Dulk Hunts
I have a strange relationship with buses. Buses are my favourite form of public transport now that trains no longer have corridors and separate compartments. However, they fill me with dread in so many ways. When I was about eleven my mum gave me some money to go into Manchester on the bus and go to the cinema. I climbed aboard the wrong bus and headed in the opposite direction to the one I should have taken; heading towards Worsley and Patricroft, rarely a good idea. At first I didn’t notice because I didn’t know the bus route. By the time I had realised what was happening it took a couple more stops to decide on the best course of action. Clearly the best course of action was to get off and retrace my steps which is what I eventually did but, now being mistrustful of buses, I walked back instead. I never mentioned what had happened and no-one ever asked about the film. Anyway, I’ve never fully trusted buses since then. I now start any new bus journey by assuming that I am on the wrong bus. I then spend the rest of the journey unsure about which stop to take and often get off several stops too early in case I’ve actually gone too far in the wrong direction. And this is my favourite form of public transport.
Trains are hell on wheels. Unless you’ve paid about forty quid a mile and your left kidney for a first-class ticket, the seats are uncomfortable. In many trains they now come in blocks of three but they have clearly based the seats on the width of the arse of a twelve-year old girl with an eating disorder. They might be in blocks of three but there’s only space for two and you can’t actually sit two to a block because of the high ridges between the seats. There’s a well-known story about trains and the width of arses that actually has some basis in truth, it goes like this:
The size of the solid rocket boosters for the Space Shuttle was influenced by the size of your average horse’s arse. The reason being that the boosters were manufactured by the Thiokol Chemical Corporation in Utah. The dry climate of the state made the consistent casting of the boosters more straightforward. Now, it wouldn’t have been possible to transport the giant segments by air and the road journey of two thousand or so miles to Cape Canaveral would have been very difficult indeed. Utah is blessed with many things, but a seaport isn’t one of them, so the only way to get the segments of the booster rockets to Florida was to do it by railroad.
Obviously, the width of anything that can be moved by train depends, to a large extent, on the width of any tunnels you might need to go through and, therefore, the width of the tracks. The first tracks in the United States were based on the tracks and the carriages in use in Britain. In Britain the first railway carriages were built by those who had built the horse-drawn coaches. The horse-drawn coaches had been built so that they were wide enough to be pulled by two horses abreast, therefore they were the width of two horse’s arses. There are even those who go further back and claim that these coaches were built to run in the ruts in the roads first built by the Roman invaders to these islands a couple of thousand years ago. That would mean that the design of the Space Shuttle was influenced by the size of a Roman horse’s arse. Whatever the truth of that, there is no doubt that past decisions often have unintended consequences on our lives and the lives of others.
Anyway, back to British trains. As well as being generally awful in every conceivable way, they are also always either too hot or too cold, never are they the right temperature. It’s like the tale of Goldilocks if Mummy Bear had previously run off to join a circus, it’s never just right. If you get on a train and the temperature feels right then you are ill and should get off and go home and get into bed.
Trains are the worst form of public transport imaginable. First of all there’s the transport element of that label. They often do not do much in the way of transporting you anywhere. They are late, cancelled, replaced by a bus or stop for no apparent reason, miles from anywhere and you get an announcement which tells you nothing:
“Ladies and gentleman, our apologies that the train has stopped this is due to it not currently being possible to progress further.” Or “Ladies and gentleman, we apologise that this service is currently not continuing, this is due to a train in front which has stopped.”
And? What precisely are you going to do about it? Trains are awful, the announcements are awful. Some are so awful that they are almost good.
“Good morning and welcome to this Greater Angular service to London Liverpool Street. First Class accommodations are at the frontal end of this train service and coach haitch is the quiet coach. You must buy a ticket before boarding.”
No-one ever seems to have noticed that having an announcement on board the train after it has left the station which tells you where you are going and that you need to have bought a ticket before boarding is a little bit on the late side. And why do they say: “Your next station stop is…” Do they plan to stop at places other than stations? No, they don’t and that’s another reason why they barely count as transport. When they eventually manage to move you from one station to another, you are not where you wanted to go. So, you need another form of transport, a useful one like a bike or a car or even a bus, to actually get you to where you were hoping to be.
Then there’s the public part of that public transport label. Most of the public that I meet on trains are not the members of the public I want to meet. While I do not wish to appear intolerant and I fully support people’s right to believe what they like, live where they like, wear what they like, eat what they like, smoke, cough, drink, fart, take drugs, dance like no-one is watching, laugh like they were two years old, pick their noses, talk loudly on their mobile phones or just about anything else; I don’t support their right to do it in the seat next to me. Worst of all are those hunters of the dulk.
Dulk is the name that I have now created for that dull click that some mobile phones make on every single key press during the composition of a text message. The one which it is incredibly easy to turn off if you have just two functioning brain cells. The hunters of the dulk do not turn that dulk off because they are stupid and love to find more and more dulks. Their day is measured in just how many dulks they can find in their world. They start the journey with “HI HOW R U” dulk, dulk, dulk, dulk, dulk, dulk, dulk, dulk, dulk, dulk, or some other such gibberish. They then, inspired by their love for the dulk, build up confidence in their writing until they have reached the point of typing out the entire works of Dostoyevsky. Each letter accompanied by their beloved and eagerly sought dulk. That’s how the journey goes.
My old grandad used to call the TV “the idiot box”, that’s because he would never know that the real idiot box was going to be much, much smaller. Here they are on this train, though, all glued to them. Dulk, dulk, dulk, dulk. That’s how it goes. Dulk hunts.
Then there’s the sniffers, the sniffer always takes the seat next to mine. I don’t know how they do it. Perhaps I’m just over-sensitive to the sound of sniffing, perhaps there are just lots of sniffers or perhaps it’s a well-orchestrated plot to drive me totally, barkingly insane. Whatever the truth is, I always get the sniffer. They then spend the entire journey sniffing at intervals of between three and twenty-eight seconds. The longer pauses between sniffs are calculated to get you to believe, although nearly all hope has now left you, that, perhaps, the sniffing has stopped. It’s been ten seconds now since they sniffed, that’s not bad. Fifteen seconds, perhaps the sniffing isn’t constant. Twenty seconds, it’s clear that the earlier sniffing was just a reaction to the intolerable temperature of this train. Twenty-five seconds, I am so sorry that I ever thought that this wonderful person was a sniffer, they are clearly delightful company, perhaps I should try to strike up a cheerful conversation about the announcement saying that we need tickets when we’ve already left the station. Perhaps I’ll point out that while I can understand their desire to get people to pay, as they estimate that in a normal year around £240 million is lost through fare evasion on Great Britain’s railways, nobody seems to have pointed out that, if they halved their fares they could save themselves £120 million every year. Twenty-eight seconds, sniff, bastard, bastard, bastard, I hate everyone on this train. Sniff, sniff. I hope that we crash, I would gladly die right now if it also rids the world of these people. Of course, we’d have to go fast enough to crash first.
Marcus Aurelius said, and I am significantly paraphrasing him here, that every day we will meet dickheads, people with poor manners or personal hygiene, people who sniff and constantly send text messages. He went on to point out that when you meet one you should not, therefore, be surprised or angered. You should congratulate yourself for being so prescient as to expect them. Well, I’m sure he’s right, but he never had to go around being a philosopher and Roman emperor on a bloody Greater Anglia service between London and Norwich. He’d have quietly seethed then or finally offered them the corner of his toga to blow their noses on in a massively passive aggressive gesture of contempt.
There was, however, one instance of a train journey where I did not get the sniffer. It was 4th July 2016, I was so overjoyed that I hadn’t encountered the sniffer that I wrote the date down. I had an empty seat next to me and two empty seats opposite. Just before we left the station, the seat opposite was taken by a lady in her mid-sixties: slim, tanned, well-manicured and expensively but understatedly coiffed. She wore a dark navy two-piece suit, the skirt of which just touched her knee. Under the jacket she wore a blue and white blouse with turned-up collar and a single string of pearls. She was speaking on her telephone but quite quietly and didn’t have the dulks switched on. She spoke of Fenella and Fergus and said things like: “Jast a sec, there’s a tannel.” As my old grandad would have said, at her house sex is what the coal is delivered in.
Between Chelmsford and Shenfield she calmly, slowly and elegantly raised one cheek and let out a high-pitched fart of sufficient volume to startle a police horse at forty yards. She and the rest of the carriage carried on as though nothing had happened. I looked around at my fellow passengers but either no-one else had noticed, which was pretty much impossible given the volume, or they were all managing to ignore it, which was only slightly less plausible. They must all be actors, in on the plot to drive me mad. As we left Shenfield, it happened again, just the same but, if anything, a little louder and with a touch more reverb. And that is my favourite train journey, the one with the elegant farter. I’m sorry that I ever started talking about trains, never a good idea.
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Originally published at https://adrianbleese.substack.com.
