There's nothing like the situation of waiting for someone. On the street, in a pub, a station platform, somewhere busy. An excuse to loiter and watch it all go by, the people, the traffic, and occasionally the traffic in people. Of course one can mooch about for a bit anyhow, but after a while I would get self-conscious. For this to work, to get right into it, it has to be the real thing. You might think that occasionally scanning the crowd for one's approaching companion / consort / connection would be a distraction, but apparently not. That's your standing ticket, your loitering licence.
Getting nicely plotted up is more than half the trick. What you want is a window seat, or near the bar, or on a corner, under cover, close to the flow but with a bit of architecture either side of you to keep the bodies from bumping you. Have a think about this before you fix the rendezvous. Some of the best spots already have uses. If you're not buying or selling cracksmackpaddywhack people will wonder why you're sticky about the top of Charing Cross Road by the furthest tube exit - and those people will have an urgent reason for wondering why.
A chamfered corner is useful, giving that crossroads location without thrusting you into the path of the populace. Standing on the steps of a building, so long as one is not impending ingress and egress to the relevant edifice, works a treat since you have elevation into the bargain. Another trick for getting a bit of space around you is to stand directly beside one of those vagrants who sleep at right angles to the brickwork. Or adjacent to a freshly shot or stabbed teenager - no-one wants blood on their Blahniks or Churches.
After a while you'll get to read the street, its characteristics and rhythms. The ebb and flow of the bus stops, the steady stream into the tube station and intermittent gushings out, shuddering cinema queues and the pink provincial mobs outside the theatres. Taxis flagged down, amber gambled, figures bolting through the vehicles. The people, beginning or ending their evenings, the lovers, the adulterers, the escorts and the escorted, the couples, the singles. If the truth could be told to you, of all those passing, most of it would bore you arseless, but in among them you know a few are there doing something Else, New. Have to be, it's in the numbers.
If you do it right, get it, you won't want him or her or them to turn up, not just yet, not until you're good and cold or wet, and really need that drink and the Vietnamese from the new place. You might almost want to skip before they arrive, and find another corner. But you don't and it's usually just enough.
28 August 2007
27 August 2007
When a man is tired of London, he is tired of gits quoting Samuel Johnson at him.
No excuse for having a go at the canvas, mind you.
You'll all be familiar with Flickr by now, and its splendid tag facility, the potential for misuse of which is enormous. Take 'London' for instance. Here you'll find pictures of Nelson's Column and Bayswater, Bloomsbury and Marble Arch. You'll also find pictures of Stonehenge, Princes Street in Edinburgh, the Eiffel Tower, the interior of a Prague hostess bar, and several pages' worth of the long stay parking area at Washington Dulles. Because people don't tag their snaps for other people, they tag them for themselves, and relevance and association are highly subjective concepts.
On the other hand, it's also disturbing when the subject is more tightly defined. Of those photos that fit the GLA boundary, an overwhelming percentage seem to be from a tiny oval shaped area stretching from the Wheel to Buckingham Palace, as if most visitors had only two hours in town before leaving again. The sheer profusion of views of Westminster Abbey is especially perplexing - most English religious architecture manages to make the ornate seem dull, but WA does it in a way that is actually exhausting to the eye.
Perhaps we just don't have much to take photos of here? I may be biased, because I have had plenty of time to have had it up to here with here, but some of our most renowned public spaces really aren't up to much.
One of our more architecturally underwhelming buildings, Buckingham Palace is more of a house. A dull one at that. In the style of a Town Hall in a West Country spa town, but pointlessly elongated. In summer there are tours - I've never been in but I'm told it's filled with a horrible quantity of tacky gilt.
Piccadilly Circus: there are postcards of this road junction from the 1950s in which the neon ads look picturesque, but now the buildings are clad in mediocre fascias evoking a suburban shopping parade on steroids. Even the smackheads and rent boys have forsaken the place. This vortex of human and vehicular traffic obstructs passage from St. James to Soho to the extent that one is tempted to take the 38 one stop just to cross it. Walk down Coventry Street and past the effluent Trocadero and you find...
Leicester Square. Several obscenely overpriced cinemas, streams of adolescents from zones 4 to 6, indefatigable little fellows trying to sell single roses to couples who have already shagged. On weekend evenings, a place where people from Brentwood and Carshalton can meet and kick each other senseless. We do vertical drinking on the pavements outside pubs very well, but otherwise al fresco urban social culture is beyond us. We should give up and Fester Square shows why. La Rambla it's not.
When I lived in Fitzrovia I'd occasionally be asked by visitors for directions to Oxford Street - when we were already on it. I can only sympathise. If Canal Street ever got as bad as Soho's (oursnotyours) northern boundary, it would lose even its PATH-borne custom. Was ever thus: in 1964 Len Deighton wrote 'Charlotte Street runs north from Oxford Street and there are few who will blame it' (Funeral in Berlin). When even spy novels are hitting something with near-Wildean putdowns you know it's low.
Covent Garden: as Time Out will tell you, London is all about shopping, buying things, etc (that and watching telly). The Parisians learned their lesson with Les Halles and so have we - it's when you chuck out the fruit and veg market that the rot sets in. WC2 sucks in the creatures from Burbworld like a big Electrolux that's just had its dust-bag changed. Put a roof on it and most of Covent Garden would be more obvious as the shopping centre it merely is. Or mall. Pronounced 'maul'.
On the other hand, London looks good from the air. It really does. Do yourself a favour when you're next flying in to Heathrow (which, as overcrowded, prone to baggage loss, and grim as it is, is not Gatwick in Sussex, Luton in Bedfordshire or Stansted almost in the Fens) - use the 'change seat' facility to be over on the right hand side of the plane. If your boss isn't paying sit way back (it's not as if you'll beat your luggage to the carousel) so the wing isn't in the way. Usually the plane will enter London from the north and make a sharp right turn over the City, so that your view is exactly aligned downwards with the Bank junction, pivoting around it. Time your arrival for dusk and it will be lit prettily, the bridges like Christmas trees, the parks as dark voids in between. With all the lights on even Hounslow High Street looks like a valley of jewels and precious metal. Try not to dwell on the fact that you're not going to be at your hotel for at least another hour and a half. Even if it is at the country end of the Cromwell Road.
You'll all be familiar with Flickr by now, and its splendid tag facility, the potential for misuse of which is enormous. Take 'London' for instance. Here you'll find pictures of Nelson's Column and Bayswater, Bloomsbury and Marble Arch. You'll also find pictures of Stonehenge, Princes Street in Edinburgh, the Eiffel Tower, the interior of a Prague hostess bar, and several pages' worth of the long stay parking area at Washington Dulles. Because people don't tag their snaps for other people, they tag them for themselves, and relevance and association are highly subjective concepts.
On the other hand, it's also disturbing when the subject is more tightly defined. Of those photos that fit the GLA boundary, an overwhelming percentage seem to be from a tiny oval shaped area stretching from the Wheel to Buckingham Palace, as if most visitors had only two hours in town before leaving again. The sheer profusion of views of Westminster Abbey is especially perplexing - most English religious architecture manages to make the ornate seem dull, but WA does it in a way that is actually exhausting to the eye.
Perhaps we just don't have much to take photos of here? I may be biased, because I have had plenty of time to have had it up to here with here, but some of our most renowned public spaces really aren't up to much.
One of our more architecturally underwhelming buildings, Buckingham Palace is more of a house. A dull one at that. In the style of a Town Hall in a West Country spa town, but pointlessly elongated. In summer there are tours - I've never been in but I'm told it's filled with a horrible quantity of tacky gilt.
Piccadilly Circus: there are postcards of this road junction from the 1950s in which the neon ads look picturesque, but now the buildings are clad in mediocre fascias evoking a suburban shopping parade on steroids. Even the smackheads and rent boys have forsaken the place. This vortex of human and vehicular traffic obstructs passage from St. James to Soho to the extent that one is tempted to take the 38 one stop just to cross it. Walk down Coventry Street and past the effluent Trocadero and you find...
Leicester Square. Several obscenely overpriced cinemas, streams of adolescents from zones 4 to 6, indefatigable little fellows trying to sell single roses to couples who have already shagged. On weekend evenings, a place where people from Brentwood and Carshalton can meet and kick each other senseless. We do vertical drinking on the pavements outside pubs very well, but otherwise al fresco urban social culture is beyond us. We should give up and Fester Square shows why. La Rambla it's not.
When I lived in Fitzrovia I'd occasionally be asked by visitors for directions to Oxford Street - when we were already on it. I can only sympathise. If Canal Street ever got as bad as Soho's (oursnotyours) northern boundary, it would lose even its PATH-borne custom. Was ever thus: in 1964 Len Deighton wrote 'Charlotte Street runs north from Oxford Street and there are few who will blame it' (Funeral in Berlin). When even spy novels are hitting something with near-Wildean putdowns you know it's low.
Covent Garden: as Time Out will tell you, London is all about shopping, buying things, etc (that and watching telly). The Parisians learned their lesson with Les Halles and so have we - it's when you chuck out the fruit and veg market that the rot sets in. WC2 sucks in the creatures from Burbworld like a big Electrolux that's just had its dust-bag changed. Put a roof on it and most of Covent Garden would be more obvious as the shopping centre it merely is. Or mall. Pronounced 'maul'.
On the other hand, London looks good from the air. It really does. Do yourself a favour when you're next flying in to Heathrow (which, as overcrowded, prone to baggage loss, and grim as it is, is not Gatwick in Sussex, Luton in Bedfordshire or Stansted almost in the Fens) - use the 'change seat' facility to be over on the right hand side of the plane. If your boss isn't paying sit way back (it's not as if you'll beat your luggage to the carousel) so the wing isn't in the way. Usually the plane will enter London from the north and make a sharp right turn over the City, so that your view is exactly aligned downwards with the Bank junction, pivoting around it. Time your arrival for dusk and it will be lit prettily, the bridges like Christmas trees, the parks as dark voids in between. With all the lights on even Hounslow High Street looks like a valley of jewels and precious metal. Try not to dwell on the fact that you're not going to be at your hotel for at least another hour and a half. Even if it is at the country end of the Cromwell Road.
pictures of cars and flowers
As children, we play, and think: 'When I am an adult I'll do this all day - and all night if I want'. We imagine ourselves with an adult's resources and freedom to act. We can take the train to the seaside on a schoolday, paint pictures of cars and flowers directly onto the wallpaper, eat nothing but beef stew, breakfast cereal, and pancakes at the cafe in town.
As we grow older our passions for all these things lessen gradually, so precisely in synchronisation with our increasing ability to act for ourselves that it seems almost mechanical. With the impulses of children, as adults we would be a danger (as they say of the psychotic) to ourselves and others, so perhaps this is all just as well.
But there's an echo or a shadow, or something, that brings a tinge of regret. Now we can do all these things, the wanting has gone and for all this independence those desires have been lost and the real strong soul-filling pleasure has ebbed away.
There's love, of course, but that's not the same.
As we grow older our passions for all these things lessen gradually, so precisely in synchronisation with our increasing ability to act for ourselves that it seems almost mechanical. With the impulses of children, as adults we would be a danger (as they say of the psychotic) to ourselves and others, so perhaps this is all just as well.
But there's an echo or a shadow, or something, that brings a tinge of regret. Now we can do all these things, the wanting has gone and for all this independence those desires have been lost and the real strong soul-filling pleasure has ebbed away.
There's love, of course, but that's not the same.
20 August 2007
18 August 2007
Blackmail Years
For a long time I've believed that my demise will be foretold unto me and I will simply not get around to do anything about it - like never putting my the bulk of my savings in an interest-bearing account or topping up my ISA, only fatal. One day I'll get one of those Chinese fortune, ahem, biscuits and the rice paper message will just say "You die."
I'd rather walk around a built-up area wearing shorts and a Bluetooth phone headset than have a presence on F'cebook, so when a friend of mine sent me a link to it recently I had to politely decline. This isn't the first time this has happened, as it is popular with several colleagues (why use a social networking site when we can more easily procrastinate on our employer's e-mail system?) but I'd never followed the link before.
"Blackmail Years"? Eh? Am I just about to enter my 'blackmail years', is that the message? Am I blackmailing? Or do I leave it to one of any number of Feisbook users to do that to me? Perhaps we need to be clear about this, because it's going to last a while.
It may foil the spammers but it scares the sht out of me.
I'd rather walk around a built-up area wearing shorts and a Bluetooth phone headset than have a presence on F'cebook, so when a friend of mine sent me a link to it recently I had to politely decline. This isn't the first time this has happened, as it is popular with several colleagues (why use a social networking site when we can more easily procrastinate on our employer's e-mail system?) but I'd never followed the link before.
"Blackmail Years"? Eh? Am I just about to enter my 'blackmail years', is that the message? Am I blackmailing? Or do I leave it to one of any number of Feisbook users to do that to me? Perhaps we need to be clear about this, because it's going to last a while.
It may foil the spammers but it scares the sht out of me.
09 August 2007
All I am saying / is give bureaucracy a chance
Prowling the corridors of an unfamiliar building the other day, seeking a cryptically numbered meeting room, I glanced in through the glass wall of an office and saw what I at first thought was one of those security service posters of terror suspect mugshots. I normally only see these affixed to the cubicle of a passport control desk (and in the brief moment of having my particulars scrutinised can usually identify at least one individual who looks a lot like me).
It wasn't one of those posters, but an organisational chart, depicting all those senior bods in the structure who have it in their objectives to circulate among their staff and get to know what it is they do, but never quite get around to it. So they settle for having their face in the organogram. By the way, doesn't 'organogram' sound like a cross between the strippergram the lads get Dave for his fortieth and that bloke on the ambulance service motorbike with the freshly harvested kidney in an ice-box on the pannier?
The similarity of these posters is striking in terms of the occupants of the boxes above the names. Neither suspects nor directors want to be in front of the camera, all look puzzled, miserable or suspicious. The manager of strategy, performance and corporate relations appears to have spent a full morning being waterboarded, while the business development coordinator clearly has electrodes attached to his genitals at the moment of photographic capture. Just as an aside, there is an important cultural difference here in that the inhabitants of corporate charts across the atlantic generally look as perky and shiny as a row of freshly rubbed buttons, smiling with their lips pulled back like salaried lupines to reveal a row of glaring halogen bulbs in the approximate shape of teeth. So anyone not familiar with the dowdier UK version will have no clue what the flip I'm talking about, but that's never bothered me before, so on I go...
What this led me to think was that there is an opportunity here for the Great War On Terror to become more sophisticated in its methods (or 'get smarter' if one has to be vulgar about it). For comparatively little resource the evil-doers and wrong 'uns can be effectively thwarted with one of these organisational charts. Here's how.
To begin with, I hope I am not being merely charitable in assuming that the security services have already infiltrated Al Qaida at various levels. I was speaking to someone who works in marketing the other day and he said that his firm already has half a dozen guys in there on secondment. They're developing a campaign to put costumed distributors onto the site of the next atrocity with free samples of a new carbonated lemon juice drink before the emergency services arrive. Similarly the British Army in Helmand, a lucrative market segment representing high impulse spend opportunities, might want to consider why they keep seeing gigantic images cut into the poppy fields advertising X-Boxes, Lynx deodorant, and FHM magazine everytime they fly over Taliban-held territory. My sources tell me Gilette are interested in the viral marketing possibilities of those video clips of beheadings. All you have to do is turn up, really.
So let's assume our spooks are in and they're passing information out. What I suggest is a shift to the proactive. Never mind bunker-busters and other noisy crudities, if someone were to introduce a root and branch reform of Al Q's cellular command structure their activities could be halted by, well, the end of the financial year. It all starts with the organisational chart. No-one will question the wisdom of putting the internal command structure down on paper because they'll be too busy squabbling about what the poster's background should look like ('Blue is authoritative.' 'Yes, but pistachio is nicer.' 'What about an intricate repetitive pattern - with bits that look like crescent moons but only if you squint.' 'Yes, it could be like one of those magic eye pictures!' 'No, that's naughty, it has to be plain and pious.'). If they ever get past the swatches they can move onto the power struggles, but these are less important than an institutional collapse from the foundations upward.
Because once you let an organisational chart into your concern, a bureaucratic oblivion soon follows. Corporatist interference in ongoing and forthcoming activities is now sanctioned. Martyrdom operations have to be cancelled because everyone has back-to-back meetings all day, or is on maternity/paternity leave (AQ being by now an Equal Opportunities employer) or is on a training course. Of the latter category, 'Health and Safety', 'Motivation and Teambuilding with Will Carling', and 'Diversity and Cultural Awareness for Public, Voluntary and Community Sector Professionals', are likely to be mandatory.
Whereas before WMD and associated components could be obtained on the spur of the moment down at the market, they will now have to be bought from approved suppliers, using the prescribed procurement system. These suppliers never have the thing you want in stock, or at least not in the right colour, and in any case filling out the forms and getting them approved takes ages. How can you obtain clearance for a dozen snazzy new surface-to-air missiles when your counter-signing officer is in Belmarsh, your budget holder is in Guantanamo, and your line manager is holidaying in the Atlas mountains for the summer? After a while all this will no longer matter as operatives will have become too distracted by the contents of the stationery catalogue to have time for purchasing weaponry. Under the new priorities a gun that can fire 300 rounds a minute is one thing, but a stapler that can clip through 50 sheets of paper, now that's quite a compelling piece of kit.
Transport of goods and fugitives across the Hindu Kush then grinds to a halt because no-one can work out how to get their donkey hire expenses approved on SAP. Furthering the descent into chaos, Al Quaida establishes a central Help Desk based in Bolton. Imagine a Baghdad insurgent attempting to prime his improvised landmine with two minutes left before the biggest Blackwater / Haliburton / Bectel convoy ever comes through, under lethargic wheezing instruction via sat-phone from a Johnny Vegas sound-a-like.
And so peace, a vaguely frustrated but increasingly ennervated peace, breaks out.
It wasn't one of those posters, but an organisational chart, depicting all those senior bods in the structure who have it in their objectives to circulate among their staff and get to know what it is they do, but never quite get around to it. So they settle for having their face in the organogram. By the way, doesn't 'organogram' sound like a cross between the strippergram the lads get Dave for his fortieth and that bloke on the ambulance service motorbike with the freshly harvested kidney in an ice-box on the pannier?
The similarity of these posters is striking in terms of the occupants of the boxes above the names. Neither suspects nor directors want to be in front of the camera, all look puzzled, miserable or suspicious. The manager of strategy, performance and corporate relations appears to have spent a full morning being waterboarded, while the business development coordinator clearly has electrodes attached to his genitals at the moment of photographic capture. Just as an aside, there is an important cultural difference here in that the inhabitants of corporate charts across the atlantic generally look as perky and shiny as a row of freshly rubbed buttons, smiling with their lips pulled back like salaried lupines to reveal a row of glaring halogen bulbs in the approximate shape of teeth. So anyone not familiar with the dowdier UK version will have no clue what the flip I'm talking about, but that's never bothered me before, so on I go...
What this led me to think was that there is an opportunity here for the Great War On Terror to become more sophisticated in its methods (or 'get smarter' if one has to be vulgar about it). For comparatively little resource the evil-doers and wrong 'uns can be effectively thwarted with one of these organisational charts. Here's how.
To begin with, I hope I am not being merely charitable in assuming that the security services have already infiltrated Al Qaida at various levels. I was speaking to someone who works in marketing the other day and he said that his firm already has half a dozen guys in there on secondment. They're developing a campaign to put costumed distributors onto the site of the next atrocity with free samples of a new carbonated lemon juice drink before the emergency services arrive. Similarly the British Army in Helmand, a lucrative market segment representing high impulse spend opportunities, might want to consider why they keep seeing gigantic images cut into the poppy fields advertising X-Boxes, Lynx deodorant, and FHM magazine everytime they fly over Taliban-held territory. My sources tell me Gilette are interested in the viral marketing possibilities of those video clips of beheadings. All you have to do is turn up, really.
So let's assume our spooks are in and they're passing information out. What I suggest is a shift to the proactive. Never mind bunker-busters and other noisy crudities, if someone were to introduce a root and branch reform of Al Q's cellular command structure their activities could be halted by, well, the end of the financial year. It all starts with the organisational chart. No-one will question the wisdom of putting the internal command structure down on paper because they'll be too busy squabbling about what the poster's background should look like ('Blue is authoritative.' 'Yes, but pistachio is nicer.' 'What about an intricate repetitive pattern - with bits that look like crescent moons but only if you squint.' 'Yes, it could be like one of those magic eye pictures!' 'No, that's naughty, it has to be plain and pious.'). If they ever get past the swatches they can move onto the power struggles, but these are less important than an institutional collapse from the foundations upward.
Because once you let an organisational chart into your concern, a bureaucratic oblivion soon follows. Corporatist interference in ongoing and forthcoming activities is now sanctioned. Martyrdom operations have to be cancelled because everyone has back-to-back meetings all day, or is on maternity/paternity leave (AQ being by now an Equal Opportunities employer) or is on a training course. Of the latter category, 'Health and Safety', 'Motivation and Teambuilding with Will Carling', and 'Diversity and Cultural Awareness for Public, Voluntary and Community Sector Professionals', are likely to be mandatory.
Whereas before WMD and associated components could be obtained on the spur of the moment down at the market, they will now have to be bought from approved suppliers, using the prescribed procurement system. These suppliers never have the thing you want in stock, or at least not in the right colour, and in any case filling out the forms and getting them approved takes ages. How can you obtain clearance for a dozen snazzy new surface-to-air missiles when your counter-signing officer is in Belmarsh, your budget holder is in Guantanamo, and your line manager is holidaying in the Atlas mountains for the summer? After a while all this will no longer matter as operatives will have become too distracted by the contents of the stationery catalogue to have time for purchasing weaponry. Under the new priorities a gun that can fire 300 rounds a minute is one thing, but a stapler that can clip through 50 sheets of paper, now that's quite a compelling piece of kit.
Transport of goods and fugitives across the Hindu Kush then grinds to a halt because no-one can work out how to get their donkey hire expenses approved on SAP. Furthering the descent into chaos, Al Quaida establishes a central Help Desk based in Bolton. Imagine a Baghdad insurgent attempting to prime his improvised landmine with two minutes left before the biggest Blackwater / Haliburton / Bectel convoy ever comes through, under lethargic wheezing instruction via sat-phone from a Johnny Vegas sound-a-like.
And so peace, a vaguely frustrated but increasingly ennervated peace, breaks out.
07 August 2007
To address over-achievement
Do this in winter. The effect of the exercise will be all the more severe. You want this moment to live forever in the memory, but never to be repeated in life.
Wake them early, your children, wrench them from their dreams. Dress them in new and starchy clothing, irritating to the skin and restrictive to movement, applying to the male child a kind of noose, tightened to within several circumferential millimetres of the fatal. Permit no leisurely breakfast, or indeed any moment for contemplation or assimilation to the waking world. About the whole exercise there should be an air of crisis, of near panic. Hurry them from the home and out into the street. It will still be dark.
Scamper them to the station, tripping and hobbling in their new and uncomfortable shoes. Explain carefully as you pour coins into the ticket machine that this is their pocket money. All of their pocket money and then some - they will be repaying the balance over many weeks to come.
When the train arrives force them in among the dense herd of human contents. There will be no seats, nor any window sufficiently nearby to look out of. Several stations later take them off that train, taking care that they glancingly impact on every briefcase and umbrella point on the way to the door. Scuttle them through tunnels, up and downstairs, through apparently impenetrable crowds of oncoming people, maintaining urgency throughout. On another platform, another train, repeat the process.
By the time you reach the surface, in whatever financial district your city possesses, your children should be terrified, dazed, perhaps shivering, but still sentient. You want them to learn from the experience. You want them to understand.
Only now let them rest, ideally placed at some vantage point from which they can see the gadarene trudge of compromised humanity. Direct their gaze to the shuffling columns of commuters, identify for them particular subjects, examples of dead-eyed half-life.
Now you can speak to your children at length, gently, return to them the parent they know and love. Tell them that if they work hard at school, apply themselves in particular to those subjects that seem to promise most in terms of later career and fulfilment of material aspiration, all of this can be theirs. Day after day and year upon year, and only when they are too weak to work, too drained to play, when they no longer recognise their younger selves, will it end.
That should see to it.
Wake them early, your children, wrench them from their dreams. Dress them in new and starchy clothing, irritating to the skin and restrictive to movement, applying to the male child a kind of noose, tightened to within several circumferential millimetres of the fatal. Permit no leisurely breakfast, or indeed any moment for contemplation or assimilation to the waking world. About the whole exercise there should be an air of crisis, of near panic. Hurry them from the home and out into the street. It will still be dark.
Scamper them to the station, tripping and hobbling in their new and uncomfortable shoes. Explain carefully as you pour coins into the ticket machine that this is their pocket money. All of their pocket money and then some - they will be repaying the balance over many weeks to come.
When the train arrives force them in among the dense herd of human contents. There will be no seats, nor any window sufficiently nearby to look out of. Several stations later take them off that train, taking care that they glancingly impact on every briefcase and umbrella point on the way to the door. Scuttle them through tunnels, up and downstairs, through apparently impenetrable crowds of oncoming people, maintaining urgency throughout. On another platform, another train, repeat the process.
By the time you reach the surface, in whatever financial district your city possesses, your children should be terrified, dazed, perhaps shivering, but still sentient. You want them to learn from the experience. You want them to understand.
Only now let them rest, ideally placed at some vantage point from which they can see the gadarene trudge of compromised humanity. Direct their gaze to the shuffling columns of commuters, identify for them particular subjects, examples of dead-eyed half-life.
Now you can speak to your children at length, gently, return to them the parent they know and love. Tell them that if they work hard at school, apply themselves in particular to those subjects that seem to promise most in terms of later career and fulfilment of material aspiration, all of this can be theirs. Day after day and year upon year, and only when they are too weak to work, too drained to play, when they no longer recognise their younger selves, will it end.
That should see to it.
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