by Andrew Newman Getting back
to Blighty T
he volcanic ash cloud wasn’t the only cause of
‘claustrophobic tension’ in late April 2010. ‘Getting back to Blighty’ is possibly a better phrase to describe such frustrating logistical delays. You’re stuck, and all you really want to do is get back home. So it doesn’t matter if you are trapped in a lift; stuck down a pothole; caged in a train under the Channel; or imprisoned in Ikea - you just want to get out and get home.
And you know that the journey is going to be a tortuous one. That’s especially true when you find yourself incarcerated in one of those end-to-end, queue-after- queue theme parks with just an ‘in’ and an ‘out’ - and you are not allowed to go back against the flow to escape through the ‘in’. The IIB’s Barbara Bradshaw’s misfortune to become stranded in Shanghai after the Chinese Grand Prix is recorded in Market Talk on page 4 in this issue, and there were thousands of others facing the same plight all over the globe.
But there were also other incidents of ‘claustrophobic tension’ much closer to home.
● Take the FA Cup Semi-Finals
at Wembley. A disappointing result for a certain North London team (that has otherwise enjoyed its best season for a very, very
long time) witnessed an earlier than normal departure from the stadium.
The usual plan is to hang around, and chat over a drink while the crowds heading down Olympic Way towards Wembley Park station disperse. On this occasion that option was discarded in favour of braving the crowds just to get home. It didn’t help emerging on the ‘wrong’ side of the stadium - producing the bizarre logistic of half the crowd trying to get to the other side struggling against an equal flow attempting to do the same going the opposite way! Olympic Way was a log jam of people, although unlike the stuck lift or the potholing experience, the only physical danger was the probability of treading in horse manure laid down by the platoons of mounted police otherwise maintaining an orderly queue. Frankly, the potential for ‘claustrophobic tension’ of joining such a throng did not appeal, and it turns out that the famous Olympic Way has been deliberately designed to keep a captive homebound audience closely penned.
There are a few escape exits, and a walk round the back of the nearby Arena led to Wembley Park Drive where a comfy armchair in a hotel bar offered some relief. But this respite wore off after about an hour, and so
the plunge was taken to join the queue for the station. But how? The queue was still backing up towards the stadium.
A helpful police officer at the railway station provided a quick solution. “Walk over the bridge to the other side of the station. You’ll find a door in the side that takes you straight onto the platform.” And he was right! If only that knowledge had been available an hour earlier.
● No such wrinkle at
Twickenham unfortunately for the rugby internationals. There, the dodge at the rail station is to catch a train going the other way, change at the next stop, and board a relatively empty train coming back into London. Consequently the queue at Twickenham is worsened as every train that arrives is already full with rugby fans employing this manoeuvre.
●
You wouldn’t think the London Marathon would be a haven for ‘claustrophobic tension’. Don’t you believe it. And we are not just talking about the people who like to treat it as a fancy dress party - the ‘fun runners’.
A competitor who took part in the event is Kevin Durkan, a director of New Way Solutions. He finished the course in a respectable 3 hours, 37 minutes,
39 seconds (which he reckons is not bad for someone who turned 59 on the day of the race) but says the earlier stages were in some ways the most
uncomfortable. “The organisers were quite strict on which gate you could start from, and my attempt to choose a better location were thwarted by officialdom. So I went to my allotted slot, and to be honest the first few miles were scary. You felt trapped. There was nowhere to go other than to keep going, so thick was the throng.”
That seems to tie in with the helicopter view on TV. There were the amateurs - thousands of them - somewhere in Greenwich hemmed in between houses on one side and a substantial wall on the other. And nowhere else to go. And the word ‘go’ has a special connotation here. As the runners reached the spot where the forbidding wall moved away from the road, swathes of competitors could be seen peeling off onto the welcome piece of greensward for relief - fortunately far enough away not to cause any personal embarrassments. So that old Monty Python sketch ‘The Incontinent Olympics’ wasn’t as silly as we all thought, at a time when TV cameras were more discreet.
Mr Durkan was not one of the incontinents. “We Insurance People have more control!”
JUNE 2010 insurancepeople 33
by Andrew Newman
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