Forever waiting

From Times Online

The heat, even in October, was as clammy as the showers after a school swimming session, our bodies were pressed so close we couldn’t just feel each other’s wallets, we could count the loose change, too, and the sheer frustration of being stationary seemed to fizz its own energy like a van der graaf generator – we were all wondering, this time, was someone going to blow a fuse?

The scene, you’ve probably guessed is that magnificent feat of 20th century engineering, the Northern Line, and – train derailed at Morden wouldn’t you know? – we were somewhere between Clapham North and Stockwell, just waiting.

You would have thought, wouldn’t you, that after 150 years of underground train building, someone might just have got it right by now. But they haven’t. The managers of the Tube are about as adept as running their Underground system as Chihuahuas are at climbing trees.

It’s not just the underground, though is it? Heathrow and Manchester and Stansted – shiny architectural triumphs of the modern age – are principally shopping malls to divest air travellers of their hard-earned holiday cash. Why? Because we spend so much of our time in them waiting for delayed planes they might as well try and convince us to fork out on a pair of fair isle socks. In the age of the bullet train in Japan, we sit in stationary carriages (always in the dullest of railway cuttings) watching a Greggs paper bag being blown around like a clump of stinging nettles. And make an appointment at even the swankiest dentist – let alone the Stalinist slabs of concrete that house a multitude of waiting rooms in our hospitals – and you should take an outline of that novel you’d planned and get cracking.

Thousands of years of evolution, in other words and we’re standing about in the vain hope that a streamlined train with go-faster stripes might come into the station, or forcing down yet another Costa Coffee in the terminally boring Terminal 3 with the prospect of journeying across the Atlantic being pushed ever further into the future.

And when we’re not institutionally waiting, as it were, we’re waiting for our girlfriends, our boyfriends, our children, our boss, our plumber.

Which begs the question, are they late because of the institutional late-ism that pervades our country? Or does institutional late-ism exist because our institutions are populated by listless ne’er-do-wells whose principal activity seems to doing the minimal amount of work that remunerates them sufficiently to pay the mortgage and get leathered at All Bar One at the end of the day.

Well, is surely has to be the latter. In which case, the government must take action now. Legislation must be introduced forcing the managers of train companies, airlines, airport authorities and hospitals to take responsibility for wasting so many hours of our precious time. At time of delay, they will be forced to entertain us by dressing up in clothes of the opposite gender, walking on stilts and singing Ich bin ein Berliner to the tune of the 1812 Overture.

And is that doesn’t work then a stocks should be put on every platform, station concourse and hospital waiting room in the land. Rest assured, we’ll have the squashed tomatoes all ready to throw in our hand luggage.