Fidel Gastro’s

**Breaking News- Ken has obvious read this post and has acted!**

Silverlink. Giver of travel. Delayer of journeys. Container of chavs. Supplier of stabbings. I salute you.

The notorious North London Line has provided me irregular, painful transit betwen Canonbury and Richmond for over 8 months now and my love-hate relationship is currently at divorce proceedings with Judge Judy.

Death Train 2000

This most-reliable of trains doesn’t garner the nicknames ‘Freelink, ‘Scumlink’ and ‘Stablink’ lightly. In fact the reasons it sits in such a damp social and economic ditch follows in roughly the same order.

No inspectors. No-one pays. Tramps and crackheads essentially live on the train. Then try to stab you. Silverlink systems measures the decline of the train’s condition equal to constantly full carriages travelling every 20 minutes but their total income is £2.40 and two Kit Kats. No inspectors. Repeat.

However today’s madness lay not with the inhabitants of the 20.57 to North Woolwich but with the station announcer at Richmond tonight. For months now I’ve got used to the soothing tones of the female announcer bringing joy and happiness to my life as she proclaims that the train is on time. And the bitter sense of abject disappointment as the male announcer harbors doom and gloom with the casual ‘The 20.57 to North Woolwich has been delayed by approximately 15 minutes. Silverlink apologies for the inconvenience’.

But not today. Today I sat at the platform when suddenly the same male voice blared over the tannoy

“Colour coats. [pause] Poppleton. Mosley Grove Road. [bigger pause] Service from Chattleborne. [staccato] Sixteen. Sixteen. Sixteen. Eighteen. Eighteen.”

Yes - Colour coats. I can’t make this shit up. That’s what he said - word for word. I’ve never heard these words come from his mouth before. As soon as he started bugging out I leapt for my notebook; my instant reaction was that I’d suddenly lost the facility to comprehend English. The thought ‘My god my temporal lobe has fused - I need a medic‘ raced through my head but I stopped self-diagnosing myself and calmed down.
My next reaction was ‘He’s gone mental. Wait - how does he even know these words? He’s a damn robot - he’s never said them before. Sweet jesus, he’s become sentient and is trying to break free. Maybe communicating to the mothership’. Images of Johnny 5, access to wikipedia and ‘more input’ sprang to mind. Or maybe I am a robot and some sort of malfunction in my neutral net processor had rendered my language CPU faulty. I quickly had to discard these crazy robot explanations and move on with my considerations.

Johnny 5 disables Safe Search on Google Images.

But what else could it be? More theories quickly washed over me…

Religious experience. Alone in a room announcing train times for weeks on end, he has had a visitation and is speaking in tongues. I almost leapt to my feet crying ‘For the love of God - someone has to reach him and get him a TV show on the Evangelism cable channel’. I quickly had to get my theological act together as I realised God might not use nationalrail.co.uk as the vessel for his word. Next.
Some kind of World War II/Cold War cipher. He is transmitting and reaching out to double agents in the field. This poor man has been trapped in a small box since 1945 and his skills as an Enigma machine operator has given him the chance to communicate with the outside world. He’s deploying nuclear subs in the Baltic and ordering smoked salmon bagels for afternoon tea without us even realising it.

I was almost convinced until I spotted a Daily Mail. Maybe this was just a further example of immigrants stealing our most demeaning jobs in Modern Britain. This Bangladeshi has been shipped in to supply the Richmond tannoy voice, trained to RADA level in London accents and taught a subset of English vocabulary encompassing only station names and train times. He was probably chatting away to his fellow announcer (the nice lady) in their crazy little box with their crazy creole station speak when she accidently pressed the microphone button; just as he was showing off his new ‘phrase of the day’ he had read from a empty tin of paint. “Colour coats.”