understand.  Ignoring, of course, the fact that “normal” in this context is a matter of semantics.  There is nothing normal, or even remotely human about the London Underground.

When my Uncle Matthijs was visiting from Holland I commented to him that we commuters were being treated like cattle.

“You are cattle.” He said.

And it’s true.  The people that are grievously without entertainment; like an iPad, Kindle, the ubiquitous newspaper, or latest best-seller, have the same far-away glassiness in their eyes’ as cows.  I recall a YouTube video where some guys start playing live jazz in a field to some cows.  Gradually the ears of the cows rotate towards the strange new sounds, their heads slowly rise, and they begin ambling over towards the band.  Eventually they get there, form a neat semi-circle, and just stare curiously at the trio while chewing their cud.   The band stops, the cows slowly turn around and wander off.  These cows look more alert than the average person riding the Underground.  To be fair, I’ve never spent this amount of time in a city of this outrageous magnitude, so there is probably a deeper psychological thing at play — like there are so many people in the Tube that it has reached critical mass and the average human perception cannot take it all in without their head’s exploding.  Maybe, but I see other people, especially when they are extraordinarily cute.  I find myself smiling sometimes too — something I rarely see anybody else do — although this could be dangerous as I may find myself clubbed, thrown into a bag, and later released into nature to be with the other smilers.

Underground tunnel sizes range from “shoebox” to “drinking-straw” and the carriages are sized correspondingly.  For someone hovering above the 6-foot level this is uncomfortable to say the least.  It also seems that no matter what time of day it is these carriages are packed solid with humans.  Once while trying to board a Tube car I actually rebounded off of a mass of bodies packed so tightly I’m sure that many of the people deeper in the carriage had been compressed into diamonds.  I once jokingly commented to a friend that the London underground is where most British people are unwittingly conceiving, but when I looked to see if he had heard me I found that he had been compressed into a diamond.  Emerging from these cars is probably what a baby feels like coming out of the womb, complete with the stickiness and bone-shattering wailing.  One line in particular, the Central, defies laws of thermal dynamics by being — despite being deep underground, where it is presumably cooler — hotter than a Russian sauna.  This is either planned torture or hidden genius, because, really, the only way to get out is to get greased up with enough personal and commuter sweat that you sort of slide out of the carriage and plop onto the platform while trying to MIND THE GAP.

If you are a commuter in London you have to dress for three types of weather conditions just to travel in the Underground: dry windy freezing, hot dry stale, and hot humid stale wet.  Certain random cars within a given Tube line can simply be categorized as: gratuitous stank.  This is besides being prepared for London's natural outside temperature which is "fog".  I say, give everyone body-condoms like you see on bobsled teams and be done with it.

Incongruously people entering the tube stations are often handed newspapers like The London Evening Standard.  This is a cruel joke because they are broadsheet format and there is no possible way to actually open them while riding the Underground without taking up the space where 60 other bodies could fit.  The Standard, I’m told, is a quality paper, although I’m not sure how anybody would be able to tell.

Initially when I started writing this I was trying to cover many aspects of London but have found myself focusing solely on the Underground.  This is probably because it’s the place where I have been spending most of my time, other than my bed.  Schools and pubs play a very distant 8^th and 9^th positions. 

I’ll have a go talking about other stuff:

I live in a very dodgy part of town between Whitehapel and Shadwell stations.  I have dubbed these landmarks “Brownchapel” and “Shagwell”.  The first because the area contains the most East Indians outside of India, and the latter because it is funny.  I live in a “council estate”.  These optimistically called “estates” are designed for people with low incomes and on welfare — or “the dole” as it locally known.  These are hideously ugly buildings which hearken to the dreaded panuluks of the Czech Republic.  Duly, they contain the types of people that throw garbage directly out of their windows, cook food that smells like burning rubber, and have their televisions blaring loudly at all times of day.

(A side note about television here: I spent an evening watching it one day and identified many comedy panel shows; Never Mind the Buzzcocks, Mock the Week, QI, Have I Got News For You, and about twelve others.  What’s interesting is that these shows draw from a pool of about 4 comedians, and Stephen Fry — sometimes playing the role of panellist, sometimes playing the role of host.  And these people all seem to be either hosting or appearing in Live at the Apollo the same night.  Mind boggling)

(Another side note: Stephen Fry is a national treasure here.  I only hesitate to call him a Comedian because I think he has reached such a high level of pure intelligence that, for him, being funny is too easy to be called a career. 

The other comedians visiting each other’s shows  are Jimmy Carr, Russel Howard, Jo Brand, and Bill Bailey.)

I’ve done the touristy stuff like walk down Fleet Street, dodge camera shoots by large groups of Asians in Trafalgar square, been intimidated by Westminster Abbey and the Parliament building, and been wallet-raped by pubs in Soho.  All this has left me wondering one thing: with all the beauty of what’s available to see, how did the city look before it was bombed into paste by the Nazis? What is truly old in the city is what is the most stunning to look at.  Sure the Giant Turnip is neat, and Battersea is monolithic,  and the London City Hall looks like a bit that fell off the Giant Turnip, but St. Paul’s is astounding, the Tower of London (which doesn’t look remotely like a tower) is amazing, and whole neighbourhoods — Hampstead, Kensington, Paddington — are brilliant to walk around in.

I’ve only ever been invited to one other neighbourhood, and that is the trendy Shoreditch.  I suspect that this is because Shoreditch contains Brick Lane.  Brick Lane is where you want to go to if you like Indian food and don’t mind being harangued, cajoled, begged, and pleaded with by overzealous wait-staff to enter their establishment.  It's an amazing experience, albeit a slightly odd professional practice because, one; all the prices are pretty much the same along the whole quarter-mile stretch of Brick Lane, so they can only sell you on the discount, which they all say is 30%, and two; potential clients are afraid to get close enough to read a menu for fear of quickly being covered and drowned beneath a large pile of pleading, over-zealous wait-staff.  Regardless, it’s a safe bet because anywhere else, and you might accidentally find yourself eating actual English food.

The pubs are plentiful, roughly one every eight inches — each outdoing the other with garish light fixtures, room-temperature beer, the kind of wall-paper usually associated with blind great-grandmothers, and names circuitously referring to genitalia; The Cock & Cootch, The Gallic Bullocks, Vag. They are thick with an olde-world charm.  A charm that millions of pubs have tried to replicate around the world but have never fully succeeded in doing. 

Just like London, because there’s only one London, and it’s here.

...  Right adjacent to Jellyteethbingstead.

Authors note: I originally wrote the diamond thing thinking it come from my own brain — as I usually do. I just recalled that i’m wrong, it came from the great Dave Barry’s brain.