Rant

This little piggy went to market,
This little piggy stayed home,
This little piggy is sneezing,
He's got Swine Flu! We're all going to die! Quick, run for the hills, not those hills, the other hills! Agh! Its the end of civilisation as we know it!

This is the scenario that the media would have us believe is happening all over the world. A few cases of a new-ish strain of flu, and all of a sudden, words like "pandemic", "armageddon" and..."Mexico" are being thrown about with gay abandon. It seems as if every news outlet is dominated with tales of the most recent outbreaks, despite the worldwide death toll allegedly hovering around 100 - less than the annual rate of golfing umbrella accidents.

This media hysteria, which I will call "Swine Flu Fever", has somehow managed to avoid causing panic and mass rioting. Most of the people I know have been completely unphased by the growing number of cases worldwide - we survived Bird Flu, SARS and Fat Duck virus, so we feel mildly impervious to such things. Besides, Swine Flu is a perfect excuse to drag out all the worst pig puns with a completely new context: "I phoned NHS Direct, and all I got was crackling". Finally, I personally am unable to hear "H1N1" without thinking "You sunk my battleship!".

So why have the news media latched onto this situation like a Jack Russell clamping onto your unmentionables? There is of course the old adage that "Bad New Sells", but the Credit Crunch has provided plenty of bad news over the last 18 months, so there seems to be little reason to move onto something new and untested. There, however, is the possibility that the health correspondants have been getting jealous of Robert Peston and wanted a shot at the limelight.

I do have another theory, one that may shed light on a conspiracy bigger than Armstrong overexposing the Moon Landing photos on the way home and having to re-shoot everything after they got back like an episode of a predictable sitcom. The fear of Swine Flu is being blown out of proportion as a joint venture between the sellers of surgical masks and the Associated Press, their dastardly hope being that they can scare everyone into staying at home with their mouths covered, ensuring that surgical masks become an essential consumable...and journalists can get a seat on the tube in the morning.

I was running slightly late for work today. Not so late that eyebrows would be raised, but late enough that I would be able to get on the Northern Line at Clapham North without being asfixy asphyxiay suffocated by a crowd of angry commuters. Or so I thought.

I rounded the corner to the station to see that the shutters were half closed. Not a good sign. Venturing closer in some vain hope that any problems were limited to the Southbound service, I found that the line was suspended up to Stockwell due to "passenger action" - quite the type of action was not explained, be it industrial, affirmative or pump. This was, however, beside the point, in all likelihood it was a fluffy euphimism for the older, decidedly less pleasant term "person under a train".

Fine, I thought, Stockwell's only a short walk north, I can handle that. And was slightly pleased that the train would likely be completely empty. I was half right. After getting mixed up about exactly which platform I should wait on - being in a hurry causing a strange form of temporary dyspraxia - I took a seat on a terminated southbound train that was to be imminently repurposed to go back north.

We sat patiently for a few minutes, smug at attaining seats at this time on a Monday, until the train had a sudden change of heart and decided it was going south after all. So hundreds of eager (read: late) commuters dutifully marched across to the Northbound platform - which, being entirely in tunnels with off-grey tiled walls, seemed a really long way.

The sudden re-repurposing of the train left something of a gap in the service. After five minutes of waiting, an empty Northbound train came into the station, and then went straight back out again without stopping. So we had to wait a further five or so minutes for the next train to arrive (with a running commentary of where it was from the platform staff - who probably shared our ire), this train was invariably rammed, and I was typically stood furthest from the door, so I had to wait for the next train.

Despite there being several of us stood back from the door of a train clearly crowded to Tokyo-ian(?) levels, one woman decided she would still have a try, and stepped around us before poking at gaps in the crowd with her body in a vain attempt to fit inside. Her grim determination might have impressed me, had she not implied by her actions that she thought I was fatter than her - bitch.

The staff announced that they were very sorry for the inconvenience...

Living in London has moulded me into one of those annoyingly self-righteous people who don't own a car. I may occasionally rent, but on the whole, public transport is good enough for me to manage. Its not so much about saving money, or saving the planet, its more about how I really hate driving.

This being the case, when I venture away from the bustling metropolis that is our capital city, I take the train. There's nothing more British than sailing majestically through the country side on a nation-spanning network of rails, within a powerful, proud, mechanical beast. At least not until mainland Europe got so much better at it than us...gits.

Of late, it seems that intercity (the purpose, not the model) trains have become vastly more crowded, with seas of embittered passengers lining the vestibule ends like a grumpy, somewhat uneven carpet - a sea of carpet, now there's a great mixed metaphor. I'd be tempted to say that this observation demonstrates how the Credit Crunch  and rising cost of fuel are making people cut back on the luxuries: staying in the UK for holidays, and dropping the family car for a family rail card. However, my observed rise in congestion coincides almost exactly with my being employed, so I now only really travel in and around peak times (even when I try to be clever and take Friday off to travel in the daytime, an ingenious idea, which it seems everyone else had too). Luckily, that was not the overriding point of this rant, so I shall move on.

My latest railway adventure was last Friday, and it was indeed an adventure, chock full of the excitement of watching the departures board patiently, hoping your choice of standing spot will be close enough to the unannounced platform to allow you to be first aboard, securing a space in the woefully inadequate luggage rack. A three hour journey into the wilderness of Northern England is ordinarily a scary prospect, but I was attending a friend's wedding, which was lovely, and a most worthy reason to stray from Southern Safety (pictures on Facebook, or possibly here, soon).

My reading matter for the trip was the eye-opening The Undercover Economist, one of a recent trend of Economics-lecture-as-entertainment type books. I was half expecting a poor cousin of the enourmously amusing Freakonomics (a fascinating and witty read that revealed many great truths and fallacies in the world, and made me far less likely to invest in property), instead I got something totally different; an accessible and humourous inside out look at economic principles, applied to simple real-life situations to show why everything seems so darned unfair. It explains why things cost what they do, that everything will work out in the end if left alone, and that governments will try their hardest to bugger that all up (despite being a necessary evil). Read it, and I guarantee you'll feel both slightly less miffed at the state of the country, slightly more miffed about the state of Cameroon, and a lot less likely to buy a large mocha-latte. But, I digress. We're back on the train.

One segment of the book described how products are often 'sabotaged' in order to sell more of the premium variation. An example of this was standard class on a train, designed to be sufficiently unpleasant that, if you can possibly afford it, you will go first class. As I was on a train, in standard class, at the time, I was shocked. I closed the book and sat there for a while with a glazed expression on my face, like I'd just been hit by, well, a train. But a train that was also a metaphor for hidden truth, a "Truth Train" if you will, much less funky than a "Soul Train", but on a nearby branch of the Intangible Mainline network.

Looking at the glum people sat at the end of the carriage by the toilets - feeling smug that I had pre-booked, paid less and got a seat - I realised why the open or on-the-day fare is so expensive. You're only going to sit on the floor once. After that, the few extra pounds for the far emptier first class won't seem like a waste of money.

I discussed this with the woman sat next to me. She said she would have gone to first class if the carriages weren't full of bodies, and that it is disgusting that they oversell trains like this. I resisted the urge to point out how much easier it is to get on the train via the door of the carriage you wish to sit in, rather than trapsing through the train, pushing past everyone who is making their way to their seat in a more efficient manner. I instead mumbled something about open tickets while secretly chiding myself for having a conversation about economics with a complete stranger.

I have several conclusions from the experience: always buy train tickets early. The product of the cost of a middle-aged woman's clothes and thickness of her makeup are inversely proportional to how much I'll agree with her views. Finally, rail companies have lots of clever tricks to part us from out hard earned money, but they'll still manage to screw it up along the way.