The ‘Out Of Office’ Is On

But before my holiday, I asked TfL: so are you gonna fix the tube map or what? Also this week: some notes on Cornish place names.

By the time you read this I will be far away – unless, of course, you’re on the Iberian peninsula, in which case I will be unexpectedly and unnervingly close. My week in Lisbon is my first foreign holiday since before the pandemic – yes, I know – and although I’ll still be hanging around social media, because I’m going on my own and if I don’t I’ll get lonely, I am absolutely determined not to do even a tiny bit of work.

So, this week’s newsletter is slightly shorter than normal, and also upside down: I’m starting with the links, which normally go at the bottom, with some actual writing (some notes on Cornish place names; the rest of my interview with the man in charge of the tube map) to follow. Next week’s edition will be a guest post, from friend of the newsletter and long-standing backup me Ed Jefferson. I’ll be back with all the usual goodies in two weeks. 

Links, etc. 

1. “A politics whose most fundamental idea is Make Progress Stop Happening would inevitably find itself fetishizing the torment of having to live in a world in which other people, who are not even you, are somehow supposed to matter just as much.” A fantastic bit of writing about the US, by The Defector’s David Roth.

2. Sticking with that subject, whoever is writing the headlines on press releases for the Harris/Walz campaign deserves a pay rise. Consider this: “Donald Trump To Ramble Incoherently and Spread Dangerous Lies in Public, but at Different Home”.

3. Not doing a full write up of a map this week (I did mention being on holiday, right?), but I really enjoyed Nick Brumfield’s effort showing what the US states should have been named, had they all been named for rivers:

By my count there are 16 states, nearly a third of the total, which are unchanged. There are none which seem to have swapped with a neighbour, which feels both surprising and slightly disappointing, although renaming Alaska “Yukon” would presumably be of some mild irritation to those in the neighbouring territory of Canada. I think my favourite new state names are Snake (Idaho), Brazos (Texas) and Mystic (Massachusetts).

Anyway, Nick explains his logic in the thread below. 

4. I’d always assumed I’d be there until the bitter end. Now, I’m not so sure. This week’s New Statesman column is a sort of eulogy for Twitter.

5. “The campaign responded with a blog post headed: ‘Why RBWM can’t afford not to back out of golf course deal’, so good luck with that.” This week’s Nimby Watch concerns the people trying to block housing development on a golf course next to a Crossrail station, who haven’t realised they’re the baddies.

6. “You don’t have to be shoehorned into something else because you didn’t reach an arbitrary score to do something you are passionate about. Time is your friend.” My terrifyingly impressive mentee Matt Taylor, on how he got two GCSEs and still ended up studying at Oxford.

Don't let your results define you!

7. I was on yesterday’s episode of Oh God, What Now? talking to Jacob Jarvis, Zoe Grunewald and Hugo Rifkind about Labour’s relationship with the unions, and the irritating refusal of defeated Tories to shut up and go away.

8. I was also on Paper Cuts on both Thursday (Liz Truss and ageing, with Jason and Alex) and Monday (Taylor vs Trump, and from “brat” to “demure”, with Marcus and Alex again).

I do think that risking war with Taylor Swift by fabricating a “Swifties for Trump” movement out of almost, but not quite, whole cloth (there does appear to be one) could be the former president’s stupidest move yet. For some reason I keep thinking about the fate of King Pentheus in The Bacchae. But that’s by the by.

9. “You can’t be in on the joke when you are the joke.” This is a week old – it came out about 20 minutes after last Wednesday’s newsletter – but last week I made my debut in the comment pages of the i Paper with this bit on Liz Truss.

10. My furry and excitable life partner Henry Scampi is spending the week with my mother, who will of course be delighted by the near hourly requests for updates on his activities. I may spend some time re-examining Edith Charles’ thread of “comical/worrying dog crossbreeds” for comfort. (Twitter may be dying, but Blue Sky is really starting to deliver the goods, huh?)

11. And finally, let us all enjoy the tshirts I had made while sick and off my head on codeine the other week:

So is TfL going to fix the Tube Map or what?

A few weeks ago, I spoke to Transport for London’s “head of crayons” – or, if you want to be formal about it, design – Jon Hunter, to ask how a fully operational transport network went about rebranding an entire Overground rail network as six different lines. The answer, it turned out, was surprisingly quietly.

That was the main topic of our conversation – but a measurable share of my time has been dedicated to bitching about the declining quality of the Tube Map for about as long as I can remember. Since Hunter is the man in ultimate charge of the tube map, it thus felt like it would be remiss not to ask him if there were any plans to rethink things to address any of the many things that annoy me.

Well, big news: TfL has, it turned out, looked into this. “We did an exercise a couple of years ago,” Hunter told me. “There’s been a lot of criticism about how Harry Beck’s version” – the work of the draughtsman who originated the modern Tube Map, essentially inventing the modern science of metro maps in the process – “was better”.

The original and best. Image: Transport for London.