London Overground Read Online Free Page A

hefting weights. Tight young women in black leotards, down on their backs, raising wagon-wheel discs. Number crunchers grunting at resistance machines. The arched tunnel behind a curtain made from overlapping fronds of translucent plastic looks like a high-security-prison gym; masochism and narcissism striving for improved body image and the cult of infinitely sustainable youth.
    There is always an artisan bakery ‘promoting well-being and recovery from mental ill health’ by endorsing traditional methods (of flour-grinding, not health care). Hot-spiced loaves drip a trail of authentic grain from brown paper bags.
    Then, beyond CHARTERHOUSE AQUATICS , in symbiotic connection, a stylish Japanese restaurant: TONKOTSU EAST . Slanting roof across yard. Long bar. Raw fish-meats arranged in poetic portions on white plates.
    These interconnected enterprises, nudging one into the next, mimic the sleepers of the railway overhead. An endless tunnel – food, fitness, money-art, van hire, storage – looping, cave after
cave, around the span of London. Parasitical on blocks of secure flats selling themselves on the spectacle of those twinned pseudo rivers, the Regent’s Canal and the elevated railway. Balconies jut over the cobbles to within a few yards of the Haggerston platform. Station announcements, every two minutes, punctuate sleep. Dream destinations: Clapham Junction, New Cross, Crystal Palace, West Croydon, Dalston Junction, Highbury & Islington.
    The new line, with its new bridges, artisan bakeries, blue-bike racks and coffee shops, was opened by Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, on 27 April 2010. The first train left Dalston Junction at five minutes after midday. And I was on it. I liked the experience so much, the wide carriages, the views, the orgasmic hiss of the brakes, the absence of pioneer clients, that I stayed with the shuttle: to Surrey Quays on the wrong side of the river. And back.
    I might have settled permanently in the time capsule, this cynosure of a transport system that actually worked, if it hadn’t been for the din from a couple of profoundly deaf mutes. One of them had cropped silver hair, ear attachments that hummed, and a bellicose thrust of chin. The other, serene to the point of dead stop, was Japanese. They debated, discussed, translated, revised at Morse-code velocity, across the carriage’s generous aisle. Threatening silences were broken by strangulated yelps from the white man – who I took, on no hard evidence, for Northside Dublin. Wanting to come closer, to feel the projectile impact of unspoken words, their excitement at something beyond the journey they were presently undertaking, they relocated. Repeatedly. The Irishman thumped down next to me and waved his friend to the vacant slot on the other side, leaving me caught in the middle like a referee with no idea of the rules of the game.
    My
head was ringing. The more the Japanese man displayed his beatific smile and pre-chemical calm in the face of the onslaught of dumb-show dialectic, the more his study partner insisted. The tensed hush of the other widely dispersed travellers was absolute, clenched: trainspotters, railway buffs entering details in notebooks, a great transport occasion. They remembered all too vividly that this novel fairground railway, Boris-puffed, freighted with boasts and predictions, surfeited on statistics, was a very old railway revamped.
    In 1853, in that remote boom-industrial age, the East & West India Docks & Birmingham Junction Railway changed its name to the North London Railway. The original line ventured from Camden Town to Poplar, linking arbitrary destinations in a way that opened new connections, fresh ways of reading the territory. In just the fashion that, in our own day, in my first years in London, the accident of the North London Line sweeping from the brown riverside at North Woolwich, by way of Camden Road (and Compendium Bookshop), to Kew Gardens, set the agenda for so many expeditions and