From Notting Hill Editions
Commuting isn't just personal agony, writes Benedict King, an Oxford resident who commutes daily to London. It is also a form of desertion, that has turned the capital into a combination of sink estates and gilded international playground.
I've always hated commuting. Long before I ever had a job and didn't know what anyone did to earn money, it offered every conceivable horror: tedious repetition, burdensome responsibilities, humiliating subordination of the self, uncomfortable clothes and - most terrifying of all - early mornings. Now I'm in my 40s, I've had time to reflect and - although work has exceeded expectations a little - my intuition about commuting was pretty spot on.
Yes, you can work on the train; so it's just time you don't have to put in at the office. You can make new friends or keep up with old ones. There used to be a group on my train who played bridge every morning. And if you can't work and you can't make friends, you can get some serious reading in - better than looking after fractious children. Beyond that, there are the vistas of rural England in the early morning. Is there a sight of more surpassing loveliness than the silver mist on the Thames and its surrounding meadows, yielding to the golden rays of the rising sun on a bright dawn? What better prelude to a hard day's work? That's what I claim when I tell people I commute to London every day, trying to fend off their doe-eyed pity. There's only one small problem with the vision of light work, fellowship, bridge, Proust and aesthetic delight: it's rubbish. The commuter's life is a solitary, companionless affair - nasty, brutish and unbearably drawn out.
The first nasty reality of the commuter's life is just getting to the train. Commuter trains are not as frequent as tube trains in London; getting to the station on time is very important. From the moment you get up you pace your life by the minute. If you lounge in bed, overrun on your daily ablutions, or can't find your cufflinks, you have to make decisions about whether you skip toast, tea, or any breakfast at all, to make the train comfortably. Or you have breakfast later, but cycle extra-fast to catch the train, and then pitch up at the station all hot and bothered. Or you miss your train and then have to start rejigging your whole day at work to make things fit. The whole process is incredibly vexing.In order to mitigate the aggravation, commuters spend their time trying to achieve tiny advantages of comfort or convenience in their daily routine. Most of these revolve around seating, whether it's the gentle, but sharp-elbowed queue-barging to get on the train before all the seats are gone, or the various ruses on the train to maintain sole occupancy of a double seat.
Commuters think about double seats like smokers think about cigarettes. They convince themselves they are a great treat, even a physical necessity, while they really achieve nothing but extra anxiety. If a commuter finds a double seat he will always sit in the aisle seat, leaving the window seat free, so that anyone else has to ask him to move to sit down, which is, because we are in England, embarrassing. But, as everyone always takes an aisle seat next to an empty window seat, the request is unavoidable, once all the double seats are taken. Nothing is achieved except maximum embarrassment and irritation all round.
There's a small consolation in insisting on sitting next to people who are pretending to be asleep or have a lot of bags piled on the seat next to them. You can take a commuter out of the suburbs, but you can't take the suburbs out of the commuter. Every commuter has a very high and dense, privet hedge planted around his tiny little mind.
This selfish hunt for small privileges and comfort can go way beyond gentle queue-barging. I once watched my next-door neighbour steal a copy of the Guardian from a display stand outside a station kiosk. Our eyes met. He knew I knew, but he couldn't put it back. At the same time he couldn't go and pay, as that would have been even worse, so he scuttled off into the station with his free newspaper, no doubt arguing with himself that the stand was a "promotion". I have a lot of sympathy. A free newspaper is the least he deserves for his pains, but why didn't he just board the train in first class and swipe one of the complementary copies of the Times like everyone else?
It isn't just the mornings that are stressful; the agony is repeated in the evening, with minor modifications. At the other end of the day the stress comes from trying to finish your work in time to get the train home, rather than just getting out of bed. The journey home always seems longer: the appetite for bridge and Proust has miraculously disappeared over the course of the day, and it's dark outside. A minor compensation comes in the entertaining spectacle of non-commuters arguing with the guard about the validity of cheap off-peak tickets.
Trying to add variety to the routine doesn't really work either. If you go out in London in the evening and get a really late train home, it doesn't just feel longer; it really is. The later it gets, the slower and dirtier the train, the drunker the other stragglers, the more miserable the following dawn. The better the evening, the greater the price your commute extracts. Whatever efforts you make to add excitement to your life, there is no escape from commuting's remorseless discipline.
Nothing in life is easy, but the tiredness, the long hours, the petty struggles, the lack of double seats, the depression induced by contemplating this activity stretching out to the end of your working life... they all pale into insignificance against the torture of the train manager's announcements. God, how I loathe them, with their silly pompous circumlocutions, their prissy articulation and their endless, maddening, school-marmish safety warnings. Why can't they just tell us where we're going and then shut up. We're not on an aeroplane, anxious that this journey may be our last, unfamiliar with the environment. Quite the bloody contrary.
Commuting is bad for the body, for the mind and for the soul. Commuting is a sacrifice, a trade-off, but a trade-off for what? For not having to live in London. A recent one by Halifax suggested that moving out of London was - looking just at the economics of it - a no-brainer. Even taking into account the exorbitant prices of season tickets - easily the most expensive thing I've ever bought, apart from property - moving out of London will free up an awful lot of cash. The Halifax quoted an average house price in Reading, just twenty five minutes from Paddington, at £275,000, where the central London average is £620,000. In return for less than an hour's travel a day you cut your housing costs by over 50%.
But there's more than just cash to be weighed in the balance. Everyone wants to get out of London; it's just a question of whether you waste the week doing it, or the weekend. Lots of people who live in London flee it at the weekend, but is this really any better? They pack up their car on a Friday night and flog off to some mildewed country cottage, where they snatch a few unsatisfactory hours before packing the whole show up again as soon as Sunday lunch is finished. As they flog back up the M4 feeling miserable, we commuters are enjoying an untroubled walk in the country, maybe relaxing on the patio outside the French windows, as we watch our clean-limbed provincial children play badminton on the crisply mown lawn, and pour another G&T.
Ah yes, those lawns and the children; that' s what it's really about. We do it for "the kids". That's the killer argument; and why not? It may not be good for me but, for my children and for the wider society, I'm making a great and positive sacrifice. Am I not the proud head of one of those heroic mythical entities beloved of Labour, Liberal and Tory alike, the "hard-working family"?
Am I not standing in a long and noble tradition? Long before railways were invented, rich London merchants sold up their house on Cheapside and went to the provinces in search of pastures old, to set themselves up as landed gentlemen. Isn't commuting just the modern form of this immemorial progression? This country, industrialised and urbanised before any other, has remained wedded to an idea of its rural past and grafted new ways of life onto the old.
So central to the fortunes of the Conservative party had the commuter become by the end of the 19th century that the party recast its ruling ideology as "villa conservatism". The old Tories adjusted to appeal to the inhabitants of the new suburbs, by marrying the interests of the old landed elites and the church to the massed ranks of the commercial classes - rather like a distressed 18th century earl marrying his heir off to the daughter of a rich mill owner. Those ghastly mock Tudor villas may be devoid of architectural merit, but don't they testify to England's genius for grafting political tradition onto radical economic change to deliver social stability?
None of this weighs very heavily in the balance any longer, if at all. Commuting may still benefit many individuals, but it does society as a whole no favours. Planning restrictions outside London now mean that any inflow from London into the provinces puts the cost of living beyond those who work locally. Flight from London is no longer dictated by a desire for clean air, fresh water and space, but by the prohibitive cost of living in the capital, as the capital has been turned into an offshore business centre-cum-playground for the international plutocracy.
The dynamics of commuting are no longer those of economic progress and wealth distribution, but of economic strain and social dislocation. Commuting is not just a running away from London, but a running away from the problems afflicting it - massive social divisions, a semi-collapsed system of state education, gang culture, private gated communities for the rich, with the city's poor among the poorest communities in Europe.
I can't help thinking occasionally, as I board the train at Paddington to flee this Babylon that, if the hard-working bourgeoisie hadn't surrendered and fled, but had stayed and done its civic duty, we wouldn't have stood for poor schools and gang culture.
We would have thought a whole lot harder about the negative as well as the positive effects of allowing London to become what it has. Instead we slink off silently to our provincial towns and villages to inflict the same dislocation on the local population there. Do I think my children should be grateful for my sacrifice? Or, more precisely, do I deserve any gratitude? I rather fear not.