Triple Whammy

Triple Whammy

[Image] Dawn over SW11 It's not nice having to get up for the first train of the morning, especially when the next one, an hour later, would only make you five minutes late - but sometimes things are more important than an hour's extra sleep. How Jim Naughtie and Euan Davies do it, and sound so normal as well, is truly impressive.

This morning the first thing to hit my ear drums was their jolly banter about the weather - how it just hasn't stopped raining all night in London, which is just where I'm about to go to, with my folding bike - and having just left my rain cape at the hospital yesterday. Ho hum.

Dawn over SW11

Clapham Junction is arguably the second most alienating railway station in Britain, though it'll need to do a lot of work to catch up with Birminham New Street. Of course, the whole network is trying very hard to do serious alienation at the moment: with their robotic communications, insistence that we're 'customers' rather than 'passengers', and training their previously nice and friendly staff - usually 'railwaymen' and 'railwaywomen' to the core - to fear treating those 'customers' as fellow human beings and ever being able to exercise flexibility or discretion. At least we've got that 'UK Train Times' app that seems to be able to do seriously useful things - like knowing which platforms trains are going from before the station staff do, and taking you home without the need for any intervening thought. Who needs to talk to a human being any more?

It may even be a quadruple whammy, as there is also the 'Sarf London' factor - which makes a train journey to somewhere like Balham, then a cycle ride to Springfields Hospital feel a bit like an expedition to the source of the Nile or the Star Wars space cafe. Just why does North London seem so much more understandable and easier to get to - with tubes going nearly everywhere, and places that you have at least heard of?