Training | 2010.02.20
Simon Hoggart's week: Standing up for his rights
Sir Nicholas Winterton may have a point
• I almost feel sorry for Sir Nicholas Winterton – there\'s a line you don\'t often read. He\'s the MP who complained bitterly that MPs may have to travel standard class on trains. Mind you, the feeling of pity never lasts long. He moaned about "the type of people" you get in standard class, adding that he often had useful conversations with the businessmen he met in first.
Since he was probably on a train to or from Macclesfield, he could also have had useful conversations in standard with his less wealthy constituents.
Or possibly not. I took a Virgin train to Macclesfield last year, and it was so crowded there was no standing room in standard. I flopped into first, where a kindly ticket collector didn\'t charge me extra. No such luck for other passengers, some of whom had no doubt paid the full £104.50 standard single fare.
The Virgin Pendolinos are very fast, and sometimes even on time. But they are cramped, there is almost no luggage space, so the aisles are clogged, and because Sir Richard Branson put only four and a half standard carriages and four first-class carriages on each train, they are generally packed out, a modern raft of the Medusa.
It\'s a horrible experience, and Winterton is right: MPs, believe it or not, do work hard and should be able to use the time. For the rest of us it would be best to have someone hit you with one of those things gamekeepers use to stun elephants, so you\'d be oblivious for the two hours.
I see, by the way, that Branson has offered public support to the Tories for their plans on the economy. This is bad news for all of us, because Branson has always been about brand rather than performance, about promises over delivery. Remember his at-seat massages on Virgin trains? These days the masseuse could only get down the train by clambering along the roof.
• Ray Gosling, the radio producer who has been charged with murdering his lover, or "bit on the side" as he charmingly put it on Today, was a familiar figure in my childhood. He, like our family, lived in Leicester. He liked my dad\'s work, and dad liked his – mostly radio programmes about the lives of the working class, but presented warmly and sympathetically from the inside, not as a middle class figure saying, "my goodness, what frightful lives these poor people have!"
But he was always short of money. What I recall about each visit is the ceremonial opening of the wallet as Ray trousered another loan, a small sum now, substantial then.
After a while dad ruefully realised he was never going to get any of it back – not because Ray was dishonest, but because he is one of those people for whom at all times any income is needed for existing debts.
I imagine he has other things on his mind now. And after inflation, the sums involved would seem very insubstantial.
• To Paris for a lovely weekend with friends who had rented an apartment near the Eiffel Tower. I had half-forgotten what a wonderful walking city it is, every corner bringing a new delight. Perhaps it\'s my imagination, but the people seemed much friendlier too.
The place reeked of prosperity – a newspaper headline read: "France survives recession better than its neighbours." Do they mean us? You bet. And of course the 3 million people who live in the kidney-shaped city of Paris are prosperous anyway – it\'s a slightly artificial place, as if the wealthiest boroughs of London had all been pasted together, leaving the poorer neighbourhoods outside. You get a sense of that as the Eurostar pulls north, past tower blocks as blasted as any in Britain.
The only disappointing part of the trip was the food. Ordinary restaurant food in France has fallen way behind, say, Italy and even, in some respects, Britain.
The prices are horrible, and would be even if the euro was back where God meant it to be, at 1.50 to the pound. A small, local, bourgeois place round the corner from us wanted €41 for a piece of sole, without extra veg. Other main courses were €29, or £25-plus, with starters from £9 to £18.
And it wasn\'t very good, though it was presented to us as if we were starving refugees who, being from Britain, had no idea what proper food tasted like. Well, we do now, so you can stop condescending.
• It is touring the country (Cambridge and Eastbourne coming up) so do catch if you can Alan Ayckbourn\'s new play, My Wonderful Day. Basically it\'s a short farce, acted out in front of a nine-year-old child, Winnie, played by Ayesha Antoine. She\'s been left in the house by her mother, the cleaning lady, and she is ignored, patronised, or suffocated by the various adults whose lives are collapsing around her. It turns out that she has missed nothing.
The extraordinary thing is Antoine\'s performance, which is faultless. I have never known anyone who can act with their legs like she does: stuck out and kicking when she\'s happy, twisted round each other when she\'s embarrassed, one behind the chair, the other in front when she\'s happy.
What makes her performance quite incredible is that she is fully 20 years older – three times the age – of the little girl she is playing, something which even her baggy pullover can\'t quite hide. A real tour de force.
• Thanks for your "crash blossoms" – headlines which mean something they\'re not meant to mean. Peter Mittins sent Bus on Fire – Passengers Alight; I liked Leslie Plommer\'s Chinese in Car Clash, and One-legged Man Was Unbalanced; Victor Ford found in the Jerusalem Post, Haig Still Stiff on Withdrawal. I loved Tony Eldridge\'s memory from the old Westminster Times: Birth Pill Plan for Girls Flayed by Priests.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2010/feb/20/simon-hoggart-week
