Comfort Food on the Tube

Lately I have noticed a recession-related behaviour springing up on my daily commute: comfort eating. Years ago eating on the tube was a reviled habit, consisting as it did almost exclusively of the consumption of evil smelling Wimpy burgers, replaced in subsequent years by equally evilly smelling Whoppers and Big Macs. These days I have noticed that the majority of commuters in the average carriage, will be tucking into slices of cake, fudge pieces, chocolate Hob Nobs, Millionaire bars; and today, a lady opposite me sipped from a thermos of what smelled, unmistakeably, like chicken soup. Austerity is taking its toll in many different ways but this is a new one not yet clocked by the social anthropologists. I watch people tucking into their various stress beating, high GI goodies with not inconsiderable jealousy. The months off my feet have taken their toll on my waistline and while my fellow commuters are unwrapping their shop bought chocolate, I have a litle plastic bag of cut up celery bits that I chew on disconsolately. Frankly I am amazed commuters haven't succumbed to junkfood years ago. The mere experience of dodging mice at Charing Cross station; traversing the Armaggedon that represents the queue for the escalators at Victoria; the stampede at Oxford Circus; tramping the half marathon that is the distance between the Picadilly and the Northern lines at Leicester Square; climbing off trains into sooty Central line tunnels and staggering, traumatised, through the tracks into the blinding light of the next station feeling like a wartime refugee; packing into overcrowded Bakerloo line trains like cattle; or tugging vainly at windows desperate for air to dispel the antisocial smell of a crowd of people who apparently have not had time, or inclination, to wash that day - are all by themselves experiences awful enough to send anyone over the edge. Is that why you bake, friends ask me - is it a comfort activity after the commute that you hate so much? Well, partly, although here's a confession - I bake for the pleasure of producing beautifully smelling food, but I don't actually eat that much of it, and frankly that is just as well as I would be the size of several houses if I did. So no. I don't bake to comfort eat. But it is a kind of liberation. The kitchen is my space, to move around in as I want to, without having to negotiate anything other than a teenager with his nose in the fridge. But it is far more about the need for a creative process that liberates me from the stultifying experience that is the tube ride - no matter how much I try to alleviate it with work reading, social reading, Scrabble or Fruit Ninja on the trusty IPad, I am always relieved to stumble out at my home station. Not so with buses of course - buses are unbelievably slow, a lot like elephants in the way they rumble up roads - but you can jump out of them at any time, and sometimes I do just for the hell of it. No it's just the tube. I need it, I can't get to and from work in reasonable time without it, I know it like the back of my hand, and I hate depending on it. I suspect that when fellow commuters tear into their chocolate bars, they are having similar thoughts. And if anyone reading this is thinking, if you hate it so much, get on your bike, my answer is, with pleasure. Just as soon as cycling in central London stops being tantamount to taking your life into your hands. The day Boris Johnson introduces universal cycling lanes, is the day I eat my Oyster Card. In the mean time, celery sticks will have to do.