ThePickards
standards, accessibility, and ranting and general stuff by the web chemist

I’ve been to London this week. I made it back without being stabbed, mugged, beaten up, having my mobile stolen or indeed anything else untoward happening. I wouldn’t normally see this as worthy of note, only the media coverage generally seems to imply that you can’t travel more than about 30 yards without coming across a stabbing…

Admittedly I did encounter a strange man with really quite wild looking dreadlocks arguing loudly with himself at Kings Cross Station, but I think that’s considered ‘unintentional street theatre’…

I was staying near Old Street tube, which was being called Ealdestrate as early as the year 1200, suggesting that it really is quite an old street. Wandering around, I noticed a few unusual things about London. Firstly, the city works in reverse to what I’m used to…

In the North-East, people finish work, come home from work, and then go out again later for a drink. In London, presumably because of the greater distances involved, people finish work and go directly to the pub (do not pass go, do not collect £200) and stay there until about 9pm, at which point everyone goes home. I suspect it may be different outside the centre of London, but the bars get quite deserted in the centre of London (certainly midweek) after about 9pm as nobody lives there.

Secondly, in what ran contrary to my previous experiences to London, people were polite. They would motion for other people to go first on the tube, they would ensure other passengers got off before attempting to cram on, and so on. Obviously, no-one actually spoke to anyone else on the tube, but that’s not really just a London thing anyway.

I’m sure there are parts of London where it wouldn’t have been safe for me to go wandering around by myself, but you’d find parts like that in any city, and yet the way knife crime is portrayed in the media:

Shock figures reveal no part of Britain is safe as knife violence spreads EVERYWHEREThe Daily Mail

…and they spit out some statistics, along with the indication that there were apparently fatal 250 stabbings in the last year, making you feel somewhat unsafe. However, in comparison, there were more than 3,200 road deaths (in 2005). Or about 9,000 alcohol related deaths. Are you still prepared to drink? Are you still prepared to drive? Because they are more likely to kill you than a knife…

Obviously that’s no consolation to the families of the 250 murdered stab victims, so I’m not suggesting it’s not a serious issue, I’m not suggesting that we don’t need to look at knife violence. But I am suggesting that the media should stop scaremongering and give us an accurate reflection of the story. Not that I believe for one moment that they will: the raison d’être of the Daily Mail is to terrify its readers…

Anyway, so where was I? Oh yes, in London, narrowly avoiding being stabbed.

I was walking along City Road, when I saw a graffito that caught my eye. It struck me partly because it reminded me of the Banksy style (whether or not it was Banksy, I dunno — but apparently it’s in the right part of town) and also because … well, because it was as if someone had been especially commissioned to produce some graffiti for me. Not for anyone…

…just for me. Well, that’s nice.

There was another one on a stop sign further down the road, where someone had stencilled the word ‘consuming’ on to the stop sign. In fact, they had done it onto both stop signs visible at that point but I’d only bothered to take a photo of one of them.

Asking whether or not these were ‘genuine Banksy’ pieces seems to rather miss the point: Banksy graffiti is anything but deferential to authority, so Banksy himself shouldn’t be held up as anything special: anyone can pick up a stencil, if they so choose. Indeed, I suspect that certainly the first isn’t a ‘Banksy’ as it appears to convey no anarcho-socio-political meaning, and while the second is a possibility, it’s also been done before, meaning that it’s entirely possibly it could be a copyrat.

And, now lurching unsteadily from anti-consumerism straight into the publicity and spitting-out-money machine that is the Harry Potter franchise, when I was told by a fellow resident of the Travelodge that not only had they arrived at King’s Cross, they’d been forced to traipse around looking for the famous “Platform 9¾”, they had actually found it, and seen how a luggage trolley had got stuck.

Given that I’d taken my camera with me, and that my kids would never believe me that I used to attend Hogwarts School myself otherwise, on the way back I set off to find the mysterious platform. Not surprisingly, 9¾ was to be found between platforms 9 and 10.

That’s not as easy to find as you might think, however — platforms 1 to 8 are easy to find, but to get to platforms 9 and above, you need to walk halfway down platform 8, continuing straight on past the Dalek toilets (it was directly underneath the sign for the gents, it looks like a Dalek, what else could it possibly be?*), and then turn left into another corridor.

This corridor winds around for a little while and then exhibits a peculiar phenomenon. The crowd surges down the corridor as it bends around to the left, but leaving an island of people a little further forward who haven’t moved left at all.

And there it was. Platform 9¾, which obviously is where I’d had to get the train to school from when I used to live in London as a kid, and look — conveniently — a luggage trolley has somehow become embedded in the wall as it has changed back to stone. Presumably some muggle must have got a hold of it when it was part-way through, and caused the magic to break. Or something*.

Unfortunately however, I didn’t have time to nip onto the Hogwarts Express, as I needed to get back home…

*a sign indicating ’showers’, I know!
**cynics would argue that if you look closely, it appears to be a cut-up trolley that is fixed to the wall, rather than being embedded within it. But they are just jealous because they are muggles and have never been to Hogwarts.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 18th, 2008 at 12:26 am and is filed under Life, Media, Oddities, Politics, Travel. You can follow responses via my RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your site.