London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time.
History time.
Daily word time.
In the beginning was the word.
Beginning beginning… we’ve got a baby, she’s eight months old, keeping us company, so I’m thinking today’s word has to be infant.
Old word, infant. Very old word. You can track it all the way back to the Romans. Its Latin root means ‘without speech.’
And it’s fun, and edifying, to accordion the word out. Take the word infant and stretch it a little, accordion it out, and you get the word infantry.
And that’s a little house-lights-up moment. Because if you’re in the infantry you don’t have any say, you don’t have any speech. The officers do. But you don’t. You’re without speech. You keep quiet and follow orders.
Ok, moving on. Today’s word could have been potpourri. Or grab-bag. Because that’s what I’ve got for you today. What Italians call affettati. A mixture of cold cuts. An assortment.
Well, two cold cuts. The first one’s prompted by the Jason Arday affair. And I’m certainly not wading into the middle of that affray, that god-awful and ever so tragic mess.
But for me, amongst other things, it summoned up from the vasty depths a distant memory. A memory of something that happened over fifty years ago. But with me it’s evergreen. I’ve never forgotten it. Will never forget it.
It’s a conversational barnacle that clamped onto me back in the early 1970s. Clamped on and clung on. Can’t be scraped off. Won’t be dislodged. Refuses to part company with me.
It’s late October, 1973.
I’m on a train to Oxford. I’ve been in this country for all of three weeks.
I’m greener than a village cricket pitch in April. Beyond innocent. Naive in the extreme. Fresh from the Driftless Hills in the Land of the Gathering Waters. Translation: I’m from a small town in the American Midwest. I’m a stranger in a strange land.
Completely clueless about the people and culture and ways and outlook and history of the land I’ve washed ashore on. The aforementioned infant, my eight-month-old granddaughter, the Empress, is savvier than I am.
In the train carriage with me, seated opposite, an Oxford don. Though I wouldn’t have known the word don then. He’s a gentleman, the noun is carefully chosen, of about fifty. Urbane. Sophisticated. Upper class. Posh, clipped upper-class accent. Though both those realisations only came years later, after England had begun to soak into me. And of a kindly disposition. He was, after all, willing to put his book down and give some time to an over-eager, very callow young American.
I wanted to know about British universities. I was here to attend one, after all.
I asked him about tenure. ‘Do British universities have tenure?’
‘Not as such,’ he said.
I said, ‘What, do professors, my using the word “professors” also gave me away, though I hardly needed any giving away, what, do professors not have any protection? Can they just be terminated?’
He said:
‘My university wouldn’t let a man go for immorality. It wouldn’t let a man go for gross immorality. It might let a man go for repeated gross immorality.’
That’s verbatim.
As I used to say to my American students, ‘Don’t kid yourselves, these Brits aren’t Americans with cute accents. They don’t see the world the way you see it.’
Anyway, it was a mene mene tekel upharsin moment for me. Mene mene tekel upharsin. You’ll remember that. It’s biblical. That’s the writing on the wall at King Belshazzar’s feast. Once emblazoned there, once seen, or in my case heard, never forgotten.
Everything about that utterance. Including, of course, the term ‘a man’. It couldn’t be more revelatory of a time and a place and a set of rigidly complacent attitudes. Set in stone.
Anyway, that’s one of the thoughts, one of the memories the Jason Arday affair summoned up in my grey matter.
Ok, moving on. Our other cold cut. Put it this way. One of our guides. Christian Wolmar. The Railway Laureate.
Those of you who drink regularly from this stream will know that a few days ago I launched a new occasional series. An occasional series that’s going to look at what Christian Wolmar calls London’s Cathedrals of Steam. A series on London’s railway stations. This in conjunction with that new walk. Well, it’s more than a walk. It’s an all-day exploration of London’s railway stations. We’ve called it The Secrets of London’s Railway Stations. It is, needless to say, a Special. It only comes up two or three times a year. And on it you get double-teamed. Because it’s guided by Christian and top-flight professionally qualified guide Sam Jacobs.
Anyway, the long and short of this is I’m on a Christian Wolmar kick. I knew about his books, who doesn’t? But I’d never read any of them. Anyway, I picked up Cathedrals of Steam. I was smitten. It’s not just that it’s information-rich. About London and how it was utterly transformed by those railway stations. It’s also that it’s brilliantly written. A joy to read. You learn so much and you learn it enjoyably. So that’s one of my aims for the next year or so, to read all eighteen of Christian’s books.
And I thought, I’m not keeping this under my hat. This is a great find and I’m going to share it with London Walkers.
And a really good, compressed, brief way of pushing that boat out is to read the Note About the Author that slides into view, like railway carriages coupling, right at the end of Cathedrals of Steam.
Anyway, enough from me. Here’s the publisher’s note. Here’s Christian Wolmar in a nutshell. Or perhaps better put, here are the remarkable rows he’s hoed.
‘Christian Wolmar is a writer and broadcaster specializing in transport. He has worked on several national newspapers, including the Independent and Observer, and has written a fortnightly column for Rail magazine since 1996. He is also frequently on TV and radio, commenting on transport and other social issues.
He has written seven previous books for Atlantic: The Subterranean Railway (on the London Underground), Fire and Steam (British Railways), Blood, Iron and Gold (the world’s railways), Engines of War, The Great Railway Revolution (a history of the American railways), To the Edge of the World (the Trans-Siberian Railway) and Railways and the Raj (Indian railways). He has written several other books including The Crossrail Story and Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere?
He has had a sadly unsuccessful political career, having tried and failed to get the Labour nomination for several seats. He fought the 2016 Richmond Park by-election, recording Labour’s worst result in London since 1900. A passionate Londoner, he was also shortlisted to be the Labour candidate in the 2016 London mayoral election, coming fifth out of sixth in the subsequent vote.
He is always keen to engage with readers and can be contacted through his website,
christianwolmar.co.uk or via Twitter @christianwolmar.’