I am the most unsophisticated traveller I know. Forget idiot abroad, I am idiot at home. I have downloaded a mobile app that literally guides me to my intended destination. The little man flashes his field of vision and I follow it like a dim-witted sheep. Recently I have been required to venture into the depths of Londontown to meet with clients for work. This means panic stations as I try to figure out the logistics required to reach each destination. Piccadilly Line (or Piccalilli Line as I call it) Circle Line, City Line, District Line, overground, underground. So many routes, so many colours, directions headed east or west, the London Underground Tube Map looks like a psychedelic drawing by that creepy kid in the white dress with the limp hair from The Ring. To me it’s disturbing and completely devoid of logic. To 29 million other travellers, it appears to hold some meaning. Funny that.
The Citymapper mobile app is a godsend for directionless cretins like me. I find myself literally holding my phone in front of me as I follow the directions. I look like the Queen of tools though. The mummy pose never quite made it to the high street – although when I look at twerking that surprises me somehow. When first I was following my dude on my screen, I worried that my phone was too visible and someone might nick it so I tried to be discreet and hold it lower, which meant I smashed into people, bins, poles. A class act indeed. I’d bumped into every trashcan in Euston, ten mobsters and as many Russian mail-order brides, before it suddenly dawned on that I wasn’t in Africa. I didn’t need my cellphone buried deep in my bra or safely stowed in my handbag looped 8 times around my shoulder. People I pass here are either thumbing on their phones or Spotifying through their earphones. Mobile phones are as common as Miley Cyrus’s performance at the MTV Music Awards last Sunday. No one swipes out of your hand here. I’ve got more chance of being knifed because I rammed into someone. A cellphone smash and grab Saffa style is very unlikely. Theft is another kind of weird in London - I recently heard of someone who was mugged on the Tube and her assailant asked for a hug after he’d taken her cash. He stole her cellphone, but did her the courtesy of removing her sim card so she’d keep her contacts. The whole transaction was was very polite and efficient. Very British. Poms don’t like mess or fuss. Even thieving ones it appears.
So by the time I arrive at each meeting, I feel as though I’ve given birth. And the proper way. Not my wussy Caesar births. I hope to breeze into each meeting fresh and confident. The truth is I scream in, head for the nearest loo, mop my brow, change out of my slops into proper shoes and give my underarms special attention with a fire hydrant sized deo I carry. There’s nothing bright or breezy about that.
When you’re vulnerable you take note of the signs. I’ve learnt that I mustn’t force my body in between the train’s doors when they’re closing. I mustn’t run for the train. I mustn’t stand with my daughter’s pram too close to the edge of the platform. I must mind the gap. I must watch my possessions on the train. I mustn’t litter. I must give up my seat for either an aged, disabled, pregnant person or one carrying a child. Or any of that combination thereof I’m guessing. I mustn’t vandalise the Tube. I must carry my ticket at all times. I can’t throw myself off the platform. Nor can I throw any item or person off the platform. Unless you’re a destructive, absent-minded, selfish, disrespectful, suicidal or homicidal manic, these signs seem pretty straightforward. Only sign I haven’t come across yet is one that reads: “Lost? Clueless? Foreign? Come and talk to me. I’ll help. You can cry. It’s ok.” I’ll keep looking for it. It’ll be the sign that I head to every time. My default sign.
Last weekend, we were driving on a highway from Cambridge back to Windsor. Every so often there are signs for what they call “Services” where you pull over and can refuel in petrol, coffee and all manner of overpriced road-trip fare. The British version of Shell Ultracity or Engen Quikstop. We stopped soon into our journey because my son was starting to wig out and his motion sickness meds hadn’t reduced him to the same zombie state that they’d achieved for my daughter. We couldn’t dump him on the side of the A11, which is what we wanted to do. So we figured we’d feed him instead. I bought a 500ml coke zero which I drank pretty much before we’d left the parking lot. After 15 minutes of travel small-talk, I said to my husband “I really need the loo. I wonder where the next Services sign is?” Considering that we’d just pulled off at one, my chances of another anytime soon were slim. I kept hoping though as we drove that a sign would come. Hope turned to desperation. And then it got ugly.
It was when I had reached gooseflesh and tingly hair stage that I suggested that we pull over on the side of the highway. My husband chuckled until he realised that I was ‘ready to pee in seat now’ serious. He said, “Sal, this is England. You can’t just pull over and pee on the side of the road. It’s not done. People don’t do that here. I’ve never even seen a car on the shoulder of the highway, let alone someone squatting. There are probably cameras anyway.” He carried on driving - smugly confident that I’d been suitably shamed into holding it for just a little bit longer. I took the opportunity to remind him he had two options. He could witness his wife wet herself in a car 40 minutes from home and spend the next 50 years with that mental image. Or he could pull over and risk the highway patrol arresting me for dropping my drawers. He pulled over. I had the fastest wee of my life, perched in between two open car doors, protecting as best I could my lily white derriere from highway view. My husband slouched lower in his seat like a gangsta, pretending to have no knowledge of what was happening to his left. I vaulted back into the car and we were off. I had polluted the blessed English countryside. And there were no police sirens wailing in hot pursuit. No coppers with truncheons. The sky did not fall Chicken Little. Fancy that. Guess what we saw though literally two minutes after pulling back onto the highway? Yip you guessed it – the Services sign. Taunting in its overtness.
So I’m six months in – and clearly no wiser to any signs. Literal or otherwise. I got stung by a nettle on Monday. Stung by a hornet on Wednesday. Is that a sign of more stings to come? One more perhaps? Or have I been stung enough? I joked that the third sting may be SARS as I’ve got to submit my tax return soon. Or it could be a sign from the British traffic police that my indecent exposure and desecration of a public road was captured by one of the 19 million cameras along the highway routes in the UK. They know what I did. They will come for me in their own time. Once they’ve got some manpower after chasing the knife-wielding yobs. I’ll watch out for any sign of their arrival. Then I’ll hide. Probably in a Tube Station with a couple million tourists. Until then – I’m all signed out. Clearly.
