The new game for train passengers everywhere is Validity. It’s a very simple game for one or more players, in which you buy a ticket (from machine or human, it makes no difference) and, while you’re doing this, try to obtain one that is fit for purpose.
The game is catching on like wildfire, because it requires the utmost skill, patience and IQ level to work out why your ticket is invalid. But once on the train, the negotiating expertise involved in not paying the fine to the ticket collector (and not beating that person to a pulp) makes the game a challenge that few casual travellers can resist.
Heading for the Gatwick Express to Victoria earlier this week, I asked for a Gatwick Express single ticket, and was sold one by a young lady hiding behind a pc screen. There was no clue offered to the effect that she might be selling train tickets, by the way: and when I asked if one could also buy them on the platform, she replied, “Yes, but the queues are always very long”. I didn’t take the enquiry any further: I’ve learned the hard way that doing this only results in the answers getting sillier and sillier.
As the train pulled out, along came the guard at the far end of my carriage.
“I’m sorry sir,” she said to the first passenger, “That ticket’s not valid”.
A heated argument ensued. But he paid the fine.
The ticket collector went right through the carriage, and I was able easily to work out that 60% of passengers had invalid tickets. The other 40% smiled in silence: they had been through this movie before, they knew the ropes, and they gave up tickets which the collector scribbled upon before returning them. She was probably writing ’10 out of 10, well done’.
I of course had an invalid ticket, so I said sorry, but the failure is yours not mine: I asked for a ticket on the next Gatwick Express, and I was given one. This is it. If it’s invalid for the journey, then your ticket lady is invalid for employment as a ticket salesperson.
Polite threats about being thrown off the train followed. Meanwhile, twelve holders of allegedly invalid tickets listened keenly. The collector knew that if she retreated an inch, twelve others would want the same thing. It was a Greek bailout parallel being played out through the medium of a railway train.
The collector headed quickly for the sliding door, and disappeared.
This story probably describes nothing more than rail company incompetence. On the other hand, the collector lady probably works 280 days a year, so you’d think by now she might have been to the idiots in the ticket office and asked are you having a larf or what.
If it’s a scam, then it’s a damn clever one. The fine on a £13 invalid Gatwick Express single ticket is £30. I’m advised that most train guards simply charge the difference between the invalid and valid fares. But the huge majority of travellers using the service will be either foreigners, and/or one-time users, or very rare users. Most will feel angered, but not complain. Most of these in turn will assume it’s their fault.
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I might not have been so truculent myself if I hadn’t just endured an aeroplane flight to Gatwick. Air travel has been an obscenity since about 1975, but terrorism over the last forty years (mostly Arabs wanting everything from Israel’s immolation to Islam’s global triumph) has made it whatever comes after obscene. Hard porn, perhaps – involving well-endowed men and stoats: a process during which things (people) are forced into orifices, the act being designed to annoy, humiliate, and even hurt.
I was flying from a small regional French airport, and we were all Caucasian. Most of us had grey hair, except for one Australian lady with three savages disguised as children – the kind of kids that give us all grey hair eventually. But because of the remote chance that some shard of splintered Islamism might have targeted our flight as a symbol of Allah’s greatness, we were all body searched, asked to remove our shoes and belts, told to take out all phones and pcs for examination, and (in my case) asked what several pills were for.
Cases were rifled, notepads examined, and the exact content in ccs of any liquids demanded. If like me you want to travel with hand-luggage only, you can’t take razors, deodorant or toothpaste. There may soon have to be train carriages on the Gatwick Express return trains marked ‘Hairy folks with bad breath and BO only’.
I apologise to Sloggers who’ve heard this before, but our willingness to go through all this nonsense (and by ‘our’, I mean both us and the authorities) is a symptom of many serious ailments: weakness, pc, lack of insight, addiction to oil, and just plain stupidity.
It really is this simple. On the vast majority of airline flights that take place in the world, the vast majority of passengers represent no threat to security whatsoever. By all means X-ray hold luggage, but only search passengers with Arab passports, Muslim-majority country passports, Muslims, or those of such extraction visiting such countries. And insist they turn up for the flight an hour early so that the searches can take place – through a dedicated channel.
Will this catch more Islamist nutters? No. Will it catch as many as we catch now? Yes. Will it improve the flying experience of 95+% of passengers? Yes. Will it increase the risk of atrocities? It might – to an infinitesimally tiny degree. That’s life – you still have a better chance of living to 110 than you do of it happening to you.
But what it may well do is ram home to Islamic fellow-travellers (those with a benign attitude to terrorists) that benign doesn’t pay.
Is it discriminatory? Of course it is. Is it racist? No more so than police arresting a black druggie caught on camera mugging someone, or a white yob setting his banned breed of dog on someone. Should police pay more attention to scruffy black vagrants with staring eyes, and muscular white dog-toting layabouts with a nasty scowl and shaven head? Of course they should. The past may not be a guide to the future in financial services, but when it comes to Islamists, drug abuse and violent dogs, it often is.
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Talking of druggies, I was travelling on the Jubilee Line yesterday when five heavily metalled and hugely spaced-out teenage blokes joined the carriage. There was much twitching, shaking, jabbering and inappropriate giggling. They sported – variously – tattoos, pink tufts of hair, tie-pinned noses and constantly swivelling eyeballs.
They are the children of the lost, these people. One sees them more and more in major conurbations and city centres. They have those same surreal, disjointed conversations that meths drinkers enjoy when gathered round an outdoor fire – along with the staring, rotating eyes and oddly knowing leer I always associate with The Creature in mad scientist films.
The copy of Metro I picked up this morning on my way home confirmed that we have more of them than any other nation beyond the truly hopeless cases like Zimbabwe and Mexico. (I am allowed to be rude about Mexico on this issue, because the figures back me up.)
As I walked onto the concourse at Waterloo to catch another train – this time to Southampton Airport – the police were moving on a group of vagrant alcoholics. The transport police seem to spend most of their time doing this. I often wonder where they will be moved on to, these Homeless Brothers immortalised by Don Maclean forty years ago.
But we needn’t worry about anyone issuing tickets being moved on: they will be ubiquitous forever. On boarding the train to the Airport, I noticed it was after 7.30 am, and thus my ticket was invalid for Peak travel…even though I had specified the 7.39 train when purchasing. This time I just waved it at the ticket inspector, and that seemed to do the trick.
It would be nice, would it not, if this new invalidity game could be applied to parking tickets. Sadly, the Government seems to have applied it to anyone wanting Olympic Games tickets. This Olympics fing mate – blimey, I tell you: it’s gonna end in tears.
The Slog 