A Cretin Halts Eurostar!

I grew up in a family where my late father seemed to have had an averse against public transport. Therefore I became used to being transported in his family car, the Ford Popular, a particular make and model, as the name implied, popular around the late fifties and into the sixties. However, despite how he might have felt towards using public transport, I do remember very clearly his use of the London Underground with just me to accompany him, before passing his driving test and acquiring his first ever car. As a small child, it was quite daunting to sit inside this apparently huge, man-made subterranean cavern and the sight of the train emerging from the tunnel at one end of the cavern. Because of the enclosed space, the noise of rolling wheels on the tracks was amplified as it echoed around the confines of the station space.

The Ford Popular, Dad's first ever car.

However, those were the glory days of my youth, when we lived in Pimlico, a Westminster residential district with the River Thames itself forming the southern border, with the east by Vauxhall Bridge Road, the west by the Grosvenor Canal, and the north with Belgravia by Victoria Station. During my childhood days, the Victoria Line with Pimlico Tube Station, now very close to where we used to live, did not exist, since the Victoria Line opened in sections between 1968 and 1972, with Pimlico Station itself being the last to open, which by then we were long settled in Bracknell. Therefore I have always tried to figure out which of the Tube lines Dad took me in when he had to travel across London to do business.

And so indeed, when Dad used the tube, I often accompanied him. But not so with Mum, because she never used the Underground, always preferring those red double-decker buses which plied the streets of the city. Although she had never said so, I suspect it could have been a feeling of claustrophobia, especially when the train stops in between stations and we are stuck in a tight tunnel beneath the surface and out of reach from sunlight. I guess those were the glory days of Empire, or at least, the end-days of Empire, while across the Channel, a six-nation European Economic Community was in its fledgeling stage with the rising of General De Gaulle of France making sure that Britain will have no part of EEC membership.

Therefore what a privilege it was to be old and eligible enough to vote for the UK to join the EEC, or the European Common Market, in 1973, when I was a mere twenty-year-old. It was as if I was sticking my two fingers at the former French president. But more important, to be in the Community drew closer ties with Italy, my ancestral home country where the rest of our relatives still live. And I rejoiced when the result came out the next day. We were in.

Although my father continued to drive his own car until old age coupled with cancer finally overtook him, just like Mum never taking to the Underground, I never took to the steering wheel, although in 1978, on one occasion, I did drive a three-wheel Reliant right into London on the M4 motorway, nevertheless, on a daily basis, the nearest in guiding a motor vehicle along Britain's roads was on a motorcycle. It was only a small bike in the motorcycling world, not more than 90cc, but it gave me independence and pleasure until one afternoon, a car in front decided to brake suddenly, and to avoid a rear collision, I swerved sharply, throwing me off the two-wheeler and left lying on the road next to the bike. Eventually, someone called the ambulance and was taken to the nearest hospital, where I spent the next few days bedded down in one of the wards.

As a child, I was overawed by the cavernous tube station. 

Having heard so many stories of permanent disabilities and fatalities caused by motorbike accidents, it was after leaving the hospital when I decided to leave the motorcycle locked permanently away at the garage and buy a pushbike. I believe it was a wise move. This was because not only riding a bicycle was much cheaper than any motor vehicle, but pedalling offered fitness as well, to the extent that triathlon training and competition began to dominate the 1980s, into the nineties.

Therefore the train became the main form of long-distance transportation. Although the much-maligned British Rail was plagued with strikes, go-slows and other forms of industrial unrest, nevertheless whenever normal service resumed, I always found our trains to be fast, efficient and punctual. For example, the Bracknell-London Waterloo service took just forty minutes to complete during the early 1970s, stopping only at Staines. Now, after privatisation during the nineties, our Southwest Trains stops at eight additional stations before arriving at Waterloo, and another stop is due to be added due to a housing development. Indeed, our present services are a lot slower than they used to be, at least on our line.

But I think the development of HS1, or the Eurostar, was the great leap in Anglo/French rail development, with the construction of the Channel Tunnel, a tube 31.35-mile, 50.45 km in length passing through a chalk bed under the English Channel. It's actually longer than the 30-mile route from our home town into London but it takes just twenty minutes for the Eurostar train to pass under the sea from Folkstone to Calais.

Therefore it came of no surprise over our excited anticipation in 2016 as Alex was able to climb out of her wheelchair, fold and to push it under the luggage rack as we boarded at London St Pancras for Paris. As the train accelerated through East London and Kent before entering the tunnel, I thought of the vast improvement in travel since the 1960s when Dad drove his car from our home to Paris. That is, without any direct motorways back then, this involved up to two days driving, including a late-evening ferry from Dover to Calais (with a long wait before embarkation), an overnight sleep in the car just outside Calais, then a day's driving into Paris. That was in 1966, after stripping off my school uniform for the Summer and when our family's tight budget caused us to eschew a hotel for the night.

By comparison, the Eurostar train took just 136 minutes to pull into Paris Gare de Nord from London St Pancras. We repeated the journey exactly a year later as part of our wedding anniversary celebration, and then again only a couple of weeks ago, when we boarded the international train for the third journey, this time for the 120-minute dash to Brussels. All three outbound journeys were fast, non-stop. For the return journeys, the 2016 return trip from Paris was also non-stop, the 2017 return stopped additionally at Ebbsfleet International, while the return from Brussels stopped at Lille. 

Yes, it can be argued that some magic has gone from international travel. At least with the good old boat-train which dominated my travels during the early seventies. From London Victoria, there was this hassle of alighting at Folkstone, passing through Passport Control to board the ferry to Boulogne, then board their train for Rome. With further onboard Passport checks at Modane, the whole journey took more than 24 hours to get to Rome from London overall, but I found it to be very thrilling. Especially on board the ferry which rolled over a rough sea, causing a rush of sea-spray to give us all on deck an unexpected soaking! (For the record, many of us stood on the outdoor decking to avoid the stench of vomit flooding the floor of the bar and restaurant). No wonder that after the crossing, I felt that I was really in a foreign country. 

Those were the days, my friend - the good old 1970s. Who thought they would ever end?

Therefore it came as a shock to the system to read about this deranged individual who successfully halted all Eurostar departures out of St Pancras and also delayed the arrivals from Paris and Brussels, and wrecking the plans of thousands of passengers. He was protesting about the delay of Brexit from the original March 29th exit until the 12th April, with a strong possibility of further delays in leaving the EU until a deal can be passed through Parliament. 

What he did was to spend the whole of the early hours of Saturday morning on the roof of the tunnel at Barnsbury, which takes the Eurostar track underground beneath the Overground railway tracks, therefore bypassing all the stations on that line. This action endangered his life, therefore the need to shut down all overhead power lines.

This guy, who is in his forties, does tarnish the reputation of Brexiteers. I can even go as far as to say that not all Brexiteers are lunatics of course, but every lunatic had voted Leave. I can bet every single penny that he is one of many who would love to see the Eurotunnel dynamited and sealed forever, so never again would a train pass from England to France and back under the ocean. His protest was a cry for British sovereignty - or secretly, something else.

Like as I mentioned two weeks earlier, chances are that he had never travelled on Eurostar, neither has he any intention to do so. If I was able to pierce through his tough-minded Euroscepticism, I would most likely find fear lurking in the inner depths of his heart. Not the fear of losing the chance of Britain being free from the shackles of Brussels, but fear of being in the tunnel itself. As aforementioned, he could imagine being stuck below the sea due to a signal failure, a fire, a mechanical or electrical breakdown, or seawater rushing into the tunnel, drowning everyone. Alternatively, he could have feelings of deep envy of these middle-class scum who can afford to pay for the journey and enjoy the experience, himself having to scrimp and scrape from his low-paid job, or even from benefits.

Many Brexiteers would love to see this permanently closed.

These are the thoughts and feelings most likely lurking under his stiff upper lip and patriotic love for his country. He gets a level of comfort by believing that we who voted to remain in the EU are spineless wimps who promote Project Fear, and are too pessimistic to consider England's bright and glorious future as an independent sovereign nation without the need for God, yet advancing in evolution. As former Daily Mail journalist and ardent Brexiteer, Katie Hopkins, who once publicly announced that all Remainers and foreign immigrants are but monkeys, hinting backwardness on Darwin's evolutionary scale - the exact thoughts of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi henchmen who favoured eugenics and ushered in the Holocaust in their attempt to obey Francis Galton's recommendation to spur natural selection on the eradication of the unfit in their survival for life.

Was that protester acting in a godly manner by halting all Eurostar departures? I think not. But I do know quite a number of Christians who hold the same opinions and share the same desires as this lone protester. The only difference is that they attend church instead of protesting on the roof of a railway tunnel. Other than that, they are arm-in-arm in support for the divorce.