The Central line rises in the East with Epping and sets in West Ruislip. A journey over inconceivable distance. So vast that traversing it you will cross two time zones and meet bearded apparitions of yourself coming the other way.
Tube drivers start training straight out of school at 16 just so they have a chance of crossing London on the Central Line before retirement. If you leave Epping in the summer, pack your winter clothes and some pictures of your friends and family because not only will there be an ice age in West Ruislip, but by the time you get there everyone you know will be dead and gone.
Any person crazy enough to embark on this epic adventure will need more than luck on their side. Only Tupperware supplies of crustless sandwiches, crosswords, and a bottle of weak lemon drink will you give you any chance of survival.
The ends of this line are bleak places. The platforms imbued with years of silent melancholy and corroded by salty tears. The only movement recorded by bored CCTV cameras comes from a few wraith-like figures shuffling to join desolation row for the next train in 12 minutes. Pacing like caged animals. Hunting the bins for newspapers and scanning the floors for cigarette butts. But there’s no diversion in these godforsaken places. Just the solemn ancient wooden benches carved with Old English runes like ‘Twat’ and ‘Woz ere’ and the sound of the wind howling through the empty platforms for company.
The monotony only broken by the sudden appearance of a whirlwind, picking up the discarded coffee cups, chip wrappers and pages of the Metro and distributing their seeds to every corner of the station as they drown out the garbled commands from cryptic loudspeakers. 12 minutes for the Epping train! It’s a bloody eternity. If you weren’t a Londoner, you might even think about walking.
There’s no playful banter here. No friendly jests. Every week at least 50 poor souls are discovered abandoned in Ealing. Disorientated, haggard, and with no memory of their past life, except for a crumpled tube ticket and a very long till receipt from All Bar One.
For the most part, they are burnt out balding City workers, sometimes a celebrity chef, or jaded shopping channel star, but mainly it’s a place where the founders of folk groups from the 1970s go to die. Ealing Town Council are obliged to house these desperate refugees and God willing, if they respond to the years of counselling and sucking on a Toilet Duck, and they promise never to play the mandolin again, they may be released back into the wild.
So at best these are dark places suitable for quiet solitary contemplation, at worst an Elephant’s graveyard of broken commuters littered with the modernist detritus of mouldy manbags, rust spotted makeup mirrors, the up-ended ruins of laptops, and the decomposing grease stained boxes of fried chicken.
It’s a different story travelling along the Central Line through the centre of town, careering along its sinuous track, barely clinging to the metal as the carriages screech around the corners, reaching reckless speeds of up to 10mph.
It always makes me feel giddy and important. Like I have places to go and people to see. Where everyone knows exactly where they’re going and can’t wait to get there. Full of glossy, glamorous beings, extravagantly spilling their Evian and breathing Oxygen from a portable tank as they fill their minds with incessant white noise from their tinny Ipods.
Unlike riding on to its outer tendrils as it bounces over London’s hinterlands, which makes me feel like the end is more than just nigh, it’s just around the next bend. The tube doesn’t belong in the open air, it should stay in it’s tunnels, where it’s safe and warm.
But can golf exist in such places? Names like Hanger Lane, Bank and Marble Arch just don’t evoke images of a verdant fertile paradise. Could golf really survive in South Woodford, could it cope with Chancery Lane, would anyone be brave enough to plant a fairway in Fairlop? It doesn’t seem likely that these clattering metal pellets could ever discharge themselves anywhere suitable for 18 holes. And even if such courses were built, wouldn’t the flags just shrink back into the ground, the fairways curl up at the edges, and the tees sink down into the contaminated mire?
Well, we won’t know until we wipe the grime from the windows and see what’s outside will we?
In fact there’s a veritable catalogue of golfing wonder out there:
11. Fairlop Waters Golf Course
So there you are, the point at last! Conclusive proof of golfing life on the Central Line.
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