“The player in distinctive costume at the front of the (street) car controls a crank, by means of which he is able to bring the car to a sudden stop or cause it to plunge violently forward. His aim in so doing is to cause all the standing players (passengers) to fall over backwards”.
“Winter pastimes” by Stephen Leacock in “Literary Lapses” (1910).
Recently my beloved and I took a train to the city to watch a football match – an important international rugby contest. The game was exciting, but the journey there and back was something else.
At the station, we ran to the front of the platform to board the driver’s carriage, so we could get off the train easily, no matter what happened on the journey. We did this because we knew the driver carried a wheelchair ramp in his compartment. So I figured that if there was an emergency stop between stations for more than two or three hours, he could lower the ramp onto the track and we could slide down the ramp to freedom, whooping and hollering. It would be like using an airliner’s inflatable emergency slide, which I have always wanted to do. It looks like fun, although perhaps not if the whole plane or train is a blazing inferno.
But other treats awaited us in our public transport pilgrimage to the shrine of football in our city. The train was chock full of AFL football fans. They were mostly supporters of the red and black team who were playing the red and dark blue team at another bigger stadium next to our destination. Now with Australian football crowds it is important to be diplomatic not dogmatic, not siding with one or the other so as to avoid supercilious scowls, mirthless mockery or sharply pointed finger pointing. But if all the supporters are wearing either red and black scarves or red and dark blue, then it’s hard to tell the difference at night in the dim swaying train carriage. So when questioned about our loyalties we tried to keep our answers neutral or obscure like an internet mindfulness guru. We said things such as “I’m sure they’ll win this week” or “How about last weekend’s game, eh?”
We deliberately neglected to admit that we were going to watch rugby, not Australian football, as we could have been accused of being unwanted immigrants from one of the northern states where rugby is popular or disparaged for being unpatriotic or even worse, unAustralian, whatever that means. After all the “A” in AFL football stands for “Australian” whereas “Rugby” stands for a market town in Warwickshire UK which was the birthplace of Rugby football in 1823 and the inspiration for Charles Dickens’ railway stories “Mugby Junction”. ①
But there were other difficulties on our simple train journey into the city.
Next we heard a loudspeaker announcement that the train would stop because there had been an “event” at the next station. Saying so little to describe the situation caused our minds to run wild with speculation as to what was happening down the line at Brassington.
If it was an event, had it been an entertaining one? Had the Brass Monkeys Brass Band boarded a train at too slow a tempo so that the trombone had got stuck in one of the train doors and jammed it open? Had it been an event such as a pie and noodle eating competition in the food court which is directly above the station platform? Had a greasy meat pie or a bowl of slippery Udon noodles fallen onto the tracks below and derailed a train? Had some passenger been so incensed by his expired transport card being rejected that he had experienced an attack of moral outrage and was now lying down on the train tracks in protest, hoping to gain support for a class action lawsuit against the ticketing company?
We will never know, for after 15 minutes of waiting in the wilderness between stations, the train woke up, shook itself like a wet labrador and trundled on towards the city.
When we arrived at the stadium, we climbed up the thousand steps to our seats and then suffered 30 minutes of screaming rock music and exploding fireworks which burst our eardrums and burned our eyeballs. But after that Australia won the match, so all was well.
Coming back home on the train we had a much more exciting delay. Two passengers started a verbal slanging match at the front of our carriage. Then a broad, tall, bulky man, probably an ex rugby player, bravely tried to step between them and act as a peacemaker – a sort of Berlin Wall of communication shutdown. However, his commendable efforts failed. The verbal stoush continued until the train suddenly stopped at an unscheduled station and one of the participants was frog marched off the train and out of the station by security staff.
This left the other combatant still on the train and still loudly complaining to a rapidly diminishing audience which had moved to the far end of the carriage or exited the train altogether.
Then the train driver himself announced over the PA system that further verbal violence would not be tolerated and would in fact be ruthlessly suppressed. He immediately started playing a recording of Cat Stevens’ “Peace Train” from 1971 over and over again until we were all feeling unpeacefully train sick and over-indoctrinated.
When we arrived at our station, things were relatively calm as we shuffled down the cattle ramp to the exit. However, we had to take our lives into our hands as we walked towards the bus stop and the pedestrian crossing. In their wisdom, the town planners had ensured that the main bicycle, scooter and skateboard path into and out of the CBD cut directly across the footpath from the station exit to the pedestrian crossing. The designers (probably ex rugby players) had apparently not been concerned about bodily impacts. But inspired by the rugby match, we artfully dodged the flying e-bikes and the e-scooters ridden by black clad youths wearing headphones and the e-skateboarders who were out to impress their friends with how close they could get while not actually hitting any pedestrians. We scampered across the pedestrian crossing, and eventually made it home safe and sound.
At least the Australian rugby team had won the match which is what we had hoped to see.
However I couldn’t help feeling that the night was more about the journey than the destination.
As someone once said that humourist Dave Barry once said “…. The wonderful thing about family travel is that it provides you with experiences that will remain locked forever in the scar tissue of your mind”.
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© Geoff Milton 2024
① Wikipedia “Rugby, Warwickshire”.
Image inspired by Bing Image Creator output
