Going Underground

< A North London ponce, yesterday

I searched high and low today, and in the end discovered, via Claire's work colleague, that:

One of the escalators at Angel tube station is the longest in Western Europe.

To be honest, I think this was nothing more than territorial braying from the north-of-the-river mob she works with. Haven't got Brixton Academy though, have ya? Ha! Although to their credit, they also don't have Brixton in general. Or the soul-sapping crawl down the digestive tract of the Northern Line on their way home.

I've always had a sad obsession with the Tube - the fancy coloured lines, the way the big escalators make your head go funny when you look behind you (though I've never travelled along the Angel one - it's 60 metres long apparently, and hopefully dubbed 'The Eliminator' at the station entrance). My Tube love stems from staying with my sister when I was little - I can still recall her weary mutterings as I demanded to go on the Tube for the fifth day in succession. "But where do you want to go?" "Don't care. Tube time!".

This childlike curiosity survived adult visits to London but has been truly crushed by commuting, although I have noticed that even it's bleary-eyed regulars still maintain an interest: the 'columnist' section of the free paper seems to feature little but people's observati0ns on various mundane aspects of the network. It seems odd to me that to take your mind off being stuck on the Tube, they choose to publish wild-eyed rantings about tourists standing on the left side of the escalators, or people taking more than half a second to go through the barriers when they get off. I thought the idea would be escapism; instead it seems that commuters follow that oddly British tradition of secretly revelling in their torment. Either that, or everyone is secretly thinking - as the train shudders to a halt in a pitch-black tunnel and the lights flicker out - "I'm on the Tube! Wow..."

P.S. I'm sure nobody's read down this far, but just so you know - the longest escalator in the world is at Park Pobedy station, which is not in a kids' TV programme, but is instead in Moscow. It's 126m long, twice the length of anything you'll find in that dump north of the river...