Kevin Myers recounts his sweltering train journey in Britain last weekend.
On the sound principle that nothing comforts quite so much as another's discomfort, let me tell you about a train journey from Brighton to London last weekend, when temperatures reached the highest levels ever recorded in Britain.
As you know, Brighton is beside the sea, and tens of thousands of Londoners had fled there to escape the abominations of their city.
However, Brighton was also hosting the "Pride" festival for homosexuals that day. ("Pride" is going the way of "gay" these days, and it normally means lots of tight white T-shirts, little moustaches and, of course, "cute buns", homosexualists apparently being much given to cunning patisserie.)
So, by late on Saturday evening, thousands of sweltering people had gathered at Brighton railway station to return home.
Now there is an iron law of railway management which was minted even as Stephenson's Rocket tootled its first toot: it is that when vast numbers of people wish to travel by rail, managers start cancelling trains. This is what their DNA is coded to do. It has nothing to do with logic or reason; it just is.
By 10.40, instead of the expected half-dozen, there were only two London-bound trains remaining, one standing at the platform. Many people fought their way on to that train; others decided to wait for the next one. Then someone in railway management decided to have a really good laugh, and cancelled the final train of the day. So everyone rushed onto the already overfilled train.
This finally departed 20 minutes late, packed like the contents of a tin of cheap dog-food - all hair and gristle and grease - while passengers inhaled one another's armpits, and those other conjunctions of limb and torso. At Redhill the train stopped for half-an-hour, without explanation. (Not explaining, like train-cancelling, is encoded in the double-helix of railway management.)
The heat and congestion were now unbearable, and people opened the carriage doors. The driver then declared he couldn't start until the doors were all closed. So everyone sucked in their tummy muscles, the doors were closed - and, quite predictably, the train stayed where it was. Pubic hair began to migrate in frantic lumps, like rats leaving a burning building; the heat rose; and temperatures frayed. Finally, the train began to move - back towards Brighton.
Uproar, bedlam, pandemonium, with much weeping and gnashing of teeth, until a hand reached up from the knotted throng of wet and steaming bodies and despairingly yanked the communication cord. The train stopped, and the driver spoke to his passengers. For the first time in the history of railways, the leaves-on-the track explanation was not given for what he was doing. Because of the heat, the line ahead had buckled, and they were simply going back to connect with another line to London.
At 1.25, over an hour after they should have reached the centre of London, the train stopped at Purley, in the remote southern outskirts of the capital. Paramedics came aboard to treat the gravely dehydrated, while some young men, being young men, fought anyone they could, merely to while away the sweltering wait. At length, the train once more began to inch onward.
At East Croydon, the train stopped again. Naturally. Dear me, don't want to get a reputation for punctuality, now do we? And here some railway staff started to distribute bottles of water on the platform, so triggering a stampede out of the carriages. Followed by more fights.
Police arrived and order was restored. It was now past two in the morning, the temperature in the train was in the hundreds, and many of the passengers were keening and gibbering, while the more distracted were idly munching on lengths of track. So it probably seemed a good idea for the driver to point to another train on a far platform which was also bound for central London. Hundreds of exhausted, sweating passengers promptly charged towards the other train, tumbling over one another in their haste.
There is a simple rule here, which goes back to the days of the Stockton and Darlington railway, and it goes as follows: at the very moment that the maximum number of passengers are equidistant between two trains, both locomotives depart, leaving the stranded humans baying brokenly, like animals stranded on an ice floe. In this ideal scenario, there is no further train until the milk train at dawn. There are no taxis outside; no benches to sit on; the waiting-room and the snack bar are locked; the lavatories are overflowing; the telephone kiosks are vandalised; there is no signal on passengers' mobile phones. They are doomed. Doomed. DOOMED!
Alas, this didn't happen; so we'll just have to settle for reality. With passengers thus aboard, the two trains finally slunk off towards Victoria station, exuding rage and sweat, arriving there shortly before 3 a.m. At this point, irate passengers attempted to hunt down, kill and eat the squealing, scattering railway employees, who, as George Stephenson rightly insisted, are best lightly grilled over an open furnace; which is why true railway aficionados bitterly lament the death of steam.
Order was finally restored by fresh waves of baton-charging policemen. So, some six hours after they had first arrived at Brighton station for the swift hop up to London, the footsore, hallucinating travellers limped out onto the streets of London, clutching in their hands complaint forms which had been given them by some uneaten railway staff, and which asked: Is there something you'd like to tell us?
There now. Doesn't that make you feel better?