ELIZABETH LINE

Green hedges and stones fly past in a blur. Under a bridge, past a golf course, along an embankment of an old industrial estate, complete with rusty-looking trailers. Then shiny cars, stacked Lego-like into a station car park. A voice proclaims that we’re arriving at a station. The train slows. The doors beep open.

I’m on the Elizabeth Line today. It goes all the way to where I need to be but it takes forever to do it - which feels today like a tidy old metaphor for pretty much everything else I’m trying to do. I do worry about being a massive frustration. You know sometimes you’re around people and they start gossiping about how awful so-and-so is, how slow and maddening they are, and how dreadful an attitude they have. It’s never truly malicious; just irritated. And I always wonder what those people say about me when I am out of the room myself.

It bothers me, that. So it probably should, but perhaps not to the extent that it actually does. Got to be thicker-skinned sometimes. As long as we do our best and we show love and kindness to those around us. I still worry I’m a problem though.

An old factory with broken windows. New factories with no windows at all. Progress. Grey sky now between the trees and the red bricks. Bicycles in a rack, flats overlooking the railway with balconies six inches wide and clothes draped over the railings. Then more rooftops and chimneys and lorries and pipes and offices. The smell of weed wafts down the long carriage. It must cling to clothes, swirling with every flap of fabric. That ubiquitous vile scent. I find myself wondering whether I’d mind so much if it smelled of lemons and pears. Same stuff. Same ruined young minds. What am I really objecting to?

“Get the UK’s best 12-month free easy-access savings rate,” says an ad on the back of a newspaper. It’s the Metro, being held by a passenger opposite. The smaller print says I can ‘reach my savings goals sooner’ - though I still maintain I can also do that by spending less on things we don’t exactly need. It’s another thing on my mind. I don’t need a new coat, yet I’ve still been searching for one online. Twice I’ve pulled up and said I think it’s indulgent.

That’s the capitalist world, I suppose. Indulgence for all! It leads to cannabis filling the Elizabeth Line rattling its way into London. It leads to smartphones and AirPods (both of which I’m using right now) and the unspoken etiquette of none of us on this carriage ever really looking at each other. How did eye contact, a basic human function, the window to the soul, the doorway to connection, become a faux pas? How did we do this to ourselves?

Graffiti. Poplar trees. Pylons and steel, a concrete flyover, street lamps above an empty road and high rise flats looming up into the grey sky. History flashes by the windows, telling a story all of its own. I shuffle in my seat, knowing that the Elizabeth Line takes me to a quiet office where people have quite probably been talking about me. London gets ever nearer.