Leave our tube stickers alone!

I've had countless texts and emails this week asking if I've had anything to do with the mysterious stickers popping up all over the London Underground.

Some examples:

"No eye contact. Penalty £200."

"We apologise for any incontinence caused during these engineering works."

"Peak hours may necessitate you let other people sit on your lap."

At first glance, they may seem like the normal health and safety messages but if you read them properly, they are guaranteed to make you smile.

I have several thoughts about this.

Firstly, to the killjoys who claim this is 'graffiti' and that they are expensive to remove I say leave them. If we can have a giant bronze dog turd classed as art in the Turner Prize, then these certainly qualify as urban art.
Whoever is making these stickers is doing a pretty good job of getting them to blend in and look authentic. They hardly look like the normal 'woz ere' graffiti scrawlings across the windows and doors.

Secondly, we all know etiquette on the tube is poor. These can act as lighthearted etiquette reminders.

Thirdly, it's about time people had fun on their daily commute. Price rises, squashed carriages and constant disruptions to journeys give us enough to frown about. Let these stickers turn those frowns upside down.

So, to whoever is 'going underground' in guerilla stickerfare, keep doing it. It's making us smile, and on the Tube that's a rare thing.

If anyone has new examples - please send them in. I'll re-post the best ones.

Laura King is the author of The Little Book of Tube Etiquette, published by Gibson Publishing and available at Waterstones, WH Smith and most online retailers.
www.gibsonpublishing.co.uk

Footballers, Tubes and Twitter nonsense...

A tenuous Tube link but rolling with it…

So what started as a good idea for some positive PR - down to earth England football manager uses tube train with civilians shocker – became a PR disaster for Roy Hodgson this week when he stupidly discussed Rio Ferdinand’s future with other passengers, allegedly before talking to the man himself about it.

Five years ago he’d probably have got away with it. But in a world where every comment made is replayed to millions of people around the world in very real time, there were obviously going to be repercussions.

Not a great example to set to the hoardes of English footballers currently finding extra fame for their big mouths.

Not a week seems to pass when we don’t hear about a stupid remark made on Twitter for example, most of them by footballers.

Joey Barton, Ashley Cole and even Rio Ferdinand himself have amassed large followings and all have been in trouble recently for their less than thoughtful and in Barton’s case, just plain provocative, Twitter diatribes.

Rio Ferdinand spent more of the European Championships carrying a huge chip on his shoulder that he wasn’t selected (forgetting that his own manager Sir Alex had said he wasn’t fit enough to go just days earlier), than he did supporting his ‘beloved country’.  And of course, his hypocrisy knows no bounds – the ‘choc ice’ comment on Twitter was epic stupidity given the ongoing racism court case.

Last week Ashley Cole managed to lambaste the FA’s publicised findings on the John Terry case by tweeting ‘so I’m a liar am I @FA? Bunch of t**ts’ or something similar.

Honestly, if I was a football manager I’d ban my players from being on Twitter at all. They get paid enough to give up their right to the social networking site and most people are forbidden from personal opinions about the industry they work in. Can you imagine if I called my boss or the property industry body ‘a bunch of t**ts’ in such a public way? I doubt I’d ever get a job again.

Cole’s idiocy was followed by this weekend’s speciality from Barton calling for a mass cull on all stupid people…presumably including himself in this in a rare spot of self-reflection?

To be honest, any footballer that has earrings bigger than brains should welcome a ban on Twitter anyway. It seems hiding behind the tiny keyboards on their oversized gadgets gets them into trouble all too often and I, for one, would rather hear constructive and motivational tweets from athletes like our Olympians rather than whinging nonsense from over paid prima donnas with a chip on their shoulder.

Rant over and back to commuting stuff next blog…unless something else gets my goat in between!

Laura King is the author of The Little Book of Tube Etiquette, published by Gibson Publishing and available from Waterstones, WH Smiths and most online retailers.

www.gibsonpublishing.co.uk

Blast from the past

We all have that one person that you never ever want to lay eyes on again. Well the other morning I woke from a train slumber to find myself staring right into the eyes of that one person.

I literally felt sick.

Luckily this was at the end of my journey – so I did what any self-respecting, nonchalant and confident woman would do…pretend I hadn’t seen him, hide behind the people standing in the aisles and dashed off the train as quickly as possible so not to make any more contact, eye or otherwise.

This got me thinking about the way tubes and trains force people together and how actually I’d been pretty, lucky given the chances, of not running into him before in eight years. Furthermore, imagine how much worse it would have been if we were in rush hour stuck together in a confined carriage?

So I suppose I got off lightly.

London transport has this ability to bring together people – and this isn’t always bad of course.

Remember the couple of began their romance having met on the tube only for the man to propose, all singing and dancing, on the very same tube train years later?

Remember the community spirit showed during the Olympics, of tube carriages cheering the driver’s announcement of gold medals won?

Most of the time when you see someone you recognise on the tube, it’s really not that bad. These are mainly colleagues or random business acquaintances, either on the way to work who you really don’t want to engage in conversation, preferring the last precious moments before you there kept to yourself. Or on the way home, not knowing how long you’ve got to make polite conversation. But how bad is it really?

So while I’ll fret for another few weeks about running into this person again before I forget about it and relax, it’s much more likely that I’ll see someone I want to, or witness a nice moment or, at worse, be stuck talking to a colleague politely for 20 minutes. And that’s not so bad, is it?

Laura King is the author of The Little Book of Tube Etiquette, published by Gibson Publishing, available in paperback at Waterstones, WH Smith and most online retailers.

www.gibsonpublishing.co.uk

How to spot the impatient and move away quickly…

You know the summer’s truly over when the impatient stress heads come out to play in every walk of life. From the tube, to the office, on the streets, they’re everywhere… So, if you spot any of the below signs that my friends and I have spotted recently, move quickly away so you’re out of reach when they explode.

- Standing behind you so close that we’re touching in a queue of only two

- Pushing me out of the way to get a seat on the tube when there are four empty seats and just the two of us getting on

- Repeatedly punching the ‘close door’ button in a lift as I’m trying to get on

- Repeatedly punching the ‘close door’ button in a lift before I’ve finished getting out

- Aggressively pushing in front of me in a crowd of people to get exactly one place in front of me

- Train conversations getting louder and more frantic by the second regardless of how ‘confidential’ the details of the call are

- People snapping ‘I’m DOING it’ before you can even say ‘hi how are you’

- People walking down the streets of London absent-mindedly bumping into everyone as they type away on a blackberry without looking where they’re going

- and those on tube escalators shouting ‘come on’ at the queue of walkers ahead of them

I guess people have returned from the Olympics hiatus and summer holidays with the pressure of doing deals and billing quickly. However, being an arse probably won’t help. Chill out people…

Laura King is the author of The Little Book of Tube Etiquette, published by Gibson Publishing, available in paperback at Waterstones, WH Smith and most online retailers.

www.gibsonpublishing.co.uk