On a ruinous roll of the dice, you and the rest of the legion of the damned pile into the only train that looks likely to ever leave this station. But of course it’s held on the platform until every last cubic millimetre of air has been squeezed out by desperate wedging of bodies. And still it doesn’t move.
You hang onto a dream that if you can just reach Liverpool Street you will find a magical land where various trains work and people smile, maybe read a paper and offer each other the spare seat. But when you finally get there, it’s five or six people deep the length of every platform. People aren’t moving down inside the carriages, despite a barrage of abuse, because they’re “getting off at the next stop”. You manage not to slap them by nurturing the distant recollection that it’s not their fault as you lever your overheated brain inside the closing door.
After sprinting the last mile you arrive wild-eyed, sweating, dishevelled and 10 minutes late at your appointed venue – only to find your work colleague calmly sat at a table by himself, happily polishing off what looks to have been an amazing breakfast. Where is the banker? Oh, he messaged to say he’s stuck in traffic.
“I made the mistake of getting a taxi,” explains the banker, when you’re all sat down together with coffee. “When I lived in London I’d never have done that. But living in the UAE it’s a more sedentary life and you forget these things.”
Conversation goes from customary pleasantries to catching up, turns to the push for democracy in Hong Kong and then to the business of Middle East debt origination and its place in the global market.
But something has been jogged in the mind of the banker by this morning’s travelling experience – and after a time he returns to this. He recalls a time he found himself in the far flung reaches of Evansville, Indiana, on a trip to visit the consumer lending offices of insurer American International Group (AIG).
The taxi that turned up to collect him at the airport was, he says, a wreck, its driver a lookalike of the eponymous hero in My Name is Earl. In the passenger seat was the driver’s larger than life girlfriend.
“Hope you don’t mind, she just along for the ride.”
It was only once the car started on its way that the banker realised he could see the ground – and a lot of it – moving fast below his feet. He hung on to whatever looked most securely attached and prayed for deliverance.
Perhaps London transport isn’t so bad after all.