Symbolic Forest

There are plenty of stories in literature about the nameless horrors that lurk deep within the bowels of the London Underground. It’s popped up in TV, too – on both Quatermass and Doctor Who in the 1960s – and in film. In books, the first example that comes to the top of my head is a short story by Jeremy Dyson, but there are certainly many more. There are stories of secret tunnels and secret trains, lines disappearing into disused stations and abandoned passages.

Indeed, there are plenty of abandoned stations underneath London. There’s Down Street, for example, which was used as a set in Neverwhere.^* There’s an entire disused railway, the Post Office Railway, running from Paddington to Whitechapel.^** Not much is visible, though. The Post Office Railway was never open to the public, and disused parts of the Underground are generally very hard to see from passing trains. The occasional void, or brick wall, but that’s all.^***

Paris, though. Paris is different. The Paris metro is full of secret passages. Every few hundred metres, there will be a mysterious junction. Lines will branch off into side tunnels, or delve between the other tracks, or disappear behind mysterious roller shutters in the tunnel walls. There are walkways and passageways, tracks that your train will never use, sidings deep under the city centre. In London the only place you’ll see trains parked underground is Triangle Sidings, between Earls Court and Gloucester Road; and that started out as an above-ground depot which disappeared under buildings in the 1960s. In Paris, there are trains parked all over the network, in single sidings, between stations. There’s so much to see if you look out of the window.

But does the Paris Metro have similar literature to the London Underground? Are there stories of monsters hiding in the Metro’s depths, or ghost trains rattling off down secret tracks, or secret government laboratories behind the roller-shuttered sidings? London has the literature, but Paris has the labyrinth visible from the train window.

* The “Down Street” in Neverwhere isn’t the real Down Street – but the real Down Street was also used for filming. If you’ve seen it: the dinner with Serpentine was shot on the remains of its station platforms, during normal service, with trains passing in the background.

** Which was also used as a filming location for Neverwhere, and also crops up in the love-it-hate-it Bruce Willis comedy Hudson Hawk pretending to be in Rome.

*** During the war most of the disused stations were converted into government offices – including the platforms, several of which had the platforms removed and brick walls built to partition the usable space off from the running lines. So if you’re deep under London and suddenly see a brick wall by your carriage window for a few seconds, it’s probably a disused station.

Keyword noise: disused, disused underground stations, Doctor Who, Down Street, Jeremy Dyson, labyrinth, literature, London, London Underground, Neverwhere, Paris, Paris Metro, Post Office Railway, secret tunnels, underground.

Photos from the Jardin du Luxembourg on a Sunday morning. Old men playing chess under a canopy. Hidden away in the groves of trees, a man practises moving a sword around. People sit on benches in the shade, enjoying the last weekend of the August holiday.

Keyword noise: August, chess, holiday, Jardin du Luxembourg, Paris, park, summer, swordsman, trees.

Given that lots of random people come across this site, usually looking for the wrong thing entirely, I thought it might be an idea to post more Useful Information on here occasionally. So: here you are. Today’s Useful Information post is:

What do you do if you find a dead bat?

If, for example, you should get up one morning and find a dull brown blob on the doorstep. Looking closer: definitely a bat. I could see its arms. Now, I can’t imagine The Cat managing to catch a bat. He’s heavier than he used to be, and I don’t see him being able to jump up high enough. I’ve seen him watch them flying round the garden, but catch one? No way.

So, it may well have been a dead bat, dragged home. Which isn’t really good, considering bats can carry nasty diseases. So I looked into what we should do. And, if you’re in Britain, this is what you do:

1: Phone up the Bat Conservation Trust, who will send you an envelope in the post.

2: Post the envelope off – ignoring the “where are you going with my bat?” looks The Cat will give you – and your dead bat will be tested for rabies. I’m not sure, at the moment though, if you ever hear back to find out if your dead bat was indeed suffering from rabies, or if it was just a bit peaky and didn’t fancy a drink. We’re keeping an eye on the cat, just in case. The Bat Conservation people advised: don’t let the cat out during dawn or dusk, but I don’t see that happening without serious upset and possible life-threatening clawings. And there you have it: this site has useful information on it for once. Hurrah!

Update, August 29^th 2020: Since this post was written, there’s no need any more to phone the Bat Conservation Trust up. Just go to this page and fill the form in and your dead bat postage tube will be sent out. Incidentally, the dead bat The Cat left on the doormat was not rabid, which is definitely a good thing. If the bat you found did have rabies, the Animal and Plant Health Agency will get back to you to let you know; but if they don’t, you can assume it was fine. Well, apart from being dead, but you know what I mean.

Keyword noise: bats, Bat Conservation Trust, dead bat, public information, rabid, rabies, The Cat.

They’re very careful now about MRSA and similar bugs. Each sink has a poster showing the correct, and complex, way to wash one’s hands. Each wall has a poster about the importance of cleanliness procedures. Each bin has a sign on top: use the foot pedal, not your hands. Cleaners stalked the corridor constantly, with gloved hands. The signs, though, don’t do anything about the doctor, who whipped the bin lid open with her hands just as if the sign wasn’t there. And neither the signs or the cleaners did anything about the fresh spots of blood on the floor, under the trolley and around the bin. Signs are very nice, but they don’t do the work for you.

Keyword noise: cleanliness, contamination, hospitals, Hull, Hull Royal Infirmary, MRSA.

I am not a hero. I had always suspected as much, but now I know it’s true.

I popped round to the corner shop, just to pick up a few things, and noticed some dodgy-looking men hanging around outside. Nothing surprising there, really. I tried not to pay them any attention. You don’t, do you.

As I was pottering around at the back of the shop choosing the longest-dated bottle of milk, one of them comes in. Late 20s but looks older, scraggly beard, dirty jacket. Looks like he should be dragging a dog on a string behind him. Purposefully, he strides to the dairy fridges at the back of the shop, and starts grabbing packets of cheese off the shelf. Two at a time, stuffing them into a carrier bag he’d brought with him. One of his friends followed, jacket over his arm; he plucked something off a shelf and slipped it under his jacket.

Should I do something? Should I say anything? The cheese man eyed me up, as I put a yoghurt in my basket. As he looked sideways, he didn’t stop grabbing cheese and dropping it into his bag.

I did nothing. Nothing at all. “He might have had a knife,” I rationalised to myself. “He might have punched me.” Or he might just have ran. As it was, they walked out of the shop, as quickly as they’d came, with £20, £30 or more of cheese in the carrier bag. Is there a market now for black-market dairy produce? Has someone worked out how to get a legal high from mild cheddar? My logical mind says: it was the far corner of the shop, furthest from the tills, furthest from any of the staff, in a straight line to the door, and one of the most valuable products per kilogram in that part of the shop. The rest of me says: maybe he just liked a lot of cheese?

Keyword noise: cheese, heroism, Hull, Sainsburys, shoplifting, supermarket, theft, witness, Yorkshire.

Talking of Catherine and Arnaud, incidentally: they were the reason I was in France taking photos of over-priced salad cream last week. They were having a party; not an anniversary party, but a housewarming, or crémaillaire. That word, apparently, relates to an ancient French custom of hanging up a butter churn when moving into a new house. So I’m told, anyway: my French really isn’t up to much.^* If you want to see photos, though, you can do.

* I can say “Je voudrais une grande tranche de gateau“, and, erm, that’s about it.

Keyword noise: crémaillaire, France, friends, holiday, housewarming, Paris.

While we’re on the subject of anniversaries:

Ten years ago, I remember waking up, in my little student flat by the university, the one with the tiny bedroom and the low, sloping ceiling that I never learned to stop banging my head on. I popped to the kitchen to get a drink; Flatmate Alan heard, and came out in his green paisley dressing gown.^*

“Princess Diana’s died,” he said.

“Really?”

“Yes. They said so on the radio.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

I put the radio on, to protests, on to the local commercial pop station – and they were playing a funereal dirge. Odd. So then, we put the TV on, and found four channels of continous news.

Five years ago today, I woke up in a hotel in Paris,^** recovering from Catherine and Arnaud’s wedding. I know which day I’d rather commemorate.

* Was it really green paisley? I definitely recall something dark green and patterned.

** Well, just outside Paris, in Poissy.

This was seen in the large Parisian department store Galaries Lafayette^* the other day, in the “Epicerie Britannique” section of the gourmet foodhall:

A bottle of salad cream that says “99p” on the label, on sale for €3.24^** At today’s exchange rate – just under 68p to the euro – that’s a shop price of £2.20. Slightly less of a bargain than it says on the label, then. The shop was also selling tins of Heinz beans originally from multipacks, singly, for about £1 per tin. Ouch. How much does it cost to import a tin of beans, exactly?

* They do apparently have an official website, which I couldn’t get to work at all.

** Frankly, I was quite surprised that a shop in Paris was willing to let people know that salad cream exists.

Keyword noise: British, Epicerie Britannique, expensive, food, France, Galaries Lafayette, Heinz, import, Paris, pricing, salad cream.

I love posting-in-advance. Writing in advance, I mean: writing something now and publishing it then.

See, I’m not here right now. I’m away on holiday again. I would say “I’ll post photos,” but as things stand I’m not even sure if I’m going to pack my camera or not. I should already have posted photos of the other weekend: sitting by the Thames drinking Früli and getting sunburnt. How long it will take me to post photos of Mystery Holiday Destination #2^* is anybody’s guess.

* it’s not that mysterious if you look at the big clue in the post title.

Keyword noise: escape, holiday, travel.

Talking of Room 3B (The IT Office): long-term readers (who remember the air-conditioning fight) might be wondering what Big Dave has been up to for the past few months, since he left, and what he’s been up to.

Well, the answer is, I don’t really know. He’s popped into the office, once or twice, since then. He’s kept in touch with a few people round the building. But I don’t really know what he’s been up to. The only news I have is: Big Dave’s broken his jaw. How he broke his jaw is a mystery. It’s very possible that he doesn’t know himself, of course. So, unfortunately, no tales of entertaining-but-horrific fights outside bars. No tales of unlikely-but-possible accidents involving server racks or poorly-secured hard disks. You’ll just have to use your imagination.

Keyword noise: Big Dave, imagination, injury, update.