Love, the single girl and the Tube
Visiting London is always good for me. To start with, I can get hold of more English newspapers. Secondly, I can go and see some good plays. Thirdly, it helps me realise that I wouldn’t really want to move back to the UK because life there has become too complicated.
On my latest trip, the latter belief was enforced once again by an outing with a friend to a club on Oxford Street. Errol is a car-addict so he insisted on driving there. He came to pick me up at 8pm and we agreed we wouldn’t stay at the club for too long as I was leaving the next morning. Two hours later we were still cruising around Soho Square looking for a parking space. It was full of traffic wardens just waiting for us to make a mistake.
“You know, in Nicosia you can dump your car in the middle of the road and nobody would even notice,” I informed him cheerfully. “But joking aside, I really don’t understand why we haven’t come by Tube. It would have taken us 20 minutes and we wouldn’t have had this problem.”
“I don’t like the Underground,” he answered. “I like to be independent.”
Independent? Right. I shut up because it wasn’t really my problem and Errol almost always picks me up from Heathrow, which is great as I usually travel with far too much luggage and hate having to drag it around. So, since I am a ruthless user of Errol’s misinterpretation of the word ‘independence’ and even more so of his addiction to driving, I shouldn’t complain.
Still, I was being honest with my remark about preferring the Underground because being in London always reminds me that out there, in the normal world, there are other ways of commuting than with your own car. And, I always enjoy having the option.
True, there are bad sides to it as well. Parts of the tube stink, and you can’t see too much of London when you are underneath it, but this is compensated for by the abundance of printed matter abandoned on trains. As for buses, I haven’t used them for some time but when I did, attempting to stop them when they were chasing each other round Hyde Park Corner was a life-threatening experience.
However, even with these shortcomings, when I used the London Underground only one day prior to the concert by the Spencer Davies Group that Errol took me to, to get to the West End to see Jessica Lange in The Glass Menagerie, it had been very exciting. To start with, the moment I entered the carriage, I found two papers with enlightening columns: one by Gay Girl About Town despairing about the aesthetics of underwear worn by British lesbians, and the other by Single Girl Around Town shocked because a man dumped her before she had the chance to dump him. Then I located another paper in which a male columnist was confessing that he didn’t know how to tell his wife that he loved her. And then I got my hands on a gem: a copy of Hello magazine in which Hugh Grant shared his definition of romantic love.
“It is the same as the response to the classic torture technique,” he was quoted as saying. “You know, the one with the good cop and the bad cop. One guy comes in and beats you to a jelly, then the next guy comes in and gives you a cigarette. Then they repeat the process and the more they do it, the more confused you get. Eventually you get the thing they call Stockholm Syndrome, where you fall in love with your captor and end up being actually quite obsessed with them. I think that’s why women are so very good at being nice and then nasty, nice and then nasty. It can very often lead to complete infatuation.”
Hello’s reporter concluded after this tirade that Grant was very much in love with Jemima Goldsmith but I’m not so sure. To me, he sounded more like one of those British guys who, according to a recent survey by Durex condoms, wouldn’t mind giving up sex forever if they were given one million dollars (30 per cent of respondents), a lifetime’s supply of alcohol (one per cent) or their football team won the treble (three per cent). After all, who would really want to suffer what Grant describes as “romantic love” even if the person torturing them was a beautiful woman, except, of course, psychopaths, masochists, and yes, indeed, I have forgotten about them, men.
Well, I guess, I should start doing my best.
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