Snow Problem...

It's the 22^nd of December or if you have been watching South-East today as I have, the 5^th day of chaos. Yeah, take that advent, you haven't got a patch on BBC local weather news. On the fifth day of chaos South-Eastern Trains gave to me, 5 hour longer journey, 4 revised service routes, 3 stations closed, 2 press statements, and a rail service unable to cope when things get icy. I don't care about this of course, as I'm safe and sound back home with no real need for an efficient public transport system, in fact the most of my worries is how poorly my 5 days of chaos poem scanned. But this would be a whole different matter if I was in West Kent, then I'd have a much bigger problem. This problem would be angry commuters, second only to Londoners in their perceived right to have a huge moan about things beyond our control. Lines of them queueing up on station platforms looking cold, bedraggled and bewildered, unable to function without a double shot latte, stood around confusedly staring at screens pondering the implications of the delay to the 7:36 service to Charing X.

I'm unaware of how many of these commuters understand the finer workings of a rail network, but I'm guessing it's not all too many, and I'm guessing the ones who do possess such knowledge are probably rather cleverly keeping their mouths shut. You see, I am among the majority, in that I know very little about the rail network and the inner workings of a modern day train. But humour me for a minute if you will and let me outline what I do know about such things, and then in turn the reason why I would not have been queueing up to tell the news cameras how “ridiculous” this whole thing is. Firstly I know that rails are made of metal, metal which has a low latent heat and therefore in winter weather is likely to get rather cold. Secondly I know that in cold and wet conditions, it is possible that snow will fall, I know snow too is cold. I know that in consistently cold weather this snow can often turn to ice, particularly on surfaces which don't lend themselves to absorbing things, e.g. metal (stop me if you see where I'm going with this). Thirdly, I've seen videos as a school child urging me not to run across train tracks not only because of the potential zillions of vaults which could fry me in an instant but also because because trains are big and heavy and can be travelling at high speeds. This whole size thing is brilliant for transporting large quantities of people and the speed thing helps the train achieve this quickly. However, as with many things in life, this poses a problem, that is braking, slowing hundreds of tons of train down, with only a relatively small surface area on metal rails. However this feat is achievable, hence the birth of the train, Hooray!

When you throw ice into the mix though, things get a little more tricky, I've had the joy of being chauffeured around in a few cars in this recent spate of snow, and it's been tricky for cars to maintain control on icy roads. It's all a great deal of fun when you're young and on holiday. The potential for a car to become stuck in a snow drift and for you to have to push it out sounds more of a exciting challenge than a nasty threat, like one of those adventure holidays and I didn't spend a penny. But this is genuinely a problem for many people with cars, cars and snow on the whole do not mix. Now, trains are much much bigger that cars, and they have a much harder task when it comes to braking on rails, I can only imagine this job would be made much harder by ice on the rails (ice is slippery, I know that too). Trains much like cars have to share the same rails as other trains, those trains could be going slower than them, faster than them or even in a different direction to them. This is why trains have timetables, so that they don't accidentally bump into each other somewhere along the way. As a reminder, and a fail-safe mechanism, there are also a series of signals, much like traffic lights. Trains are required to stop at these when they are red (or double orange), which is fine. Providing they are travelling at the correct speed (pre-agreed on for that service on that route) they should be able to stop in plenty of time at these lights and avoid crashing. Unless of course there's something which hinders the brakes performance, for arguments sake, let's call this “ice”.

This “ice” means that trains must travel more slowly in order to brake for the lights, which makes train's journey times longer and also means they arrive less regularly at stations. This in turn makes commuters begin to speculate about the state of the nation, something they are only too good at, as any eves dropper on train journeys will tell you. The problem with their speculative efforts to improve things is, they are unwilling to ever arrive at the conclusion “This is nobody's fault, it's just one of those things that happens, There's nothing we can do and some people seem to be enjoying it so maybe I should just give it a rest”. This is much the same way as I feel about Big Brother or The Daily Mail. OK, so maybe I do think there are things that can be done about those two things, but they are at least under human control, the weather however, most certainly isn't.

So really, there's no scape goat for this problem of snow I'm afraid, you can try linking it the government, the rail services or join a wacky cult and pin it all on full body waxes and homosexuals, but it's not gonna make the blindest bit of difference. So this chaos, wait no, this mild problem that comes around maybe once every year for about a week, is something we largely just have to bloody well grow up and live with. I am aware that in countries like Germany, France, Austria etc... the public transport continues to run through tough weather conditions, but this is something that they experience every year, for months on end, and something which costs millions and millions of euros to deal with. It's going to be cheaper and easier in the long run for us to just wait the week out with a smile on our faces and try to remember that some people at least enjoy the snow. Whether it's a senile grandparent confusing song lyrics with what winter's were generally like all those years ago, or a school boy excited by the potential of missing double maths to smother snow in the face of his unknowing and now unhappy crush. There is an upside to snow isn't there? And listening to Christmas songs on your iPod at a chilly station a few days a year has to be better than standing around moaning to television cameras about someone or something that may or may not be linked to the snow, isn't it? Maybe I'm wrong, and moaning is just one of those guilty British pleasures, like queuing or... ah... well... moaning at the weather.

Seems I've been wrong all along then, as you were. But if it really is such a pleasure, could I ask that you crack a little smile or wink at the camera from now on please, just so we all know, it'd make the whole thing a lot more bearable.

Thanks.

So This Is Christmas...

...and what have you done? Well not very much to be honest, because as seems to be custom I've let other things get in the way. "Let" other things get in the way? I hear you ask - well I hear myself ask (split personality works well in monologues) - You shouldn't let a silly festival get in the way of the important things in your life, like work, hobbies and basic essentials. And you'd (I'd) be right there are things I 'need' to do and they should be the focus of my life at the moment. Anyway, Christmas tends to lose most of it's excitement when you want for more in your life than a new lego model. The streets are jammed with worried parents and relatives frantically working their way through lists trying to figure out just exactly what a their 15 year old god son they haven't seen in 3 years would want for Christmas, heaven forbid forgetting them, it's a middle class nightmare. For everyone trying to continue with their everyday life, well, they get caught up in all this muddle, parking spaces become scarce, short-cuts through shopping centres become just as long winded as the route you gave up doing 2 years ago and going for a lunchtime coffee becomes a futile task what with the hundreds of new stressed out customers littering the place with bags and small children. Then there's anybody who works in the retail industry, and that really is quite a lot of people. It becomes quite tricky trying to serve twice as many customers whilst there's an oversized Santa hat slowly working it's way down your forehead and itchy tinsel adorning every edge of clothing, not to mention the extra hours and having to navigate around that Christmas tree that there wasn't really any room for. It's enough to get anyone down really, no-one enjoys Christmas, we just go through the motions, or at least that's what I'm being told.

Every year the first Christmas advert hits the telly more prematurely than the last in a desperate bid to break the news first, as if the first place we see advertising Christmas deals is where we will go to buy everything we need. Anyone who has been or known a teenage boy will know it's usually closer to the reverse, if it's still got things left on Christmas Eve then it's getting business. The adverts are always filled with cheery shelf-stackers itching to fulfil their destiny of selling as many Bosch Power Drills as they can before the low low prices run out. Or the perfect housewife, who's left the creepy vanish lady at home babysitting the kids and laughing at stains in order to stock up on the joy that she can only find in spending vast amounts of money on the perfect offspring she's created, and the man with the face 10x smoother than that of every other. And it really doesn't matter how many celebrities want to be our best mate all of a sudden or how much time and effort has gone into creating an advert filled with merriment, it generally only elicits one response from people. "Oh no B&Q are wishing us glad tidings, it's that time again, there's no way we're re-tiling the bathroom this year then". It really is a stark reminder that the end of the year is coming and there's a million things (well a short list of things anyway) that you planned for that year that haven't been done, deadlines you haven't met and goals that weren't achieved.

So with the ever receding adverts comes the ever receding antidote, cynacism, the art of laughing about something whilst admitting defeat. Don't get me wrong I love it as much as the next person, better to laugh at these things than let them get you down, it's just, well they're getting earlier too. The first cynical article I read this year came out less than a week after I'd seen the first Christmas advert, it took the article to make me register that all this was going on. So I was sat at my desk reading this (and admittedly enjoying it) on the 18th of November, and the problem is, I wasn't even thinking about Christmas at that point. It was like a present that came too early, and so when Christmas does come round and I could do with a healthy dose of cynicism it will all have already gone. I should have saved it, I should refuse to look at anything relating to Christmas until it's within at least a few weeks of the actual event.

I didn't always think like this of course, I stopped enjoying Christmas as much in my late teens, because there was so much more that I had to do before I could be allowed to feel 'Christmassy'. There were the aptly named 'Christmas exams' to revise for, higher education's gift at this time of year, those and the coursework deadlines I got in a stocking. Thinking about Christmas then would be a distraction from what was important, it was a distraction from getting on with what I needed to do. By the time I was finished with all my work I had to schedule in a few late carol services, tune into every music channel available and generally flood myself with all things Christmas for the last few days in the lead up to the big day. However, I did get there, my blitzkrieg approach to Christmas worked, I've had consistently fun Christmas days as far back as I can remember. So I thought I had the solution, this was my approach to Christmas, a new and functional approach for the new and functional me, a way to fit in an enjoyable Christmas and deal with my responsibilities as well.

But this year something started to bother me about this, it was November and I was going through something I've come to call in recent years 'The November Blues'. You see, November has become the worst month of the year for me, I'm a student and it's around this point that everything starts getting very tense, my work load increases and my spare time and available money decreases. This year it was going to be worse than ever, the coursework deadlines I had were more important than those of previous years, money was tighter and the prospect of finding a job over the holiday's was getting slimmer and slimmer. I retreated to my room to start the inevitable and unavoidable climb towards the summit of the work mountain. Now, I could continue my mountain analogy by talking about how I was climbing solo, how I had no support line and the incoming blizzard meant I couldn't see past the ground in front of me. But this wouldn't be right, it would make it sound like I was left no choice in the matter, like I'd been abandoned and left to tackle all of this on my own. Truth is I was the one who'd cut the support ropes and I was too busy looking at the ground in front of me to check if anyone else was around. I thought this was what I needed to do, whereas in fact it just made work a slow and arduous task and it took one good day to stop me from giving up entirely, to stop me from saying "Christmas be damned, you're nothing but nonsense, a Capitalist ceremony to help companies reach their sales targets". It was on this day that I had a mini-eureka moment and decided on a new approach to the Christmas period.

The thing is, I'm afraid my first sentence was a little bit of a half lie, it's true that I haven't done much in terms of shopping etc... and I have been getting on with other things but it hasn't "got in the way" of Christmas at all, quite the reverse. You see, the decision I made late in November was that I could be as cynical about Christmas and all that entails until December, that would be my guilty pleasure, something to help me through the month and stop me from going bitter. But when December came round, I was going to leave the adverts alone, stop laughing at the silliness of it all and just enjoy it. I know it sounds crazy to just decide to enjoy something, but it's been a lot easier than I thought it would be. I've drunk mulled wine to warm me up, I've stopped to watch the street performers, I've smiled at the display of lights around the town centre. I've allowed all of these things to help "get me in the Christmas spirit" and it's worked, I feel more positive about the season now than I have done in years.

I still have a lot to do, I have a deadline coming up next week which I still have to do work for, then there's my ongoing research project, I have a last food shop to do and I haven't made a start to Christmas shopping yet. It's not going to break my back admittedly but it's still there nagging away at the back of my mind. But for the first time in years this doesn't bother me, I'm always going to have work to do and I'm always going to have various chores and upkeep to deal with, but now I'm in a Christmassy mood. I know that in a few weeks I'm going to be able to put my feet up in a warm house and spend time with friends and family, I'm going to have a real holiday, one where for just a bit I really forget about my responsibilities and enjoy myself. The thought of that is what's keeping me going, it's what now helps me work through my essays with a smile on my face.

I found what had been missing from Christmas these last few years and it was nothing external, it was me, I had been absent. I hadn't realised that "Tis the season to be jolly" was an instruction not an observation, it was a reminder for something I was actually meant to be doing. So I smile at the lady in the coffee shop wearing the flashing Santa hat and stop to applaud the magician in the shopping centre because being jolly makes things easier, and we need that at what's otherwise a very difficult time of year. So boo to the Humbuggery of the whole thing and screw the cynics because Christmas is what you make it and mine is going to be great.

Why I Love This City But I Couldn't Stay

 

I'm currently sat in my room in the vibrant heart of Plymouth, curtains shut, sat at a crudely lit desk with a half cup of orange juice beside me. I've switched to the orange juice since realising that my excessively late coffee drinking is why I find it hard to get to sleep before 5am - not because my house is haunted as some were suggesting - anyway tonight I'm aiming for 3. However, my coffee abuse aside for a minute, there is one other thing that is worrying me about the impending deadline that is 'my new bedtime'. For that I need to explain a little something about the Plymouth nightlife.

Plymouth essentially has three nightlife centres dotted around the city. There's Union Street; a parade of clubs that stretches from the town centre in search of the river Tamar, The Barbican; a slice of old town Plymouth with winding cobbled streets, old houses and an assortment of ever so slightly differing quaint pubs and trendy bars dotted along the Quayside, and North Hill; the student capital that runs alongside the university down towards the city centre and has a series of small to medium sized clubs all churning out more-or-less the same thing - student friendly drinks at student friendly prices. The former two are rarely visited by students, and as a student therefore rarely visited by me. Union St. has large clubs and can be good fun if you're in the mood for that kind of thing and there's a student night on in one of the clubs down there, but principally it is visited by Plymouth residents and Navy Crew. To understand why this becomes a problem you need to understand the not-so-complex relationship between the main 3 groups in the Plymouth area, (Janners, Navy Boys & Students) something I will come to shortly. The Barbican is too far for Navy types to venture to and typically too expensive for the students - "£3.00 for a vodka coke, you're having a fucking laugh, come on let's go to the SU" - or something along those lines. This leaves space for your more discerning local, in the fertile soils left untouched by the likes of "pound-a-pint" and "mobile burger vendors", comedy clubs, jazz cafes and restaurant-come-bars have sprung up. It is occasionally less reserved - Bank Holiday Sunday's have the reputation for leaving no stone, flower box or litter bin unturned - but on the whole this is a safe haven from the likes of the other two night scenes. Then finally just down the road there is North Hill, a stretch running from the student saturated neighbourhood of Mutley down past the University Campus and into the City Centre. As far as I'm aware this area is dominated entirely by by students, perhaps some young locals and a few navy boys in disguise occasionally sneak in early unnoticed to the student population, but this is certainly the students' stomping ground.

This is where I live, more precisely I live a few houses down from a club called Cuba, a club with two main selling points; 1. It has thin platforms with poles attached around the ground floor walls on which drunk girls (and perhaps just as commonly, drunk boys dressed up as girls) can be seen gyrating on. 2. It stays open till 5am. It's this second reason coupled with my single glazed window with a small hole in the frame (allowing 24 hour ventilation) which is worrying me about my task of falling asleep by 3am. Students may not be the rowdiest of drunks, but they sure are persistent and even a Sunday night/Monday morning is orchestrated with the faint sound of distant shouting, laughing and arguing (not to mention the wheely bins which as a result, spend most of their life lying on their back thinking of England while the perpetrators carry on unfazed up the road.) This brings me neatly back to a point I promised I would cover earlier, the 3 main groups of people living in Plymouth, so here's how it works.

Janner is the colloquial term for a Plymothian, they are typically born in Plymouth or the surrounding area and have subsequently spent most of their lives there - Plymouth, not unlike my own hometown is not typically somewhere you leave. Wikipedia tells me there are a good 250,000 Janners currently living within the city limits and, like people from most places, they are a mixed bunch. On the whole they are not as well off as their nearest neighbours, Exeter, and more-or-less untouched by immigration into the UK, but there's still plenty of variation within the City. Plymouth has been a Naval base and a port for a very long time indeed and while Janners don't always see eye-to-eye with Navy types they certainly have learnt to share their city with them and tolerate them. In turn, the navy respect the residents' right to call the city home and use this neutral standpoint to trade for the goods that seafarers have for thousands of years, alcohol and women. Students however are different, Plymouth University has only existed in it's current state (as a University) for 17 years and is now one of the largest in the country (currently ranked 5th with a student population of 30,000). This means that your average Janner can remember a time before the University and certainly can remember a time when it was not such a large part of the city. In typical human fashion, nostalgia paints a beautiful portrait of "the old days" leaving today's problems however petty and unavoidable as a perceived product of 'change'. Students who now colonise the City centre are certainly part of this change and this probably explains a large part of the animosity towards them from the more long-standing factions. This is by no means the only reason, a walk down North Hill on a Saturday/Sunday morning, or worse still, in the wake of a Fresher's week can show another key reason for this clash between the old and the new, students are generally messy and disrespectful of the city. While the old Plymouth streets were never paved with gold, I doubt that they were adorned with last night's half digested kebab, or the shoe that didn't quite make it home either - respect is earned, not given, something which your average student knows all too well but is still a way from learning.

So student's have learnt to live in the city but not with it, certain areas are free for everyone to enjoy, while other's become available on certain days. This is quickly learnt by new students and they soon become aware that living within these boundaries is not only possible, but easily achieved and likely to result in an enjoyable university experience. And so (apologies to my year 2 teacher for using 'and' to start a sentence. But notice how I haven't started any with 'but'.) the whole thing perpetuates itself, each year in turn passing on the guidelines to the years below slowly etching away at the divide that exists between the students and the rest of the city.

This, is the first reason I love and yet could never stay in this city. I've only ever lived in a bit of it. The city I've met and enjoyed time in is not the city I would live in after leaving the University. I have no experience of what it's like to live in an outer suburb, shoulder to shoulder with local residents, I haven't even caught a bus here yet. I know very little of the geography of the city despite my efforts to learn all the place names on google maps and seeing the city from the safe distance of a friend's car seat whenever possible. It doesn't make sense to me yet and I'm not sure that it ever will, not because I think it would be a particularly complicated place to understand (it seems far from it) but because I don't think I will ever make the effort to understand it, and the reason for this lies not within it's local geography, but within it's geography over a broader area, in relation to the rest of the country.

My first visit to Plymouth was not in the winter of 2006/2007 when I came to look at the University for the first time but in fact many years earlier, as a day trip, as part of a family holiday to Cornwall. For those of you who are unable to place Plymouth accurately on a map (don't worry I couldn't before I came here) it lies on the border of Devon and Cornwall on the peninsula that juts out below Wales into the far south-west of the UK. It is as I like to call it, the gateway city to the end of the earth, slow down now or your liable to simply fall off the edge of the jagged cornish rocks that mark the end of the road. Of course this is a complete lie, the cornish rocks don't mark the end of the road, the roads stop as soon as you pass Plymouth and are replaced with small tracks which are strangely large enough for farm vehicles but too small for cars. Some would argue the roads stop even earlier than that, the last motorway was gone a hundred miles back as you passed Exeter and this should have given you a sign of what was to come. The point that Highway Maintenance were trying to make to you as you left the last blue line on the map was that you were escaping mainland UK. You're leaving all of that behind and entering a new place, and what's more you didn't even have to bring a passport.

It's for this reason that the far South-West has become such a popular holiday destination for British residents hell-bent on escaping for a week or two but unable, unwilling or uninterested in travelling abroad. Some would argue that it's the beautiful moors, long sandy beaches with excellent surf and numerous campsites and holiday parks that swathe across the region that make it such a tourist hot spot, and they'd have a point, I mean, it's certainly why my parents took me as a child. But there are other parts of the UK with equally picturesque landscapes. As a young child I would often go to beaches in Bournemouth and Poole and to the New Forest to see wild horses and attack invisible soldiers with sticks. I'm sure the same is true for a lot of children across the UK and so, for me the defining feature of the south-west and what makes it so different from any other area is it's separateness. It's the conservatory that the UK built when it tired of everyday life and wanted somewhere nice to sit in the summer months, and when winter comes around it goes quiet again. I can't live in the quiet, a fact I've been reminded of frequently in recent months as I remind my brother of every travelling musician that stops for the night in his city, who I've convinced myself I would have gone to see if they came to mine. And (sorry again miss) I wouldn't go see them all, far from it, I know this deep down but I don't think it's really this that bothers me, it's being so far away from it all. In the last two years I've entertained thoughts of travelling to Bristol to see some live music, an expensive 300 mile round trip, which truth be told is never going to be worth the time and money I spend on it. And so in these winter months I feel like the cold feet at the end of the bed, so far from the heartbeat that drives the country, alone, peeping out of the end of the duvet waiting for the summer.

I know that all sounded very gloomy for a minute and I don't see it like that all the time, I still live in the centre of a city with lots of people around me and plenty of things to be getting on with - an undergraduate degree should keep you busy at least part of the time otherwise it's not really doing it's job. Some people would thrive on this lifestyle, living in a city with all the benefits of a 24h superstore and a reasonable public transport system but with the quiet that comes from a place which for most of the year isn't a half-way-house or another stop on a tour around the UK. Hooray for them, if nothing else I've found your Mecca, a city nestled away in amongst a beautiful landscape with a rich history and a bright future, and all this in a place that you'd be hard-pressed to come across by accident. But (that's it I've blown it now, 6/10) it's not for me thanks, like crocs, I've tried them, they were comfortable and I'm all for saving the environment, but I'll never buy a pair.

In short, this city has a place in my heart, but not in my future. I've no doubt I'll come back to visit it again, perhaps even with a family of my own, and I'll remember it fondly, talk about it with a smile on my face and remember all the good memories I have of it. That's all it can be for me though, a fond memory.