This piece had the honour of being reprinted in a schoolbook to teach children about race issues and suchlike. Alas I have no idea what the book was called nor how the children did in their racial awareness exams
Prospect magazine
Notes From Underground: Love
"How much do you get paid basic?" I asked my supervisor after he'd shown me a wage slip bulging with overtime.
"I don't know," he admitted.
Overtime addiction is a common—although controversial—phenomenon on the underground. The unions hate it, since it allows the managers to get away with understaffing, but their married male members love it since it keeps them away from their wives.
I wondered what my supervisor's wife thought of him never being home, but he maintained she was unconcerned. "I don't see her much even when I'm there."
Notes From Underground: Unions
The London Underground doesn't set the standard for much, but it boasts perhaps the worst post-Thatcher industrial relations in Britain. Led by old-style bruiser Bob Crow, the RMT is still very much a beer and sandwiches union, give or take the sandwiches. Its take-no-prisoners attitude to strike action has earned it a somewhat ambivalent relationship with the travelling public.
Notes From Underground: Clerks
In the old days, the station staff and the ticket clerks lived in parallel universes. The station railmen were in the NUR (later the RMT) and used to work polishing the brasswork, sweeping the platforms and pocketing the excess fares. The clerks, by contrast, worked inside poky offices, joined an association (the TSSA), and behaved generally as though they were a cut above the railmen by virtue of the fact that they could read and add up and weren't pissed all the time. They were also paid significantly more money.
Notes From Underground: Football
The underground and the World Cup could be a match made in heaven. Not for the drivers, who obviously have to drive, nor for the station assistants who get lumbered with the platform jobs, but pretty much everyone else is likely at some point or other to find themselves skulking round a television willing on whichever of the 32 nations their supervisor is supporting, in the hope that in a rash good mood he might let you go home early.
Notes From Underground: Power cut
After another struggle with my bed, I get into work to see Marcus, the early-turn ticket clerk, standing outside the ticket barrier in a high-visibility vest and the ticket office closed. What's going on? It takes a minute to sink in, since I'm still thinking of a decent excuse for being late, but then it dawns on me—the ticket office is closed. The problem is defective lighting—a minor electrical fault, it seems, but it could be a few hours before it's sorted out. What better gift could I have expected than this surprise respite from the rush-hour pummel?
Notes From Underground: Language
The underground has an incredible repertoire of stock phrases. More or less the entire history of the world can be boiled down and written on one of those whiteboards you see at the entrance to tube stations. Each one of these phrases, such as "passenger action" or "severe delays," has—or at least is supposed to have—a fairly exact meaning. But the public tends to have completely the wrong idea about what that meaning is.
Notes From Underground: Misery Line
Whereas most tube lines are content to inflict delays, cancellations, signal failures and derailments in haphazard succession, the Northern "misery" line appears to bunch its catastrophes together for the greatest possible effect. Over the years, only the Central line has ever really given the Northern a run for its money. And, as if to prove the continuation of the duo's supremacy, both these lines have recently suffered weeks of suspension after derailments.
Notes From Underground: Finale (published version)
The London Underground is the Venus flytrap of jobs. There you are, buzzing about, poor but happy, when you catch the smell of regular wages, cups of tea and early starts. Working-class culture, without much working. Over you trot, to have a look and… there you are, stuck. Everyone I ever met on the underground will tell you that they only joined for six months and here they are 25 years later, fat and dull and living in Borehamwood.