Thankyou London Underground

The Tube is on strike today. Everybody's cursing (including me). Meaning, it's not a bad day to remember one of my favourite poems, an ode to the London Underground, which I discovered on the London Underground:

Here's to the gaps, the maps
And the elapse of a hundred and fifty years since that first
Steaming monster hurled
Through its Metropolitan Minotaur world.
To all the billiard ball-bottomed straps onto which I've hung.
And here's to the police office, who, when I was illegally
    busking outside Westminster Station, approached me and said,
'Do you know any Neil Young?'

St George the Dragon Slayer? Or St George the Lizard Eater?

St. George's Day Posters in London c. 2014

Is England’s patron Saint George a dragon slayer? Or a lizard eater?

The question is prompted by these posters promoting St. George's Day, prominently displayed across the metropolis, blessed by the Lord Mayor of London himself. The weapon the beast is impaled upon is, obviously, a table fork. In which case, the beast itself can’t be much bigger than a garden lizard. 

Do people eat lizards? Do heroes eat lizards?

Quite different from the way the dragon slayer was depicted in more heroic times….

St. George Slays the Dragon, by Raphael c. 1504

We drive on the left, so why do we walk on the right?

In England, we drive on the left. So it would be natural to walk on the left, right? Wrong! 

This sign, instructing pedestrians to walk on the right, was photographed in the Green Park tube station, in Central London.

In the Green Park tube station

Why? Because of the high concentration of American tourists in Central London? Maybe...but it might just be random. 

I'm conditioned to think that things are the way they are for a reason. It is much harder to accept that most things are the way they are for no especially good reason. It just is what it is. Get with the programme, baby, go with the flow.

Pedestrian tunnel, Green Park tube station