A Work in Progress

What We Talk About When We Talk About the Tube: The District Line

Well, moving right along in the Underground . . . I'm on a little roll.  Already I've hopped from the Metropolitan Line over to the District Line with John Lanchester's What We Talk About When We Talk About the Tube (and now have the Central Line at the ready), and so to keep all those Lines straight I had better tell you about what I've read before taking in yet more information.  Did I already say how much I am enjoying these little bites of social history via the London Underground?  Whoever came up with this idea for a series, which is in honor of the 150th anniversary of the Underground, should get a raise.  Or at least an enthusiastic pat on the back.  They may be slight little books, but they are so interesting and informative (and I mean that in a good way, not in a dry-imparting-of-rote-facts-only sort of way) and my list of books, movies or new subjects to explore seems to grow more with each new read. 

Did you know that there is a difference between the Underground and the Tube?  I thought the words were interchangeable, but there is actually a distinction.  Like me, Lanchester, who did not grow up in London, wasn't sure if the Tube was something other than the Underground, or if it was simply another word for it.  His impression was that the Tube was some other thing--more modern and cooler-sounding.  Londoners might use the terms interchangeably,  but upon doing research for the book he learned that there is indeed a difference.  The first Underground Lines--the Metropolitan (1863), District (1868) and Circle (1884) Lines were not actually Tubes.  

Here's where it gets technical.  They weren't Tubes because they weren't tunnels.  Tunnels being a hole carved out of the ground for a certain distance which opens back out again.  The first Lines were made using the 'cut and cover' method--"a hole dug straight into the ground, laid with tracks and brick walls, and then covered back up."  So these lines are not even all that far underground and are called 'sub-surface' lines.  Now the Tube uses a very different digging technique. 

"It features a shield, a huge frame, on which the twelve 'navigators' who dug the tunnels stood: the frame advanced gradually through the earth while the men dug, and then the other navigators bricked up the tunnel walls and roof behind them as they went."

***

"This was the birth of the Tube: the deep tunnels which were dug using the shield technique, and which run through the clay subsoil underneath London, are in the strict sense the Tube.  The Underground includes the Tube, but the Tube does not include the Underground."

How's that for sheer nerdiness?  You never know, you might just need this for a trivia question someday.  You can thank me (and Mr. Lanchester) later!  He notes that this difference is most useful to those who don't like being deep underground.  The Tube Line the author uses most often, the Northern Line, is also the oldest of them and is often called 'the Misery Line' as it was for some time the longest train tunnel.  It "disappears into the earth at Morden and then not popping up above ground again until Finchley, seventeen and a half miles later."  Now that is quite a stretch. 

I very much enjoyed reading about the District Line.  John Lanchester gives all sort of interesting facts yet he couches them in interesting stories and anecdotes.  And he throws in lots of the personal, too, which all overlaps with the Mabey book about the Metropolitan Line.  It's part history, part memoir, part social history and maybe even a little science thrown in for good will.  So the books tend to build on each other nicely.  Going back to the beginning and to share something of significance about the District Line--it stretches across very different social and geographical ends of London.  It goes from the poor East of the city to the rich West.  And it sounds like the areas it crosses is quite diverse, too.  I like the way one of the Underground workers described the demographic differences between the two ends. 

"Put it like this, if they're annoyed about something, at this end of the line--we were at Dagenham (East)--they yell at you.  You know about it straight away.  At the other end, they write letters."

Just like the Metropolitan Line helped create Metroland--those suburbs outside the city, a place for Londoners to enjoy the countryside yet still able to commute in to their jobs, the rest of the Lines did their part to create the city of London as we know it now.  That iconic London Underground map, which I am sure you can easily bring to mind makes you think that those lines were simply drawn as if superimposed on top of the city.  You would think that the city came before the map, whereas in reality "London as it exists today would not be the same place without the Underground."

"The Underground is what gave the city its geographical spread, its population growth, its clusters of spaces and places.  The new Underground stations became the places around which the city grew; they were the first gravitational mass, like the clusters of debris in the nascent solar system, which agglomerated and grew and thickened and became planets."

One other little bit of trivia, before I leave the District Line (and I have really barely scratched the surface of what Lanchester writes about), did you know the word Commute (as in your daily commute, or commuter) is an American thing?  The original meaning of the word commute means "to give something in exchange for something else, or to change one thing for another."  In the US regular travelers "began to swap day tickets for better-value season tickets; they 'commuted' their daily tickets into season tickets."

"The Oxford English Dictionary gives the first instance of the modern, dragging-your-weary-bones-to-work sense as in the American magazine the Atlantic Monthly, which defined a commuter as follows: 'one who purchases a commutation-ticket'.  A commutation-ticket was the American term for a season ticket.  Commuters commuted 'commute'."

Hah!  Anyway, Lanchester has a very engaging way of drawing you into this wonderful and lively little book!  I have once again switched lines and now will be stepping onto the Central Line with Danny Dorling's The 32 Stops.  I wonder where my journey will take me next.

In case you are wondering--yes, these books are great fun!  So far, I've ridden the Victoria Line, the Circle Line, the Metropolitan Line and here the District Line.

A Good Parcel of English Soil, Richard Mabey

It's amazing how chock full of interesting information, engaging stories, and even reading suggestions these slim little Penguin Lines (which celebrate the 150th anniversary of the London Underground in 2013) are filled with.  I am now embarking on the fourth book in a set of twelve (one for each Underground Line), so it is time to tell you about Richard Mabey's A Good Parcel of English Soil which I read a month or so ago before the Lines begin to get muddled in my mind.

Mabey, a nature writer who I've read and enjoyed before, takes as his subject the Metropolitan Line which was the first "urban railway to burrow underground".  Mabey points out that the Metropolitan Line opened the same year as Jules Verne's novel Voyage to the Center of the Earth came out.  Seems fitting, don't you think.  London's Underground is "an expression of nineteenth-century futurism."  The more I read about the London Underground the more I marvel at both the ingenuity of it (and more about that in my next post about the book I am reading right now) and the social history surrounding it.  It is iconic in so many ways.

I was particularly happy to read about the Metropolitan Line (and Mabey whose writing I like very much) as its history of why and how it came about is so very interesting. 

"The Metropolitan line does at least have a destination, and a mission.  It exists to take people out of a working city to live in a greener place.  The irony is that in doing so it has succeeded in wiping out, or at least dramatically changing, many of the green places that it used as bait for its customers.  So it's also ironic, I guess, that as a boy naturalist and then would-be Romantic scribbler, I've been endlessly enthralled by the strange and not always pretty negotiations between human and natural life that it brought into being."  [Mabey grew up in the shadow of the Metropolitan Line.]

And so we have the famous Metroland which has inspired books and stories and films.  You have probably heard the term, just as I had, but I didn't realize the significance or meaning behind it.  Back in its early days the Railway Company had bought up those vast stretches of land on which to build houses, which they hoped to sell to potential customers.  Genius in its way really, even if it didn't quite work out in the way they hoped and intended.  Mabey puts it so wonderfully descriptively--the Railway Company provided the "honeytrap" of land to lure Londoners out and then provided the beeline to the destination in the form of the Metropolitan Line. 

We're talking classic suburbia here.  Was it real or just faux-rural is the question. 

"Metroland was a grandiose and sometimes cynical concept designed to encapsulate the urban worker's dream of a country retreat, wreathed by wild flowers and birdsong but not too far from the office."

Mabey calls it Arcadia for profit.  What it ended up being is a margin between city and real open countryside.   Here's an early pitch (from a 1927 brochure) by the Metropolitan company to draw people out from the city.

"There is a good parcel of English soil in which to build a home and strike root, inhabited from old, as witness the lines of camps on the hill tops and confused mounds amongst the woods, the great dyke which crossed it east and west, the British trackway, the Roman Road aslant the eastern border, the packhorse ways worn deep into the hillsides, the innumerable fieldpaths which mark the labourers' daily route from hamlet to farm.  The new settlement of Metroland proceeds apace, the new settlers thrive amain."

I can imagine this Metroland, though I am not sure I am visualizing it quite as it is or was.  Suburbia holds a different image in my own mind, more city and less rural and I get the idea that this British Metroland was far more rural, or at least had hoped to be.  The creation of Metroland, which was meant to be a sort of rural destination in the end destroyed large sections of "ordinary farming countryside".  While it might have offered relief from being cooped up and packed into the city it only ever became "sub-rural".     

I think I could easily read this again and pull more information from it, but Mabey has provided me with further reading material.  One book leads to another, or in this case one book leads to a novel, a short story and a film.  In setting the tone and introducing his subject matter Mabey refers to a classic science fiction short story by A.J. Deutsch published in 1950 called "The Möbius Strip".  The story premise is that a Boston Tube train vanishes with more than 400 passengers and rematerializes some ten weeks later as if nothing happened at all.

"A mathematician brought in to advise the tube company believes the subway has become a four-dimensional version of the Möbius strip, the mathematical device in which a length of material is given a single twist and its ends are then joined, so that it has only a single surface, leading to all kinds of mysterious space-time anomalies." 

So of course I had to go out and find the story, which I photocopied and now must pull out to read.  And to really visualize Metroland there is the novel by the same name by Julian Barnes, which I found a copy of to read. 

"His first novel is a wryly funny and evocative account of what it felt like to be a self-styled existentialist teenager living in this suburban motherlode.  He also gives an exact description of how the 1960s trains still echoed, in their ornamentation, the fixtures and fittings of the rural dreamland they were bound for."

I can't wait to read it.  And for real visuals, there was "an eccentrically funny film" called Metro-land made in 1973.  I have taken a peek and it does look eccentrically funny and it can be viewed online here.  As you can see one small book (and I didn't even mention all the books he makes note of) is leading to a whole new (though related) reading path, which I do plan on undertaking.  For now, though, I have moved on to John Lanchester's What We Talk About When We Talk About the Tube, which promises to be equally as interesting and informative. 

I've written about the Victoria Line and the Circle Line.  The Lanchester is about the District Line.   

The Circle Line: Heads and Straights

If you look at a map of the London Underground, the Circle Line is yellow and it runs in a loop with a later addition--an extension--that looks like a digression from its normal route.  Heads and Straights is Lucy Wadham's nod towards the Tube line that runs through Chelsea and Kensington.  It is one of a dozen books published in 2013 for the 150th anniversary of the London Underground (all of which I hope to read and write about this year). 

The books are a bit of an adventure as each author was given free rein to write about whatever inspired them using each Underground Line as their springboard.  As an Anglophile who has traveled some of those Underground Lines (sadly far too long ago), though not intimate with the City and its particulars, the books are entertaining but a little like picking a chocolate from a box of bonbons.  Until you take a bite, you aren't sure what will be in the middle (or if you'll like it).

Lucy Wadham is a novelist and Heads and Straights is a most intriguing memoir of growing up in Chelsea in the 1970s.  Have you heard the term 'heads and straights'?  You can likely tell from context what the words refer to.

"The first time I admitted publicly to having been brought up in Chelsea I was thirty-five and at the launch party for my first novel, which was being held in a tapas bar in Clapham."

Thinking back on my reading in the last year or so, I've come across another Chelsea girl who drifted away into more colorful parts of London as well.  Chelsea must equate posh, and not always a welcome label to the wearer.

"Inverted snobbery was embedded in my sisters and me from an early age, so being from Chelsea was never a source of pride for any of us.  I don't know where this class shame came from, certainly not from our parents."

So, what do you think--heads and straights?  Heads are good, of course, and straights, not so much.  "Heads were people who smoked pot and Straights were people who didn't."  When you are a teenager in the 70s and are trying to be cool, it's probably pretty easy to figure out which camp you want to be a part of.  Lucy, and the Big Three as her elder sisters were known, were firmly (though some more than others) in the Heads camp.

It doesn't matter that I don't know Chelsea, this is a memoir of the personal--of growing up and wanting to be a part of as well as wanting to be apart from.  It's about family relations, parents, and even grandparents and siblings and bad choices and bad experiences and growing up and out of.  I always find it fascinating how a memoirist can segue from one subject to another, sometimes seemingly unrelated topics yet without even realizing that the distances between the two are farther than you think.  From Chelsea to siblings and parents to a grandmother who loved Virginia Woolf and passed on to her granddaughter Woolf's love of nature, teaching her names of trees and flowers that "would make us ridiculous to future boyfriends."  And then more.

"Gran's Welsh cottage was freezing and you had to put fifty p in the meter for hot water, so she often read to us in bed beneath an eiderdown so thick and heavy it was like lying under another body.  Her bed was large and we would often all squeeze in with her--'Plenty of room, come along, shove up'-and fall asleep to her radio, which she would tune to a shipping forecast, one of the few voices that still mirrored her own (very Edwardian)."

It sounds to me as though she would have come off as posh indeed, yet Gran was "busy shaking up the tree" since she took great pleasure in the girls' rebellion against their parent's very middle class lifestyle.   Heads and Straights--I guess these things tend to skip a generation.  Gran would have been a Head as well as the granddaughters and the parents most definitely Straights.

I understand being the youngest sister and I think I was in the same predicament.  Older sisters are almost always pretty cool and you are the straggler, the hanger-on.  And Lucy had sisters, those Big Three, who in some cases lived life a little too close to the edge.  When she as the youngest sister, was a "fully blown, self-loathing Straight", she must have felt a square peg.  Her first day in a new school, clothes preempted from one of her sister's closets, she realizes she looks like a "roaring Sloane" (Bad thing, I think) as if she had "Made in Chelsea" stamped onto her forehead. 

It all comes out in the end, much happier and easier than her sisters anyway.  A life story, or impressions of a life story, wonderfully told and with surely one of the best last lines, a memory, that I've come across in a long time.  And all in less than 100 pages.  A wonderful nod towards the Circle Line as it whooshes through Chelsea.

I've picked up a nature book, maybe a memoir, I'm not entirely sure as I am just now preparing to get into Richard Mabey's A Good Parcel of English Soil.  Another reading adventure.  

Victoria Line: Mind the Child

Did I already tell you that I have chosen a new "series" of books to tackle this year?  Last year I finished up the Little House books, which I started to read the year before, which was satisfying in a variety of ways.  Good books and compelling, comforting reading and the satisfaction of finishing nine books (even if it took me longer to read them all than anticipated).  But I was ready for something a little different.  I bought the Penguin series of books--Penguin Lines that were published in 2013 in celebration of the 150th anniversary of the London Underground, or the Tube.  The books are small and compact and novella-length and quite fun.  The series is made up a dozen books--one each for the twelve Underground Lines.  So:

Victoria Line: Mind the Child
Central Line: The 32 Stops
East London Line: Buttoned-Up
District Line: What We Talk About When We Talk About the Tube
Northern Line: A Northern Line Minute
Metropolitan Line: A Good Parcel of English Soil
Bakerloo Line: Earthbound
Jubilee Line: A History of Capitalism
Hammersmith & City Line: Drift
Waterloo & City Line: Water-City, City-Waterloo
Circle Line: Heads and Straights
Piccadilly Line: The Blue Riband

The series is interesting in that the books are not exactly about each Underground line.  Each author writes about something particular to that area of London.  It's sort of hard to tell even what each book is about as there is no real description on the back cover, more a Q&A with the author with interesting/quirky vital statistics.  So it is an adventure starting each book, as you are  not sure what you are in for.  Once again I had started reading these books ages ago (two years ago to be specific).  I had a different idea on how I was going to approach these books and was going to read them in tandem with something else.  But I read one book and a chapter of the other and then they just sort of sat there and languished.  But now I am eager to get back to them and plan on just reading them in no particular order and on their own and not as any sort of larger project.

I read Mind the Child: The Victoria Line back in 2014 and have just this past weekend finished a second book Heads and Straights: The Circle Line.  I will write about the latter book in the next few days, but to keep it all neat and tidy and together as a complete set, I thought I would share the original post that started it all.  So, what follows appeared here a couple of years ago.

* * * * *

It's the social aspect of London, social as in societal ills, that the author takes as her topic for Mind the Child: The Victoria Line by Camila Batmanghelidjh and Kids Company.  It's tourist London that I remember so clearly, but what about the real London?  Mind the Child was an eye-opening and sometimes harrowing read about a portion of society that should be cherished and cared for, but is all too often abused and neglected--children.

Batmanghelidjh begins her narrative with the story of her own sister who jumped in front of a train but fell between the rails and only injured her leg (she later subsequently had better luck in committing suicide).

"Since then, each time someone jumps on the tracks, bringing the station to a halt, I find myseld preoccupied with the discprepant journeys we all take in life: the parallel existences of the destination-driven crowd, who move rapidly to complete a task, and the destination-despondent, who decide life is no longer worth pursuing."

It wasn't the loss of her sister that prompted Batmanghelidjh to work with children.  It was a love of helping others.  And it was a family trait handed down from earlier generations--this desire to serve others.  ". . . some of the richest cultures put care-giving at the forefront of their agenda, and see it as an expression of refinement rather than failure or weakness."

"We tend to look at the Tube map only when we have a destination in mind.  Take the Victoria Line: its sky-blue snakes clearly through the tangle of other lines, from Brixton in south London all the way to Walthamstow in the northeast.  In this book, I want us to take a less direct route.  I want to introduce you to some of the extraordinary kids struggling daily with the dichotomy of living and dying, who I have met through my work at Kids Company and, prior to that, through a range of other settings."

Mind the children--much like mind the gap--these are the children we don't see or demonize if we do, the ones who fall between the cracks.  Mind the Child is a combination of personal narrative by the children themselves, Batmanghelidjh's experiences working with them, and many statistics about crime and violence.  The numbers however aren't empty and meaningless as numbers usually are.  Hearing the voices of these children, who don't seem to ever be quite visible to politicians puts faces on the numbers.  Each child speaks in their own voice, some pulling themselves out of poverty and bad situations and others mired in it no matter how hard they try and lift themselves out.  The author also explains the neuroscience of battered children--how living in abusive households affects them and stunts them.  I had no idea what to expect when I picked up this book.  Victoria Line?  It was her inspiration and it is certainly a journey.  It's reading books like this that put life and the world into sharp perspective.  It was not an easy read at times, but it was such a good read and I am happy that I was finally prompted to pick it up.

Next up is A Good Parcel of English Soil: The Metropolitan Line by Richard Mabey.

Winter Progresses & a Few Other Notes

First a little progress on my Prairie Schooler design "Winter".  Well, winter does indeed progress, but it can't go fast enough for me. My stitching however is happily moving along at a nice pace even if it is only very slowly emerging from the linen!  A door to get into the house, two evergreen trees, part of the border and Winter at the top (almost anyway).  A few stitches every day does add up, but it may take a while. Hopefully I can finish before mid-March.

I think I have decided on a new series to work on reading my way through.  Something a little different than the Little House books.  Very different actually.  Did you ever come across the Penguin Underground Lines?  The set of twelve books came out in honor of the 150th anniversary of the London Tube.  I had to have them all when I first saw them and dutifully read one book and then ever since not another. 

The set consists of twelve books, twelve stories--one for each Underground line.   They are "city-based vignettes" centering around a part of London that the Underground line runs through.  At the moment I am reading volume on the Circle Line.  The nice thing about the books is they are novella-length--mostly between 100-200 pages, so not only do I have a good chance of reading through the whole set this year but they are quick reads so, instant gratification and motivators to keep reading steadily.  

Hopefully I won't neglect the more difficult themes from my beginning of the year list and only focus on the easy, comfort reads.  Of course it is January and comfort reads help me through the long, dark and very cold month, so a good book to escape into is always on my mind.  I also want to do a little rereading this year (otherwise why bother keeping books I have read once before already, right?).  I was doing a little shelf browsing this weekend and there are two that caught my eye.  I'll start one now and keep one in reserve.  I have read both, though the first one was read so long ago it will be like picking it up for the first time.

Judith Koll Healey's The Canterbury Papers appeals for several reasons.  I am in the mood for historical fiction (though pre-20th century) and the Medieval era has been one I am happy to revisit soon.  While the details are lost now, I do recall that it was a very satisfying read.  It is a novel of "dark family secrets, duplicity, and a missing heir to the throne."  The setting is England and France.  The ward of Eleanor Aquitaine is sent to retrieve letters hidden in Canterbury Cathedral only she is abducted along the way.  I see, too, that the author even published a sequel that I missed.    

I'm a great fan of Katharine McMahon's books, and one of my all-time favorite novels is her Crimson Rooms.  I loved it and was thrilled to see a sequel published, The Woman in the Picture, which I had to have when it first came out.  Of course that was several years ago, so it is definitely time to pick it up and read it.  First I feel like going back and rereading the first novel.  I'll catch myself--before I say I wish she would publish a new book--and read/reread these two first!

I finished a book (will tell you about it this week), read a great short story, dipped into several others and have lined up a few new reads.  Despite the bitter cold weather, it was a happy reading weekend.  Did yours include any bookishness?

Walking (& Reading) the Victoria Line

The Victoria Line of the London Underground.  Let's see, that's 13 miles long, 16 tube stations--all but one of which connect with other Underground lines.  It's walkable in one day, and author Mark Mason managed it in roughly seven and a half hours.  It took me far less time to read about it but I spread my 'armchair' journey out over several sittings.  I almost feel a little guilty that I sat relaxing and reading about it while he did all the work!  So, one line down and nine more to go!

Reading Mark Mason's Walk the Lines: The London Underground, Overground is morphing into something of an enjoyable, and adventurous reading project for me.  First it was a matter of just reading about his experiences, then I added to it the series of books Penguin issued last year celebrating the Underground's 150 year anniversary (you can see my pile of books here).  What better reading pairing?  Each author 'interprets' the Underground line in their own way, telling a story of the city of London with the Underground as their inspiration.  It's a marvelous idea.  And even if my own travels to London took place so very many years ago, the Tube is famous.  I have vague recollections of traveling on it, and recall vividly some of my own adventures in the city. 

I wasn't sure whether the stories he was going to tell, the places he would talk about and the situations that he found himself in would be so far outside my own world knowledge that it might be a little meaningless to me.  I needn't have worried.  Isn't this why we read anyway?  You don't need to have traveled to Mars to appreciate a story set there.  Reading is a way to broaden horizons and bring the faraway world closer to home.  At least that is in part why I love reading so much.  I let my imagination fill in as many blanks as possible and let the writer do his job.  So even if I don't know all the references Mason makes, and if he is a good writer it won't matter, there is enough to appreciate in the telling to make the journey worthwhile.  And I am always happy to learn new things.  I think I am going to learn a lot with this read.

I really do have a good imagination, but a few extra visuals never go amiss.  As I was reading and Mason was walking and talking about the route he was taking--the streets, the people, the places began filling in, but maybe there was a way to bring it even closer?  He had mentioned using the London A-Z Atlas.  Genius.  Why not order a copy myself?  It came a few days ago, so I was only able to use it for the tail end of the chapter, but what a difference it makes to read and follow along the map.  (And I love maps in any case).  And then I can always google the other references--the Wikipedia has photos of all the Tube stations and I can always search out other references as they pique my curiosity.  Now I feel like I am almost there with him.  I can see as many of the references as I like (handy now to have that iPad along with me as I make my way through the book).

And the Victoria Line (I fear I am going to scrimp on the actual chapter but will be better about them in the future)?  All but one of the lines that make it up is literally underground.  It starts at Brixton station and ends at Walthamstow Central.  There are all sorts of interesting bits, but a few to share?  His walk took him past "every architectural style of the last 150 years (Victorian, Edwardian, 1960s brutalist concrete).  He calls London not just a city, but a "collection of villages" and notes that with the coming of the railway "nothing could put the brakes on suburban sprawl".  I already mentioned Victoria station's most famous visitor.  But Victoria station is nearby another famous Londoner.  Any guesses who?  I probably would have made a short detour to the Royal Mews Shop for a peek around.  He walked by the outer wall of the Queen's bedroom and related the story of her unwanted visitor a few years back.

It's amazing to think of all the history that Mason just walked right by.  He shares lots of bits of knowledge--things that make sense but I would not have thought of.

". . . we should remember that Mayfair got its name from an annual fair (guess which month it was held in) that had to be banned in 1764 for being too rowdy."

And imagine walking down the road (in this case Broad Lane) and seeing a small green where Henry VIII came to hunt deer.  There is lots of history, but Mason reflects too on the social and economic aspects of the city--at least how it makes itself felt in this part of it. 

* * * * *

It's the social aspect of London, social as in societal ills, that the author takes as her topic for Mind the Child: The Victoria Line by Camila Batmanghelidjh and Kids Company.  It's tourist London that I remember so clearly, but what about the real London?  Mind the Child was an eye-opening and sometimes harrowing read about a portion of society that should be cherished and cared for, but is all too often abused and neglected--children.

Batmanghelidjh begins her narrative with the story of her own sister who jumped in front of a train but fell between the rails and only injured her leg (she later subsequently had better luck in committing suicide).

"Since then, each time someone jumps on the tracks, bringing the station to a halt, I find myseld preoccupied with the discprepant journeys we all take in life: the parallel existences of the destination-driven crowd, who move rapidly to complete a task, and the destination-despondent, who decide life is no longer worth pursuing."

It wasn't the loss of her sister that prompted Batmanghelidjh to work with children.  It was a love of helping others.  And it was a family trait handed down from earlier generations--this desire to serve others.  ". . . some of the richest cultures put care-giving at the forefront of their agenda, and see it as an expression of refinement rather than failure or weakness."

"We tend to look at the Tube map only when we have a destination in mind.  Take the Victoria Line: its sky-blue snakes clearly through the tangle of other lines, from Brixton in south London all the way to Walthamstow in the northeast.  In this book, I want us to take a less direct route.  I want to introduce you to some of the extraordinary kids struggling daily with the dichotomy of living and dying, who I have met through my work at Kids Company and, prior to that, through a range of other settings."

Mind the children--much like mind the gap--these are the children we don't see or demonize if we do, the ones who fall between the cracks.  Mind the Child is a combination of personal narrative by the children themselves, Batmanghelidjh's experiences working with them, and many statistics about crime and violence.  The numbers however aren't empty and meaningless as numbers usually are.  Hearing the voices of these children, who don't seem to ever be quite visible to politicians puts faces on the numbers.  Each child speaks in their own voice, some pulling themselves out of poverty and bad situations and others mired in it no matter how hard they try and lift themselves out.  The author also explains the neuroscience of battered children--how living in abusive households affects them and stunts them.  I had no idea what to expect when I picked up this book.  Victoria Line?  It was her inspiration and it is certainly a journey.  It's reading books like this that put life and the world into sharp perspective.  It was not an easy read at times, but it was such a good read and I am happy that I was finally prompted to pick it up.

Next up I will be joining Mason on his walk of the Bakerloo Line and reading Paul Morely's Earthbound as an accompaniment.  And, of course, mapping my progress in the London A-Z.  I'll tell you all about my adventures when I finish.

Teaser Tuesday: Walk the Lines

I've decided to go on walking tour.  And in one of my very favorite cities--London!  It's been a very, very long time since I traveled to London, but I still remember it vividly.  I am very fortunate to have traveled there not once but twice and the second time I stayed for several weeks with friends.  Un-fortunately an armchair walking tour is about all I can manage these days on my very restricted budget.  Books, though, are always the next best thing--especially if the book is good and your imagination rises to the challenge. 

Cath at Read Warbler suggested Mark Mason's Walk the Lines: The London Underground Overground.  I've been itching for a really good nonfiction read and haven't been able to focus on one in particular (as a matter of fact have yet to finish a single nonfiction read so far this year!).  I'm not even sure what made me reach for this other than picking through a variety of books and the appeal of not only London and spending time walking (I love walking outside and am going a little stir crazy with the incessant cold weather we've been dealing with . . . bring on spring please) was strong enough for me to dip into the book.  Mason hooked me right away. 

The premise--Mason decided to walk the entire length of the London Underground in order to truly 'know the city' and 'own it'.  The catch is he walked each Underground line--overground and passing through each and ever tube station.  To make things a little more interesting and as I always love a good reading project, I have pulled out my set of Penguin Lines.  I love these little Penguin books (I have the Penguin Food boxed set and some of the Penguin English Journeys, too).  They were published last year to celebrate 150 years of the London Underground.

"The city is filled with stories. For the 150th anniversary of the London Underground, twelve writers tell their tales, each inspired by a different Tube line. Some are personal, some are polemical; every one is unique, showing how we are connected, and how the space in which we live shapes us and our imaginations."

When I first discovered them I had to have them, bought each book and then promptly left them to their own devices on my bookshelves.  Time to put them to use, however.  Aren't they pretty?  So, as Mason walks the lines I will follow his adventures and then supplement the reading with my Penguins.  Mason's itinerary: Victoria, Bakerloo, Central, Hammersmith & City, District, Northern, Circle, Piccadilly, Waterloo & City, Jubilee, Metropolitan.  The Penguin series has one additional book--East London, which I am not entirely sure how it fits in with the whole scheme, but I am sure I will figure it out soon enough.

The extracurricular reading may well  diverge drastically from Mason's writing.  I have started reading Mind the Child by Camila Batmanghelidjh and Kids Company.  The Victoria Line--Mind the Child is a play on 'mind the gap', but she takes as her subject the disadvantaged children she works with who have fallen between the cracks of society.  It's been an eye opening and occasionally painful read.  Each author of the Penguin series was able to interpret the theme in their own way, so it should be an interesting read and I am curious how it will all tie together.

As for the Mason.  It's quite humorous and more than a little chatty.  It seems to be chock filled with all sorts of London and London Underground trivia.  I suspect some of it might turn out to be a little over my head as I won't catch all the references, but there should still be plenty of interest to me.  For example (and I swear I'd read this somewhere but had forgotten):

"If you ever want a sense of peace at Victoria, this is the place to come [Victoria Tube Station].  Not because it's especially quiet, but rather because a plaque at the ticket barrier commemorates the arrival of the station's most famous (though nameless) visitor.  At 8.32 p.m. on 10 November 1920, this was the end of the journey from Dover for the train carrying the Unknown Warrior."

I plan on reading each Penguin book in tandem with the corresponding chapter in Walk the Lines, so it may take me a while to get through the book, but I will share my own 'journey' here.  I have also ordered the London A-Z Street Atlas so I can follow Mason's walk.  I think it will be more meaningful to me to 'see' it in some way.  Besides, I love looking at city maps and it will make the reading experience all the more richer. 

I hope the weather is fine in London.  I know I am ready for a good walk!