Underground Overture

Six days a week, forty-odd weeks a year, I travel on the underground from my home in Stratford, East London, to my place of work in Chelsea. I take an overground train, the 7.54 usually, from Maryland Station one stop to Stratford, where I change on to the Central Line. I travel one stop further west to Mile End, where I change again. These first two trains are generally very crowded, and it is not always possible to get on. But generally I'm able to plead or bully my way to Mile End by about 8.05 each morning. The District Line, which I change on to here, runs along the river, skirting the southern periphery of the city and the West End. It's a marginal line, busy only between Embankment station and South Kensington, where I disembark. A westbound train will gather commuters from Estuarial Essex, at Tower Hill (close to Fenchurch Street); from Kent, at Monument and Embankment (serving London Bridge and Charing Cross Stations, respectively) and from everywhere else at Victoria, gateway to Sussex and the rest of the world, via Gatwick Airport.

The carriages are bigger than on most of the Underground network and the service is frequent. It's usually possible to get a seat, if not at Mile End, then at Whitechapel where many commuters disembark for the Royal London Hospital and, once it reopens, for the East London Line.

London is the most ethnically and socially diverse city on Earth. I thought it might be interesting, instructive even to pay attention to exactly whom I'm travelling with on a daily basis. No-one wants to be interviewed on their way into work, before they've had their morning coffee, no-one wants to be shaken from a post-coital reverie by a fool with a dictaphone. And there might be fifty people even on a relatively empty tube carriage. So I've decided to restrict my study (a grand name for a little thing) to physical observation of the person sitting exactly opposite me. This morning I began to scribble in the Moleskine.