I have started 2005 on a scary tube journey with 400 scary people. London Transport kindly publicise their free all night travel for New Years night, the tubes running all night instead of shutting at half twelve and completely free.
The first promise of 2005 is broken when at 5am I get to Brixton tube to find the barrier gates shut and demanding I pay £2.20 for a ticket. But I have been out all night I’m tired and want to go to bed, £2.20 is small price to pay to get back home.
Problem is, there are only a couple of ticket machines working and a lot of mashed up people queuing for them.
I feel out of place.
For new year I decided to go somewhere a wee bit different, I decided to go to Torture Garden, the worlds most famous fetish club type affair. It was a fun night, but now, stood on my own in pvc trousers in a scary Brixton tube station full of guys in tracksuits and cream jeans staring at me. I wished I’d stayed in and watched Jools Holland’s Hootenanny.
So after queuing and keeping myself to myself and cursing myself for letting my flatmate rush me earlier that evening when it was last year so that I’d forgotten to think about packing a change of clothes for this very time I head down the escalator to dubious looks.
I’m hoping that I an find a quiet carriage and fall asleep and doze off. But the not really free tube is also not really running, lots of people milling about and 1 train about every 20 minutes.
The platform is busy and everyone appears to be chewing off their own faces and gurning in the style popular these days, and not of the rubbery faced old men that used their face of and in a tracksuit.
I too am chewing my face, well but now I just want to shut my eyes and sleep until Angel.
I can’t work out why everyone is in tracksuits, and they all seem to be 14. , I’m not even talking fashion bling type tracksuits, these are just tracksuits. what club have they been going to that combines drugs and exercise? There are hundreds of them, probably, now I’m typing this up the memory is all a bit vague. The train slowly lurches off from the platform heading north. I am being looked at and realise again that my problem is I’m too alternative (what a wanky wanky word) for normal life, but when in somewhere like Torture Garden I’m too normal for these truly alternative people – I’m stuck in the middle and am now sounding like a goth. I don’t feel bad about this. Just interested.
The train finally pulls into Euston and I can get off and change for the Northern line, only another 12 minute wait, I could walk it home, but in my big boots and tired state I sit on a bench and wait for the tube making chit chat to similarly tired people.
Once home I make a big cup of tea and promptly fall asleep finding it next to my bed stone cold when I wake up at about 3pm.
Happy 2005.