Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

Peoplewatching!

As any commuter knows (well, any commuter who uses Waterloo or Victoria), Clapham Junction is a huge railway delta a couple of miles outside central London. It's where the lines from Kent and Surrey meet in one huge confusion of steel and sleepers before splitting off again to head up towards the termini. A lot of trains stop here as a convenience for passengers transferring between these major routes (few people actually exit the station), and immediately north of the station there are a lot of tracks running parallel to each other. This is superb territory for peoplewatching, as it's common to have trains running parallel to each other at low relative speeds.

Looking out of the window and across to other trains, it's striking how few people seem to be doing anything interesting. People who aren't reading a newspaper or a book are generally gazing into space. Very occasionally you'll see some people talking to each other, but more often the only conversations that are going on are between people and the disembodied entities at the other end of their mobiles. However dull the activities in which people are engaged, it's still strangely compelling to watch other people from such an unusual angle - it's almost as if you were looking out of the window and back at your own train, where everybody's doing the same mundane things.

It's very uncommon to find other people who are looking out of the window. Occasionally I'll look up and find someone looking back - when this happens I get a terrible urge to wave, but as the English are a reserved people I'd never dream of doing anything so, well, direct.

The whole thing reminds me of the time a child wrote into Jim'll Fix It to ask if Jim could fix it for the people on the trains that regularly passed the end of her garden to wave back for once - she always waved at the trains as they passed, but nobody waved back (miserable bastards). Well, after a bit of a talk with "our friends at British Rail" it was arranged, and one day she waved at a passing train (conveniently, a film crew just happened to have popped by) which, just that once, erupted into a sea of waving hands. I'm sure there's some deep philosophical meaning which could be read into the desire to have people on trains wave back, but it certainly made for damn good television (in a low-budget early-80s BBC kind of way).