Episode 1 : Introduction & prologue

February 2020: Why the end of the line Tube stations?.

INTRODUCTION

“This the end,  beautiful friend…” 

The End, Jim Morrison, The Doors, 1967

‘Life’ll kill ya” 

Life’ll kill ya, Warren Zevon, 2020

​​Did you ever wonder about those stations at the very end of the London Tube line map? No? Well maybe you were too busy; too immersed in getting to and from work; wondering if that man/woman/person/them/they/it sitting opposite you thought dressing that way was cool; thinking about how you’d like more/ less sex; your ingrowing toenail; your outgoing daughter/son’s too much/too little sex life; or just what the hell is that pain in your back/bowel/heart? No matter - maybe now I’ve drawn your attention to those end of line stops you can start to wonder why you have never thought about them? Unless of course you live at or near them in which case you’ll be even more irritated by this rather facile opening - but don’t turn away. 

The famous London Tube map which started me on this project  (quest? madness?) is not accurate in any geographical sense.  It is a canny piece of graphic design, evolved over time and only vaguely represents the twisty truth of how the network actually runs underground. In some places it is at total odds with reality¹. The significance of the map’s deception only came to me one night in January 2022 after having, yet again, rather drunkenly failed to explain to friends what this book might be about, I realised that, like the Tube map, the ‘book’ (whatever…) would inevitably end up as a gloss, a device which perhaps will conceal as much as it reveals - or possibly reveal as much as it conceals.  

I set out with a vague idea of saying something about London (and my life/death - God help us) by trying to capture some moments of journeys, some thoughts about places, perceptions, people and ideas. The resulting set of pages with crisp lines of words (especially if actually published and printed) might (note might) give the bookshop browser (or more likely Safari surfer) the impression that there was some clarity here, some sort of shape to be understood. But if such a hypothetical reader or potential reader were to draw this conclusion they would be misled. At the point where I write this now it seems to me the whole thing can only be a muddle - perhaps a glorious muddle².  

And whereas the Tube map does help get one from A to B - this book certainly will not. 

PROLOGUE

February 2020 

A needle in the tongue

For 25 minutes the consultant had stuck long fine needles into my arms and legs and run increasingly strong electric currents through them. It had been horribIy painful and I remember thinking I would have not made it as a spy - I’d have told everything I knew rather than face any kind of torture. Then he came towards me with a long needle and said he had to put this in my tongue…

I opened my mouth to say ‘no fucking way’ and he’d done it - he had actually put a long needle right down my tongue. Physically it was painless but mentally it was agony. I was haunted by ball clenching flashbacks for the next few weeks - writhing at the image of this huge needle sliding into my tongue.

It was the last test and I lay back exhausted.  Dr ?? then told me that he didn’t think I had Motor Neurone Disease  (the diagnosis I had been living with for the past three months) because the tests had not shown any deterioration in my nerve conduction. He went on to say that Parkinson’s Disease was more likely but that would need more tests etc etc.  I walked out, shakily, with a whole new prospect to process. I was probably not going to die in three years - which was good.  But from what I had read on Parkinson’s I was probably going to become an increasingly doddery old invalid - which was not good - and with none of the cachet of a terminal illness. 

The initial diagnosis of Motor Neurone disease had been shocking and exciting. This was big, my life expectancy had suddenly dropped to a few years. I’d have locked in syndrome,  lying in bed communicating via a computer controlled by eye movements. “To die would be an awfully big adventure” was a line I’d liked, and regularly misquoted, since I’d heard it spoken by Jean Arthur as Peter Pan on a 1950’s recording of Leonard Bernstein’s musical of the same name.  A brilliant production with Boris Karloff as Captain Hook and Mr Darling. Now the adventure had really arrived - or so I had thought for three months until the episode with the needle and the tongue.  I returned home from the hospital shocked, relieved, shaken and confused.

Coming up in the next post: From Devon to Camden and a book emerges

1. The very British amateur vs management muddled evolution on the Tube map is well described in the excellent Londonist.  https://londonist.com/2016/05/the-history-of-the-tube-map.

2. “‘Tis a muddle…” one of my favourite observations on life - a phrase I took from the maddingly lugubrious Stephen Blackpool in Dickens’ desperately downer Hard Times. I detested the gloom of the book as a teenager but hung on to the quote.  As I have the insight into my own detached personality provided by the jaded aristo James Harthouse from the same text - who had a  “...cavity where his heart should have been…had [it] not been whistled away,”  I remember being simultaneously shocked and attracted by this wasted young man.