PSP - PlayStation Private? Or Public?

At any given moment in time I will generally have one or two things that really wind me up about commuting. My previous gripes have included eating fast food on public transport (which you can read about here), and taking up more than one space on a train either through a) a larger than average coat or b) through sheer ignorance (though tempted, I exclude the size of the individual, as I don't want to appear 'weightist'). One that crops up from time to time is people walking down the stairs at tube stations on the wrong side, even though there are prominent signs saying 'Keep left'. Often, without again wishing to appear prejudiced, these people tend to be foreign tourists, and therefore I tend to be fairly forgiving about such folk. After all, it's not like when you come off the ferries at Dover and you get multi-lingual signs advising which side of the road to drive on. (I tend to be less forgiving when they've physically knocked me over, of course.)

Today, however my spleen overfloweth - and therefore venting requireth it - with two issues. One is a consistent bugbear of mine, the other is a brand new contender for the top spot.

The first is not restricted to commuting per se, but I'm most acutely aware of it when trying to get to work: people who cannot walk in straight lines, thus preventing easy overtaking and hence hindering my smooth passage to work, whilst also raising my risk of limb entanglement or even death under a passing vehicle as a stroller's random zig-zagging manoeuvres force me to step off the pavement into the road. Here I have little patience - high heels and heavy luggage aren't valid excuses as far as my zero tolerance policy is concerned. Mobile phones appear to exacerbate the situation, and that feminist nonsense about men being unable to multi-task really doesn't wash here - male or female, if you are walking 'n talking you'll be all over the pavement, guaranteed. Short of putting overtaking lanes on pavements, I can't think of a solution, so this one's here to stay.

Not so with the second - people playing Sony PSPs on public transport with volume up and no headphones. I have endured this no less than three times and am suitably perplexed and frustrated. The first occasion was on a shuttle bus between JFK and downtown Manhattan. The noise pollutant here was a small child, and while it was annoying to be stuck in traffic in Queens after an early start listening to the between-stage music and explosions and gunshots (from the PSP, not from the general ambience of Queens), one glare at the child's parent did the trick and the offending machine was placed in mother's handbag; peace and quiet prevailed for at least ten seconds until the comparatively cacophanous wails and tears of said child made the PSP seem like mere background noise. The other two occasions were both on underground trains.

I really don't understand it. We've lived with people listening to the Walkman and it's many offspring for almost thirty years, and I assumed rightly or wrongly that people had cottoned on to the idea that everyone around you doesn't necessarily wish to enjoy your music along with you. Hell, people even got rid of annoying key tones on mobile phones a few years ago. So is it wrong for me to assume that PSP gamers would realise that that small socket at the back is designed for headphones?

I suspect it may have something to do with the level of absorption and concentration required by gamers. Despite many youthful years of trying, I have always been rubbish at computer games, but from those heady days I do recall many a time being called down to dinner by my mum and never actually hearing her yelling up the stairs, so absorbed was I. One of the two guys on the underground was so pre-occupied with his game that he missed his station. And, yes, recalling my nerdy game-playing days, games were better with the sound turned way up. The fact remains, undeniably, that PSPs are designed specifically for solitary enjoyment - you can even buy porn DVDs for them (which has the potential for all sorts of RSI combinations. But we digress).

Playing with volume up and no headphones makes whatever the player is doing a public event, therefore I'd suggest that if you are ever faced with this situation to try the following - wander over to the offending noise pollutant, get very, very close and watch the screen intently. After a while, ask for a go, or better still gloat vividly when (s)he makes a mistake. If that doesn't get a result, turn up your iPod and sing along as loud as you can. And if that doesn't work, you won't be able to hear anyway.

A day of two halves

In order to put pen to paper (or rather stylus to Palm), my inspirations are fairly transparent - it's either going to be something that has annoyed me or vexed me to the point of frustration, or it's going to be something that fills me with a degree of joy. Nothing particularly innovative or original there I agree, but this isn't intended to be prize-winning journalism.

Today started off very well - it was a nice, clear and crisp Spring morning, still cold enough for gloves, but bright enough to wake the serotonin from hibernation. I strolled to work filled with a renewed sense of purpose, my chest puffed up in valiant confidence (thinking about it, that may have been to make myself fractionally taller to prevent my slightly overlong trousers from dragging on the floor). My usual route to work sees me turning left from Southampton Row into High Holborn. At this time of year, and at that particular time in the morning, the sun - rising steadily above the architectural spleandour of the old Marconi headquarters - is at the height that momentarily blinds you, gently warming you even on a fresh morning such as today.

Walking down High Holborn in the rising sun is a great start to any day as far as I'm concerned, but for me the highlight of my morning walk is the view you get of the City's tallest buildings - Tower 42 on Old Broad Street and the Swiss Re 'gherkin' on St Mary Axe - from the junction with Chancery Lane. That view never fails to stir something within me. It reminds me, perversely, of how much I love New York - it feels like those brief glimpses of the Financial District you are greeted with when schlepping around Midtown, the way the dramatic horizon can disappear behind buildings as fast as you've noticed it. High Holborn veers softly right onto the concrete-lined Viaduct, causing the office blocks, with that rising sun playing off the shiny surfaces and dispersing the morning haze, to slowly disappear from view. It's a beautiful sight that I never tire of seeing day in, day out.

By the time of my journey home, my familiar funk had returned, and such romantic notions were long behind me. The weather, which this morning looked so promising, took a turn for the worse at lunchtime bringing rain and high winds to the City. In such conditions, my mind wanders to less optimistic matters, and one's grievances with the world come to the fore. (I'm not sure whether this was prompted by the rapid change in the weather or the fact that, over fifty miles away, my mini greenhouse was spectacularly blown over, wiping out an entire afternoon's foray into seedling transplanting.) These are today's gripes:

Umbrellas

Be very clear on this - using an umbrella during windy weather will not make you dry. It will give you a stiff arm from futilely attempting to keep your brolly aloft by gripping as hard as you can, naïvely believing that you, a mere mortal, can hold back Mother Nature simply by pointing your brolly into the wind and holding it really, really tight. Idiots. You spend so long wrestling with your umbrella, which if we're honest has the same basic component construction as a ship's sail and in windy weather wants to behave exactly like one, that you fail to notice that you're getting soaking bloody wet. Oh, and golf umbrellas? Don't get me started. Golf umbrellas are for fat people or - now here's an idea - playing golf in the rain. They're not for clogging up our pavements. They are the SUVs of waterproofs.

School holiday train travellers

'Hurrah! School holidays have arrived. Trains will run with about half as many passengers as normal with all the commuters who've taken time off to holiday with their kids. Praise be! I'm such a lucky commuter!'

I genuinely have this conversation with myself at the start of any school holiday. What I never do is think of those three words that fill the average commuter with abject fear - Family Saver Tickets.

During the holidays, it must seem like such a good idea to take your partner and both kids down to London for the day. I wish my parents had. But during evening rush hour? Really? Doesn't that seem a bit mad? Surely you must think to yourself 'Oh, those trains will be packed! Let's leave before / after the peak period.'

But no, that conversation doesn't happen, and they take up four seats on the train, rendering your average holiday commuter train significantly busier than usual.

Evening Standard boards

On the day my greenhouse re-enacted the scene in The Wizard Of Oz where the house is picked up in the storm, the final Evening Standard billboards ran with 'Milton Keynes Hotel Collapse Drama'.

Crikey, that sounds nasty doesn't it? Although of significant interest to me, what with being a Milton Keynes resident and all, I didn't buy the Standard. Firstly because I don't see the point when you can normally read it over someone's shoulder for free but also because - as always - the billboard totally exaggerated what had in fact happened.

If we break the sentence down, I suspect that one is left with an impression rather along the lines of the following:

'A hotel in Milton Keynes has collapsed, causing considerable distress and disruption.'

However, that wasn't what happened Mr Evening Standard now, was it?

Yes, something happened in Milton Keynes. Yes, it had something to do with a hotel. Yes, something collapsed. And I daresay it was pretty dramatic. But it wasn't a hotel that collapsed, but more accurately a fifteen-storey corner of scaffold surrounding a new hotel, burying three construction workers, one of whom later died. They closed off the surrounding roads, but generally no-one was too inconvenienced. Which doesn't quite have the same newspaper-shifting edge, I suspect. Terrible thing that accuracy concept.

Besides, does anyone actually ever buy the Standard on the basis of the ridiculous sensationalist headlines anyway? Are they that stupid? Or are people basically paying 40p for a sudoku puzzle wrapped in the news you can read tomorrow in the Metro for free?

Observations from a late train

A few Mondays ago I had to catch a late train back into London. I’m not a huge fan of late evening trains, despite the fact that they’re far quieter than their daytime counterparts, thus affording more space and time to think. Late trains tend to be filled with a strange mix of characters – businessmen with ties undone after a punishing day, teenagers on their way to last orders or home from concerts, an alarmingly high number of single female travellers (which always amazes me), and the odd chap you think it might be best that you don’t make eye contact with. It’s the high degree of meeting someone in the final category that makes me slightly uncomfortable, especially if they happen to be swigging from a can of extra strong lager while travelling.

On this particular occasion, my fellow travellers on the 22.13 train from Leighton Buzzard to Euston were no different than any other late train I've caught, but I was relatively relieved that there was only one guy who could have been categorised into the latter category – a man with wild hair and a bandage wrapped around the outside of his trousers who infrequently stalked between the carriages muttering and growling to himself.

Taking my wife’s advice, I avoided listening to my iPod or talking into my mobile on the journey (quite who she thought I would be talking to at that time of night I do not know), and instead pulled out my work-provided Blackberry and caught up on some of the emails I hadn’t had a chance to respond to during the day. Of the three electronic gadgets at my disposal, I figured that losing my work emails was probably not a bad thing should some thug demand that I hand it over, relatively speaking.

So there I was, busily tapping out emails while the train – an all-station stopping service no less – slowly wended its way down to London, minding my own business and avoiding eye contact with anyone on the train. At Hemel Hempstead I feared the worst – waiting on the platform were three teenagers, two lads and one girl, probably of around 17, each swigging from bottles of beer, and when the doors opened they chose to sit in the bank of four chairs next to me, thus causing me to draw my bag closer to me and ensure that my iPod was not visible. However, when I heard their conversation I was quite surprised.

Guy #1 : Well, what you do is put down a 10% downpayment on the property and take a loan, called a mortgage, on the rest of the house value and pay a monthly payment back to the lender.

Girl : I don’t understand.

Guy #2 : It’s easy – you want to buy a £500,000 house, so you put down a deposit of £50,000 and then borrow £450,000 and pay the rest of it back over a long time period with a monthly payment.

I had expected them to be talking about whatever it is that we expect the youth of today to be talking about, like drugs, Pete Doherty and videogames, not finance decisions. ‘Hurrah!’ I inwardly exclaimed, ‘perhaps the media portrayal of Generation X-style errant youths let down by a struggling education system getting themselves into all sorts of trouble is just a myth.’ As a father-to-be, lately I have spent a considerable amount of time worrying about the way teenagers are these days and the things that – if you make the mistake of believing everything you read – teenagers get up to, worrying that my child will be forced to follow beastly (anti-)social norms.

Granted, they then proceeded to focus their conversation exclusively on which curry house they were going to go to in Watford and how drunk they intended to get later that week (‘ratted’ is the word they use these days apparently). So, illusions shattered, I carried on fretting about my unborn daughter while ploughing my way through meaningless email conversations.

What surprised me the most was the fact that when the trio got off at Watford they were replaced by two student guys who were discussing their respective overdraft limits and bank account interest rates, one expressing great concern at how little money – after rent and bills – he had to live on month-to-month. He claimed to have been living on a diet of bread for the past week because he simply didn’t have enough money to buy food.

It’s not intended to come across like schadenfreude, but I have to say that their serious focus on spending and personal finance rather impressed me. The bread-eating lad was genuinely concerned about the debt he was getting himself into and what he could do to take some of the pressure off himself. It did occur to me that there are probably many, many thousands of students in precisely the same predicament, who go from a life of carefree abandon while living out of their parents' pockets to suddenly having to balance their finances. They should call this Sudden Onset Maturity Syndrome.

These students also did not stay on the subject of personal finance for too long, and their conversation meandered quickly into how attractive so-and-so was and what a great figure someone else had. Once they got their hormones out of the way, they then started discussing the gig that they’d played that evening, and it transpired that the impoverished loaf muncher was a pianist and his accomplice a percussionist…in a jazz band.

I've read a lot about jazz and improv over the years, and always considered it not to be the counter-cultural revolutionary leftfield music of the reactionary sixties, but the domain of old men in silly hats and cardigans. I never thought it could have any sort of resonance with young people. And these cats (for we shall adopt jazz parlance in due deference) knew their stuff – they were namechecking the master of harmolodics Ornette Coleman, whose work was so bound into the avant-garde sixties that his music was the natural choice to soundtrack William S Burrough’s incendiary acid-novel-turned-film Naked Lunch. What’s more they were likening their tunes to Coleman’s hard to precisely define aesthetic. Most contemporary jazzhounds think that owning Bitches Brew marks them out as purist, but these two, not even yet in their twenties trotted out a comprehensive list of proper avant-garde. So enthusiastic did they become that they began vocalising one of their new compositions without instrument, the pianist mimicking the rolling, thundering and striding piano part of his latest song (a ballad he called it although it was hardly slow and sensual) while, after a couple of perfectly metered bars, his friend came in with a skipping little beat utilising nothing more than his tongue and thighs.

The whole hour journey down to London turned out not to be the depressing, long affair that it had the potential to be. Instead, it got me thinking about the modern youth and how the Daily Mail might just have it so incredibly wrong – kids aren’t all Burberry-scarfed, hoody-wearing chavs who couldn’t care less about morals and social norms. I appreciate that my sample of youth culture that night was particularly on the small side, but nevertheless it made me appreciate that kids aren’t all bad, and some of my fears for my soon-to-be-born daughter disappeared.

Unlike my slight concern about the man with the bandaged trouser who carried on making his way up and down the train even though we’d reached the final destination.

Approaching parenthood

For a while now, my goals in life had been as follows – to be married by the time I was 25, to work in London, to have a black and white cat, and to have become a father by the time I turned 30. Three out four of these ambitions have been fulfilled, and as I write this, according to the estimated due dates, my wife and I are less than three weeks away from becoming parents, and I am just under six months away from turning 30. Not bad going, methinks.

The eight and a half months since we found out we were expecting have had their ups and downs, but above all else we are just excited about this new phase in our lives. We know it’s not always going to be fun and games, that the highs will be higher than anything else we’ve experienced together and the lows lower. I’ve never even held a baby before, let alone dress one or change one’s nappy, and I know that as a father I’m going to make countless mistakes along the way. But I'm also determined to be the very best father I can possibly be. My own father taught me that I could never disappoint if I just tried my best, and that’s all I can hope to do.

All of this said, however, I don’t feel anywhere near prepared enough for what’s about to happen to us. My wife approaches everything in life with an organised and focussed attitude – within the first few weeks of knowing we were expecting, she’d been out and bought several books on pregnancy and birth; the decoration of the nursery was completed at the start of the year to allow the paint fumes time to evaporate before the baby was born; she signed us up for the National Childbirth Trust (NCT), joined a yoga class, took up reflexology, and worked out everything we needed to buy. The pain of labour has concerned her, but on the whole she’s tackled this major life event with a breezy and calm sense of purpose. She’s thoroughly researched everything, is very clear on the kind of birth that she wants, knows all the conditions and all the risks, and could probably write her own book after all this.

Me, on the other hand, that’s a different story. I tried to read a book very early on called The Bloke’s Guide To Pregnancy, which – as its name suggests – is written for expectant fathers. It’s written in a very casual, simple way which says a great deal about how men approach pregnancy. I actually had to put the book down after the first few chapters as I got very emotional – I read on a little too far too quickly and got myself in a state about my wife having to endure labour. Not a bad book by any means, but one that should be read slowly as things are happening, not in one sitting. It is also, I have to say, written for the kind of bloke that probably wants to spend a lot of time in the pub with his mates watching the football. I know I'm probably in the minority, but those things have never really appealed to me and so some of the author’s forewarnings of having to give up such pastimes were lost on me.

At the other end of the spectrum, as a present, my wife bought me the Haynes Manual for expectant fathers, which has frustrated the hell out of me because it is written in such a concise way that I don’t feel like it’s taught me anything. However, the sections on caring for your baby look quite good and so I haven’t given up on it just yet.

We started NCT classes earlier this year with four other local couples, and at the very beginning I really enjoyed the fact that I was finally learning about pregnancy properly. Many of the myths were rapidly dispelled and I felt at last like I was going to be a supportive birth partner and good father. After a while, though, during the course of the eight weekly classes, I began to reach the point where the information just wasn’t sticking anymore. I wasn’t learning anything meaningful, and the only things I seemed to be able to absorb were unnecessary things like physiological factors, the effects of hormones and all manner of scientific facts that I really felt like I didn’t need to know. (This used to happen to me at school as well – I’d always seem able to recall tiny, irrelevant pieces of information during an exam whilst forgetting the major point of the topic. Either that or I’d find myself suddenly adept at being able to remember all of the lyrics to the first Kylie Minogue album, but forgetting how to solve basic algebra.) So at the end of the course of lessons, I look back and believe that I learned very little overall, and I guess I became a little bitter and twisted by the end of the course. Deep down I know I’m using this resentment as a means of avoiding considering the fact that I simply am not prepared enough for what’s going to happen today, in three weeks or five weeks depending on when our baby decides she’s going to make an appearance.

For me the best part of NCT was the bit I was expecting not to enjoy – the social aspect of it. Neither my wife or I are particularly gregarious people, and the NCT literature puts great store in the fact that you will make lasting friendships with people in a similar position to yourselves. I remember driving to the first class in silence because we didn’t want to feel pressurised into forming relationships. Stupid, really. Typically it’s the things you don’t look forward to that end up being the most positive things, and for us both it was great to meet people like ourselves, make some new acquaintances and understand how other people were feeling about it. And, you know, I learned some very important things about myself and the way I approach things – in particular work / life balance – from the guys in that class, which I feel indebted to them for. Not having anyone close to me who’s about to become a father was a godsend. Although I’ve discussed pregnancy and parenthood with people in the office who’ve already got kids, it was really good to talk to people who are facing this right now, rather than looking back on it.

Aside from feeding me information that I felt in some cases irrelevant, my other problem with NCT was how it has seemed to make time speed up in this last trimester of our pregnancy. The classes were held each week on a Monday, and Monday seemed to just come around so damn quick after starting the classes. I'm sure that before the classes started time was progressing fairly slowly, but now everything has accelerated, and I think that also might have something to do with why I don’t feel sufficiently ready.

On the face of it, nine months feels like a long time, but now it doesn’t quite feel long enough. I feel like I could do with perhaps another couple of weeks to get my house in order, but I sense my wife - who by now is sick and tired of carrying around an extra person - would disagree. That said, I strongly believe that in those nine months not only do your wife’s physical appearance and eating habits suddenly metamorphose in front of your very eyes, but so too does your entire outlook on life. I have always considered myself to be a mature, sensible and above all grown-up chap, but I look back on life before we became pregnant and think that we were just playing at being adults. The nine months of a pregnancy for me have been the perfect length of time for this great epiphany of adulthood to unfold, leaving me feeling one thousand times more mature and confident about myself and my abilities than I ever considered myself to be before. I've now got things into perspective, stopped focussing my efforts on things that really have no material significance in the grand scheme of things. The nine months have been filled with so many new and joyous experiences that make the supposedly important things of the past seem so trivial in comparison, and that’s only going to continue.

At work people ask how things are going, and thankfully throughout the pregnancy everything has gone very well. Right now my response is that we’re ready for the birth, in as far as the nursery is decorated, the hospital bags – should they become necessary if there are complications with our home birth – are packed and everything that our baby could possibly want and need have been purchased. Okay, mentally, I’m slightly off the pace, but I'm confident that will come in time (and lets face if, it doesn’t then I'm in for a big shock). The hardest part to deal with is that this isn’t just about the goodness-knows how many hours that constitute labour; that’s just the beginning, and there’s going to be even more hard work to come once she’s born. My wife, typically, is quite sanguine about this – she just knows she’s going to cope, and I truly believe her because she has incredible resources and an ability to just get on with things (even though she denies it).

So here we are, waiting impatiently for something we’re so excited – and slightly nervous – about, but not knowing precisely when our baby is going to decide she’s had enough and wants to tackle the big wide world outside of the safety and comfort of her mother’s womb. I glance at my phone every five seconds, wondering when it is that I'm going to get the call from my wife that says ‘Stop what you’re doing and get home now!’ And while it might be stressful, and while I can’t honestly say that I have a clue about what I need to do, I really can’t wait for that call and what lies beyond it.