What is in Kelvin's Head?

Vile, vile, vile

18/08/2012

Oh, vile was the journey home from Edinburgh last night.

Every now and then there is hand wringing about how few the number of people are who make the trip over from Glasgow (city of light and beauty) to Edinburgh (town of dark pleasures and dug-up roads) for arts events in the Edinburgh festival. Indeed, this year, they’ve installed a useful ticket booth for the Fringe in Queen Street station, pour encourager les autres.

That’s a good idea in itself, but access to tickets isn’t the primary reason that people don’t make the journey.

I can understand why they might want to encourage more people. After all, I’ve been at two of the top notch events in the official festival in the last week and on each occasion there have been many empty seats all around me. (Funny, isn’t it that empty seats at the Olympics are a national scandal whilst empty seats at the world’s premier arts festival cause no headlines.)

[In passing, I would also note with a slight grump that the Festival is now refusing to give a companion’s ticket to reviewers these days despite having all those empty seats to fill].

A big part of the reason for people not wanting to go to Edinburgh at night from the land of plenteousness in the West is that the journey can be just so vile.

You don’t want to drive to Edinburgh because in Edinburgh you can neither park nor drive. All roads in the centre are likely to be dug up or congested due to the long-running tram debacle which would be better described as a piece of performance art than a transport policy.

And the late night trains from Edinburgh are just so horrible.

Last Saturday night there was terrible overcrowding on the trains. They know that the Edinburgh festival is on its way presumably every year. And though there is the odd extra train very late at night, the capacity at 1030 pm just isn’t good enough. Corridors are full of people and toilets are full of…. well, never mind what they are full of.

Last night I thought I got lucky by getting a seat in the front of the train. However, that feeling of pleasure and delight was soon dashed from the castle ramparts above Waverley station as Glasgow’s generic, belligerent, loud, smelly, objectionable drunk decided to sit at my table. After announcing to one and all quite how p….drunk he was, he then proceeded to keep up a commentary on everyone else in the carriage. Young women were lampooned for being too fat for him, too thin for him or wearing the wrong clothes. Every man was a threat that made him nervous and tetchy. Anyone with a briefcase was subject to questioning about what they did and whether they had any money in the case.

Dozens of people had a miserable end to whatever kind of evening that they had had.

I chose the line of least resistance and feigned sleep. However, closing your eyes to such bad behaviour is hardly any easier than keeping vigilant watch.

Scotrail supposedly have a no alcohol and no drunks policy on late-night trains. If they are going to come anywhere near enforcing it then they need some staff on the trains. Last night there was no sign of a guard, conductor, ticket-wallah or whatever the whole vile journey.

Quite ghastly and bound to make one think twice about making the journey again.

drunk, Edinburgh Festival, Glasgow

7 responses to “Reclaiming the web”

Paul Hutchinson

14/10/2015

Thank you for making me think in a different direction just before pausing for lunch. I have never had a blog, so came quite late to Internet social discourse, and have engaged more since joining one major network in 2010 and another in early 2014 – normally using those networks rather than a comment box such as this. Not all of us are natural creators of substantial original content, but like to be thoughtful in brief exchange, and so both those major networks, though cursed with many difficulties, serve those brief exchanges quite well. I do agree that the endless recycling of links (on both of them) can be wearying, and I do wish that some old friends would be a little more self-critical. But the price of any kind of social discourse is that one is vulnerable to the otherness of the other.
I feel I ought to be writing a more substantial comment here, but hope that this is enough. The time is not always there to offer deeper reflection: but sometimes a blogger needs to hear at least a small splash from the stone thrown down the well!

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1. Kelvin
  
  14/10/2015
  
  Thanks for the comment, Paul. I’m aware that not everyone is a content creator, but perhaps what I miss is the sense of discovering different communities online and keeping the comments more or less in one place helps with that.
  
  The glory days of 50 or more comments on a post are probably over. I suspect I mourn the sense of community being created even more than I miss the interesting reflections of others. Retweets and shares are always welcome – but they are the means of amplification. Becoming loud isn’t the same as becoming wise, nor the same as becoming connected.
  
  Reply
Seph

14/10/2015

It’s a damnable shame—and mostly the fault of Facebook. Twitter at least has an etiquette of sorts, wherein it is considered impolite not to respond to the original tweet, which is usually made by the blogger in question.

Facebook, in short, is the scourge of the Internet. I have often been in groups which have decided to do all of their organizing on Facebook, despite my protests that I’m not on Facebook and don’t want to be, and really an e-mail list would be just as easy, and would they like me to set one up. This inevitably leads to my marginalization within the group, as no-one bothers to keep me abreast of the discussions to which I am not party.

Can you tell I’m upset about this?

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Daniel Lamont

14/10/2015

I am only an occasional user of Facebook but I know what you mean, Kelvin. And indeed, I never read the comments ‘below the line’ on newspapers like ‘The Guardian’. You offer some useful advice. I read yours and one or two other blogs on a regular basis but don’t always comment. However, I can see that the author of a blog would like some feedback. I would be sad not to have the blogs that I do read because they do give me a sense of what people are thinking and an odd sense of community.

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Father Ron Smith

14/10/2015

My own contribution to the blogopshere is, I’m afraid, Father Kelvin, limited to comments I make on other people’s blogs (such as ‘Thinking Anglicans’ and ‘Anglican Down Under’ – a local NZ forum; plus my own blog ‘kiwianglo’, where i pluck articles that interest me personally from the web and provide my own commentary. This still interests me, personally, and provides my few readers with information they might not otherwise be bothered to glean for themselves. Like you, I am no longer an avid Facebook fan.

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David Campbell

16/10/2015

Hi Kelvin – thoughtful as ever – and yours is invariably the first blog I turn to each day. That you bring pressing issues to a wider audience and to people who know, or used to know, the church you serve is a great thing. I’m still blogging relatively strongly, but it’s certainly a different blogging experience when work is set in a very different context and especially community from previously, writing these days mainly for myself about things that interest me, although not quite at the address you have in your Blog Roll. http://www.limpingtowardsthesunrise.com is where it’s “all” happening.

Reply
1. Kelvin
  
  16/10/2015
  
  Thanks David – nice to hear from you. I’ve amended the link.
  
  I don’t think many people use blogrolls to find blogs these days but whenever I remove it my mother complains…
  
  Reply