MMD

Make Mondays different.

As slogans go it’s not great. I mean, I don’t think anyone is going to put it on a cap and use it as a cornerstone for a political campaign.

And it’s not like I’m doing anything too radical like… only wearing white, or only eating cornflakes, or only speaking French. (You can see my ideas for radical behaviour are actually far from radical.)

No, what I’m doing is taking a different route to work on Mondays.

I know. Crazy, hey?

I’ve found a new route to work that is good for Mondays. But only on Monday because fewer people commute. And most importantly, considering the recent heatwave, of the five or so potential routes I can take to work, this one has the most continuous air conditioning.

(Because when it’s 30+ at street level, it’s even more than that down in the hell pit of the Tube.)

On Tuesdays this route is just as awful as any other route: crowded carriages, standing, cramped, unable to read because you need to use both hands to support yourself against the swaying of the train.

(And what good is a commute without opportunity to lose yourself in a book?)

But on Mondays, when the TWeTs aren’t travelling (referring to the hybrid office workers who only go into the office on Tuesday Wednesday and Thursday), on Mondays there are plenty of seats.

And that means time for reading. In air conditioned comfort. Even if only for a short 20 minutes.

A quick dip into another world, another mind, another situation. A distraction from the work day that looms ahead for me.

Part of this journey involves going down into one of the deeper stations, down some long and steep escalators. I don’t know when it started but the escalators scare me.

Not if I’m standing, only if I’m walking.

(Can I take a short aside to remind readers that in the London Underground, the rule is walk on the left, stand on the right. Do not stand next to your friend, occupying both left and right sides in a static position. Do not put your luggage next to you on the left while you stand on the right. This behaviour will cause the walking people to become backed up, unable to walk as they want, and will trigger people craning their heads to see what moron is causing the hold up, some very annoyed tutting and harrumphing, before someone gets a level of annoyance high enough to say a brusque “Excuse me!” to the person causing the blockage.)

When I’m walking down the escalator on the left I feel unsteady, unbalanced. Is it because I’m right handed and worry about my left hand’s ability to catch me if I stumble and (god forbid) start to fall. I don’t have this anxiety walking down in the right side.

Perhaps in a former life I was a character in an Agatha Christie novel who was killed by being pushed down the escalators in the underground?

This poster for Jack Daniels annoys me. I think of the number of people in the music business that suffer with alcohol related issues. It’s seen as part of the rock’n’roll lifestyle but it can be a bigger problem.

As the Spotify algorithm was playing me songs from my youth recently, I looked up the singer of one of the bands being played. I remember hearing he’d died, he was still quite young. I assumed it was cancer but it was suicide, related to his ongoing struggles with alcohol. He had written two books about his struggles, but he wasn’t able to overcome it, so he killed himself.

That’s why this poster annoys me.

That, and I’m thinking about a character who is in a band. Can I kill off one of the band members in an alcohol related way?

Does being a writer make you weird, that you’re always looking for ways to make people suffer and/or die?