So, in a similar vein to my recent post, Friday night on the train… here is Bank Holiday weekend on the tube and yes, people do seem to behave even worse than in the week.
While I love football, I slightly hate some of the fans. Drunken, dribbly, shouty and absolutely no understanding of personal space. On a rammed tube carriage, personal space is limited at best. But if I had to endure one more large, stinky, drunken man leaning across me to yell at his friend on my other side I think I would have abandoned all self control and spontaneously burst into flames, and all of this was before midday. Thank goodness I didn’t get the tube after the matches had finished.
On a weekend you also have to accept that not a single person will wait for others to get off the tube before getting on – my number one tube etiquette rule. It just doesn’t happen on a Saturday and there are not enough seasoned commuters to make a stand so it’s best to just avoid the busier sections of the train if you value your own sanity.
One of the weirdest experiences I had on the tube this weekend, and one I’m pretty sure beats a lot of my other etiquette complaints was the sensation of being licked for three whole, long stops. That’s right. Thankfully it wasn’t a human guilty of such a blatant ignorance of personal space but it was still moderately disturbing. I was wedged in somewhere on the Central Line from Bank to Oxford Circus station when I felt my bare leg being energetically licked. I couldn’t actually tell who the culprit was as there was no spare space to see past other people’s backs, shopping bags and armpits, though I was pretty sure it was some sort of dog hidden somewhere nearby. I couldn’t even bend down to push the offending creature off.
As the journey went on, this licking became akin to a terrible case of the tickles and, as I was unable to move away from the source through sheer lack of space, it became more and more like some form of torture – think having little drops of water dripped continuously on one’s forehead without being able to move or brush it away.
I don’t know about you but I’m pretty conscious of the amount of germs on the tube at any given point let alone when these germs are quite obviously being concentrated on an area of my leg. I’m also pretty sure that letting your dog transfer the contents of his mouth on to another human being is fairly bad tube etiquette.
Thankfully at Oxford Circus the crowds poured off the tube carriage and it was indeed a very small dog that had taken such a liking to my leg. 20 minutes and three bacterial wipes (handy in the handbag for germ-infested tube journeys) later, I had almost recovered only to discover that the friend I was meeting found the whole thing hilarious rather than disturbing.
I won’t be travelling on the London Underground at the weekend again in a hurry. Weekdays are quite enough with or without animals (football hooligans or of the tiny four-legged kind) to contend with.
Laura King is the author of The Little Book of Tube Etiquette, available at Waterstones, Foyles, Amazon and now on Kindle.
Follow on twitter @LauraKing14
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