Saturday 7 January 2017

A Country Boy's First Trip To The City

I remained a rather lonely misanthrope throughout the first year of university, and it was only as the year was drawing to a close that I began to hang out more with the likes of Olivia and Ted. Somehow Ted and I ended up agreeing to go to Paris on holiday together during the 1995 summer vacation (I say somehow, but I think he invited everyone in the room - including his girlfriend - and I was the only one to say yes). It thus became necessary to make My First Trip To London As An Adult. 

I took the coach from Leeds down to London, which is a miserable and long journey, and arrived at Victoria coach station completely overwhelmed by its size and complexity. I was at that stage a country boy who still considered Cambridge to be large and exciting, so suddenly finding myself in such a vast metropolis felt like I'd landed on Coruscant. 

I was to spend the evening at Punam's house, and was thus required to make the rather ordinary tube journey from Victoria to Finchley Central. This sounds pretty easy these days, but I recall walking down the steps underground to regard the tube system for the very first time and wondering whether or not it would just be easier to turn around and go straight back home. 

Acquiring a ticket was a serious mystery. Back then the machines were giant black mechanical monsters rather than touch screen computers, and you had to know stuff like how many zones you wanted to travel through and pull the appropriate lever, oil the grommet and crank the gears. I didn't even know what a zone was. Working out which colour line I needed was even more complex; there are literally a number of different tube lines in London. It also hadn't occurred to me that there would be trains travelling in each direction, and so rather than heading north I soon found myself at one point passing through Brixton. As the only thing I knew at that time about Brixton was it's role in the London riots, I felt a bit out of my depth.

After finally meeting up with Punam - who admitted she should have probably picked me up from Victoria, but had forgotten I was new to this sort of thing (this sort of thing presumably being modern life) - she took me into town to show me the highlights. We saw Big Ben, which was of course shorter than I'd expected, and then somehow later found ourselves on Oxford Street, where we explored Hamleys. 

It didn't take long for Punam to realise how uncomfortable I was riding on all of the escalators. We only had one escalator in my home town, at the Presto supermarket, and they never had it turned it on. Punam thus took me to John Lewis so I could spend a half hour practising mounting and dismounting the escalators there (a very wise choice, as John Lewis has escalators with a short warm up area before they actually turn into stairs, making it an ideal test ground). We also ate some food in the basement of Oxford Street Plaza, which at the time felt amazingly sophisticated, but looking back with the wisdom of an extra 22 years I now know to be a cheap and chavvy place I wouldn't ever think visit. 

Eventually we went back to Punam's house and met her parents, who were very jolly and spoke very little English (at least, in front of me). I recall Punam's mum was especially keen that I enjoy my visit, and at one point insisted I put my feet up on the coffee table. I was very comfortable as I was and said there was really no need, but so eager was she to be a good host that she physically took hold of my legs and lifted them onto the coffee table for me. I thus had to sit there for an hour, eating my noodle dinner, with my legs awkwardly and painfully propped up on the coffee table, to avoid causing offence.

In the morning, Punam took me back to the tube station, showed me how to buy my ticket and gave me strict instructions on how to get to Waterloo. I thus arrived at the Eurostar terminal without any problem, and promptly bumped into Ted who had been travelling on the exact same train. 

Rick & Ted's Tres Bonnes Adventure will, I assume, be documented as a separate memory at a random point in the future.

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