Ralph’s Place

The tube is phenomenal. A critical part of London’s public transport network, it ferries close to a billion passengers around the capital every year! While not particularly quick, it’s often the most time effective way to travel from A to B, avoiding the busy streets above.

It’s phenomenal though, because while all of this is true, and despite seemingly endless engineering works, you’d struggle to convince me that there’s been a single day in the last 12 months that there haven’t been delays/closures/breakdowns/signal failures… SOMETHING wrong on at least one (and usually more) line!

When this happens on your route, it’s usually carnage! At busy times, even when the Northern line works fine you often find yourself compressed to a point that even sardines would complain, or waiting 2 or 3 trains (each time watching someone squeeze into an unfathomably small space) before you can sensibly board. If there’s delays on the line though you might as well give up!

Ditching the tube means getting a bus, but that’s just as bad. An already overworked bus network suddenly taking on thousands of additional passengers from a crippled tube network is never going to end well. By the time you get on a bus you’re already late, and at that time of day the traffic’s so bad the journey’ll take much longer than you planned anyway.

Walking is rarely an option, except to another form of transport. If you’re lucky enough to live within walking distance of an overland station that’s an option, but trains only go as far as the outer stations, so getting from south to north still requires the tube… maybe you’ll get lucky?

Finally, probably over an hour late you arrive at your destination in a foul mood, great!

All of this seems magnified coming home from a night out, when closures and delays prevent you from getting home to your desperately needed bed. It doesn’t help when you realise that the delays were probably caused by a defective train at lunch time, and the network never quite caught up.

So the tube is phenomenal! In fact it’s both brilliant and unthinkably bad at the same time. Maybe one day they’ll sort it out, but will I still be around to see it?

Ok, they’re cool an all that, they taste good and come in different types, but aren’t they essentially a fancy bread roll with a hole in it? What does the hole give you?

- Less to eat: it might taste better than a bread roll, but there just isn’t as much to eat!
- A mess: while the bagel has a hole, the layer of filling often doesn’t. An unfortunate filling incident this afternoon left a dollop of chicken, bacon and mayo on the floor at Paddington Station
- They’re not a donut: when eating my bagel I always feel cheated, because if it’s a doughy ring, then it should be sweet and maybe covered in sprinkles. Instead it’s a bread roll.

So why, why do bagel’s have holes? They’ve got to make them harder and more expensive to produce, not that it matters, they just charge us more than a bread roll anyway!

Some donuts have holes, while others don’t. Their makers have recognised that adding filling necessitates an enclosing structure to avoid mess…

It’s true!

Got this sent to me today, had to share. The Beautiful Game? :S

YouTube - Italy V Chile 1962