Rants & Falls

Things annoyed me today. I was pretty grumpy after having to get up at 7am and after enduring a fitful night's sleep that was mainly due to my bed being positioned 3 feet away from a well-marked public loitering/shouting spot on the street outside. I get annoyed easily when I'm tired and grumpy.

The first thing that annoyed me was abuse of the English language. Now I've veered away from this fairly obvious target for the vitriol of my 'Superior Englishman' complex, but today I snapped. Much to my chagrin (love saying that - makes me feel superior) the offenders in this case were the otherwise very amiable Canadians. I would have preferred to vent my lexicographic spleen at some Americans, but I'm sure they'll be more opportunities. The reason for my annoyance was an announcement on the train. I had noted the very same annoyance on my long journey, when the word in question was used frequently, but I was obviously less grumpy then. The typical announcement goes as follows...
"We will shortly be arriving at station x. If you are leaving us here please be sure to blah blah. When DETRAINING we advise you to take extra care etc etc". You'll have spotted the villanous word - detraining. Now where I come from (which is England, where we speak English) getting off a train is usually referred to as 'alighting'. Now I suspect a decent cross section of John and Jane Public back in Blighty would be mystified if someone told them to 'alight carefully' but still. the word detraining is a monstrosity and should be shot. What's wrong with just saying 'be careful when getting off the train'?? Detraining is actually in the dictionary, but I'd wager its another of the newly concocted Americanised 'stick-together' words where you take a noun, add an adverb and hey-presto you have a new word to fill your gaping void (cf. downsizing and upskilling). It’s a good job it’s a 10 letter word, therefore not possible on Countdown, or dear Mr Whitely would be spinning in his grave.

A further irritation on my train journey today (and again this happened countless times on the mega-trip, but didn’t really get my goat like today) was the constant horn hooting that went on. I quickly noticed when leaving Vancouver that train drivers are quite fond of their tooters. At first I though this was a quaint, but irrelevant addition to the railway experience. I eventually realized that they have to toot the tooter every time the tracks cross a road. There are a LOT of these crossings, so cue much tooting. The thing that really annoyed me was that all these crossings are protected by some quite hefty barriers, which are designed to prevent the cars from going onto the track when a train is imminent. So given the barrier protection, why the need for the never-ending tooting?? I mean, if you’re sat there in your truck and there’s a big bloody pole stickin out stopping you from driving any further, are you going to stop, or are you going to think “I wonder what will happen if I keep on driving through this barrier? Ooooh, hang on, I hear tootin. Better wait here.”. Well maybe you would if you’re a complete moron and we can’t really rule that out, so maybe they are a good idea after all.

I was on the train today as I undertook a wee excursion to Niagara Falls, which is about 2 hours away from Toronto. Its not the kind of classic tourist trap that I normally venture to, but I’m a sucker for nature so I had to go. The Falls themselves (there are 2 – American Falls and Horseshoe Falls, which is the most famous) are every bit as majestic and awesome as I imagined. There really is something uniquely spectacular about water surging over a precipice into a mighty cauldron of water down below. The tower of mist that was produced by the Horseshoe Falls was immense – it made a seamless connection to the clouds that were hovering overhead, not unlike the emissions of a chemical plant (though obviously much nicer). Yes I really enjoyed the Falls - they were great and not in the least bit annoying. What WAS annoying was everything around these magical wonders of mother nature. The entire area (on the Canadian side – I can’t vouch for the US side) had been turned into one of the ugliest, most repulsive showers of tack and vulgarity I’ve ever had the displeasure to stumble across. It was shocking. There was Hard Rock Café, Planet Hollywood, WWE Wrestling World, The Tropical Birds of the Lost Kingdom (???) and a totally third-rate wax museum, amongst all kinds of fast food eateries, casinos and assorted bollocks. Apparently this is the honeymoon capital of North America. Draw your own conclusions.

Luckily I managed to escape this trap of crap on an earlier train than I’d planned. Phew…but the biggest irritation was lying wait. I took my seat on the train and rested my head, ready for a nice snooze after my tiring day out. I hear faint voices from the back of my carriage. It was a mother helping her two sweet kiddies with their spelling. “Aaah” I thought, “its just like that film about kids doing a spelling bee”. I’m sure you all know about this bizarre North American phenomenon (again I really want to just say American here, but it was sodding Canadians as well this time) so I won’t bother to explain. As with the tooting, I found it to be a pretty pleasant novelty at first. This wore off. After 30 mins of genius boy rattling of word after word, my patience was wearing very thing. Even the words mommy was reading out were on my side – annoyance (nudge, nudge) terminate (get the hint woman!) decapitate (hmmm). After this final mortal word was ignored, I snapped. Jumping to my feet I shouted
“Can you spell ‘IRRITATING’?...Oh, very good. Well how about ‘SHUTHEF*CKUP’?...Wrong ya little bastard, the U was an asterisk!”
OK so that last bit only happened in my head, but just thinking of doing it changed my mood sufficiently and I barely noticed the final hour of continued spelling.

I guess from reading all this you might think I had a very bad day. Well that’d be wrong. For a start, musing on these annoyances has brought me a great deal of pleasure and writing about them here has been a thoroughly therapeutic process. In addition, I got back to the excellent news that Everton had battled to a point against Chelsea, thereby becoming the first team to take points of them this season. Light at the end of the tunnel after all – I’m keeping the faith.

I’m off to a new city tomorrow, so another early start and another train journey. I’m gonna wear ear plugs.

In the immortal words of Stuart Hall, I wish you a fond farewell.