Barefaced Lies and Boogie-Woogie Boasts by Harriet Vyner

Author:Harriet Vyner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd

Noda Taxis

Although the first show made an impact, The Tube’s reputation had to build slowly, week by week. Television programmes are like records or concerts: you can’t rely on doing just one fantastically and then sit back and bask in the admiration, you have to carry on and do lots more, and not all of them will be as good. Anybody under the illusion that one great success will do the trick has missed the point.

Paula and I got into a routine. We would meet under the big clock at King’s Cross station on a Thursday morning to take the ten o’clock train up to Newcastle. I’ve loved King’s Cross station ever since I first saw it in The Ladykillers. To this day I think of it as rather a romantic place, especially at that time of the morning. Then, it was much seedier, with many of the creatures of the night still hanging around – not that it’s much more salubrious now, but one thing that has changed for the worse is that they’ve taken out the lovely clacking signs informing passengers of the stops on their journey and replaced them with digital ones. There are some great improvements to the quality of our lives in the modern world – I know somebody who had a successful cataract operation the other week which took twenty minutes, and the Channel Tunnel and mobile phones are really great – but these digital signs are a step down. I don’t know why they got rid of the old ones, because the stations and towns have remained the same. The train’s been doing that route for almost a hundred years; that’s what’s good about it.

After we’d met Paula would go and buy herself some magazines for the journey and sometimes she would kindly buy me some nudey glamour magazines at the same time. She knew I wasn’t going to try and chat her up, because we were friends; she was one of my best female platonic friends. But being impeccably behaved, I assume she would buy me these just to give me an outlet should the need arise. I always accepted them politely; I thought it would be rude to do otherwise.

We would then travel up on the train together. I used to love the journey, having breakfast and passing through Cambridge shire and Peterborough, and then on to Lincolnshire. I found this countryside rather romantic and used to say, ‘Shall I just pull the communication cord so we can jump off the train and run across the fields and see where we end up?’ Paula would answer, ‘No, because we’d just end up at some really horrible fucking pub in the middle of nowhere that you’d like and I’d hate.’ So we never did.

Then, arriving at Newcastle station would be like arriving in a 1950s film; there’d be porters with uniforms and trolleys, properly dressed gents on their way down to London for the day, some nurses, people from the armed forces, the odd beggar.

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