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June 05, 2005

Lost In Transit

(NOTE: The published version of 'Lost In Transit' was much shorter than the version presented here)

Friday 2nd July

Being stuck in Heuston Station for two hours isn’t so bad. There are worst things in life. Standing on a plug on the floor in your socks. Only realising you’re out of milk after you’ve boiled the kettle. In contrast, being stuck in Grand Old Hueston Station isn’t so bad at all. After getting off the near empty bus outside Hueston, I walked inside to a station buzzing with activity. People on platform one suddenly realising their train is on platform six, thirty seconds before departure. Commuters fumbling for thirty cents to get into the toilet before it’s too late. Old age pensioners being whizzed around on golf carts. Its Hueston Station at it’s finest. When it really comes alive. With this in mind, I took the middle seat on one of the remarkably comfortable benches in the station. The one right outside the entrance to Eason’s Newsagents, to be exact. I figured I’d watch all the people inside and try and guess what newspaper they’d go for. Before I could get really into the game, an American bag packer, very politely I must add, asked if I would move up one seat so that he and his companion could beside each other. Of course I was only too happy to oblige. It’s nice to be nice you know. So anyway, as I got up to move one place, another commuter entered the equation by sitting in the seat I was about to go for. The American’s couldn’t help smiling at the situation where I had become seat less and they offered my old seat back to me. I declined it and sat around the other side of the bench where I had a view of the whole station. I looked around and thought, “Wow. This has been here since 1846.” Heuston is actually based on the design of an Italian palazzo. It certainly is a fine building.

I begun to try and think of films that involved commuting. Coincidently the first one that sprung to mind was the 1979 movie “The Great Train Robbery” starring Sean Connery and Donald Sutherland. It was all about the first ever bullion robbery from a moving train, set in 1865 England. In fact, for a film that creates a vividly authentic recreation of Victorian England, most of it was filmed in Ireland! Some of its scenes were actually filmed in Heuston Station. During the shooting in Hueston, a diesel locomotive leaked a large quantity of fuel onto the tracks by the platform. When the production’s steam engine rolled onto the same tracks, embers spewing from the underside of the train ignited the fuel soaked track, creating quite a large fire within the station.

Another film I thought of while sitting happily in Hueston was “Trains, Planes and Automobiles”. That was an obvious one really. It was all about a disastrous journey across a snow-bound North America by two hopelessly mismatched travellers – Steve Martin and John Candy. There are some great lines in that movie. Candy: You’re in a pretty lousy mood, huh? Martin: To say the least.
Candy: You ever travel by bus before? [Martin shakes his head] Candy: Hmm. Your mood’s probably not going to improve much.

Then I started to think about whether Jen Coyle’s column “Girl Friday” was named after the classic 1940 Cary Grant movie “His Girl Friday”. I decided that it probably wasn’t but it was just a strange coincidence that the film happened to be about a young lady journalist.

Couldn’t think of any more commuting films so I turned back to looking in bewilderment at the stressed commuters zipping around the station like my hyperactive Cavalier King Charles dog, Lucky. They all seem so edgy. At this I notice that the guy sitting beside me is deeply engrossed in his book. Curious to see what he’s reading I try and inadvertently turn my head to steal a quick glance. No tomato. Time to bring in the infantry. Whipped out a copy of Murakami’s UNDERGROUND (which is about the Tokyo gas attack and the Japanese psyche, if you’re asking) and opened the book on a random page. This gave me an excuse to be looking more in the direction of my neighbour’s book. It took several minutes to uncover, but his book, rather disappointingly, turned out to be about the “Greatest” poker player cheats. In fact, what made it even more dismal was that the sticker on the back of his book indicated that it had been bought in a popular Dublin music store. The fact that books are being sold in music stores isn’t so much the problem, more so the incurably evil marketing people who select books to which a music store customer would supposedly be interested in. For example, “The Greatest Poker Player Cheats of all Time”. I’ve been in the music store in question and the lone bookshelf they have there radiates conformity. Its purpose is to provide young people of a liberal persuasion into buying a book that will undoubtly prove more popular with their fellow liberal and therefore, ahem, radical (cough, cough!) friends, than say a copy of Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s “Le Petit Prince” or God for bid, Tove Jansson’s “The Summer Book”.

After reciting that rant to myself, I noticed I had been sitting quite still. Statue like almost. A woman sitting on the bench across me from me noticed too. So for her benefit, I tried to remain frozen, with the exception of blinking, for as long as I could. The novelty wore off fairly quickly, as you can imagine. I was starting to get hungry. Not the country, you understand. Even when I do eventually take over the world, I’ll probably let the Hungarians keep their quaint little province of the Planet Liam: the centre of the universe. No, I meant hungry in the rumbling sense of the world. And not proper food either. Sweets. Ah, I’ve missed many a train after deciding I’d rather have a Milky Bar then race up to platform seven. Sugar Junkies will do anything for some glucose. But in a moment of madness, I chose not to but any sweets and instead I bought a banana and returned to my bench where I would sit and listen to the Tokyo Symphonic Orchestra playing the Super Mario Bros. theme tune on my walkman, for another hour. Lost in Transit.

Trains, Buses & Automobiles by Liam Geraghty appears every week in the Kildare Nationalist (page 6)

Posted by LiamG at June 5, 2005 09:31 PM