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Some city journeys are epic some fraught with danger, alarm. My Victoria Line train stops just outside Victoria on the way south. We sit there for 30 minutes. Someone has "gone under a train", which in London Transport parlance means suicide. The Dunkirk spirit cautiously establishes itself. Another thirty minutes. An official comes through and tells us that we are going to evacuate the train and are obliged to walk along the track to Pimlico. "But have you turned off the power?" inevitably comes the question; (one imagines vaguely some large bakelite switch with POWER written above it, and a sturdy gauntleted thumb making the system safe.) "That's a good idea, love. I'm glad you reminded me" replies the official sardonically. In a short while we are trooping through the gloom between the rails, above our heads a sparse necklace of low watt bulbs dwindling to infinity. (How astonishingly medieval our underground system is. The pedestrian tunnels at the Elephant and Castle so low, so dingy, so comically labyrinthine that they make me laugh as I pass through them, head down.)

I and a companion are on a late night bus careering along the sea front of Naples. There is the driver. There are we too, and that is all. I happen to be looking directly out over the driver's shoulder and about one hundred metres distant see a hunched figure at the side of the road. The bus careers on. The figure springs purposefully into its path. The driver, having brought the bus to a halt, runs, in shock, into the park. We get off and stand, the dead man at our feet, beside empty, brightly lit bus in the Riviera di Chiaia.

There is something angst-inducing about public transport alright; the crowdedness, the unknowness of one's fellow passengers, the sheer steaming madness of them sometimes, the dodgy atmosphere on night bus or tube on weekend nights. There is the silence in the tube. We see it, perhaps as an example of British reserve. In fact I have found that subterranean travel wherever makes people silent. Be it London, Glasgow, Rome, San Paulo, Paris, Seoul, people are quiet.

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