The sit-down protest that doesn't stand up

Traingate is the kind of political flashpoint that has all the hallmarks of a peculiarly British farce.

The Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition camps out on the floor of a Virgin carriage making a propaganda film about nationalising the railways. He claims his predicament is due to overcrowding, but the billionaire entrepreneur who owns the train company (and presumably doesn’t much like the idea of nationalisation) releases CCTV footage to show that there were, in fact, empty seats.

And from that starting point, what’s our ultimate destination? Who the hell knows? But we have all kinds of fantastic station stops to visit along the way.

Perhaps the empty seats were reserved? Maybe they had bags on them? Or young kids?

It may have been that Jez was keen to spend time with Mrs Corbyn III, but couldn’t find a double berth in which to chit-chat about his anti-austerity policies.

The train, according to Mr Corbyn, was ‘ram packed’. But when aides tried to contact him about the media hullabaloo surrounding the journey, he was reportedly unobtainable because he was making jam. So maybe the train was, in fact, jam packed?

The most mysterious thing to me is why – if the sainted JC is leading some mass popular movement, as his supporters claim – no one chose to give up their seat to the aged Islington North MP. Come on now, Virgin passengers. This is a poor show. An elderly man has entered the carriage and seems to have reservations about sitting down. You, on the other hand, have reservations allowing you to sit down. What do you do? Let him go and camp out in the vestibule area? Honestly.

Someone needs to explain the rules of the train world to Jezza.

If a reserved passenger hasn’t turned up, then you can sit down. After all, they’re not suddenly going to appear just south of Doncaster and kick up a fuss, are they? And if they do, you just tell them you have a massive mandate and it’s an impertinence for them to challenge you.

In the future, you can always book in advance. Get a seat for yourself, the Mrs and any friends. Although preferably not the ones from Hamas or Hezbollah.

I have a hunch that #traingate will be remembered long after Chilcot’s 2.6 million words on the Iraq War are forgotten. On second thoughts, Chilcot’s 2.6 million words had probably been forgotten before #traingate.

With this one, Corbyn is ahead of Ed Miliband. He’s bypassed the bacon sandwich in the buffet and gone straight for the kitchen that wasn’t a kitchen. It’s the sit-down protest that just doesn’t stand up.

Becoming a Twister board

I spent yesterday evening in an old factory building off Brick Lane playing kids' games with an organisation called Fun Fed. The idea is that a bunch of adults get together and act like children for a couple of hours. We played tag and stuck big coloured discs on ourselves so that we could become human Twister mats. There was an awful lot of running around and I was thinking that I ought to get to aikido a bit more often. Being a child is very hard work.

Buttahz

Belatedly made it to the excellent Evolving English exhibition at the British Library. When I arrived, I found a curator talking to a large group of inner-city London teenagers who'd come with their school. "How do you spell Butters ?" he was asking them. The kids volunteered different spellings of the slang term. Museum man then posed another question. "But you don't actually say it like that, do you?" He was referring, I think, to the glottal stop that replaces the t in London English, although phonetics isn't my strong point. The youth were sent off to record slang in a booth for posterity and my attention was drawn to another class. This group was much younger and seemed to attend an exclusive private school. "Joanna! Come over here and listen to a bit of Romeo and Juliet!" The precocious little kids ran hither and thither, listening to samples of regional dialects on a superb interactive display or speeches from statesmen such as JFK and ...

Captain Birdseye and other people of rank

Regular readers may recall that I once doubted the existence of Yeo Valley. I'd never heard of the Yeo mountain range and I therefore rated the likelihood of there being a valley at somewhere between 0 and 5%. Of course, I had yoghurt all over my face when I discovered that the place really does exist. Somewhere in Somerset, I seem to recall. Today, having read an article in the latest edition of The Marketer magazine, I'm astonished to discover that there really was a Captain Birdseye. Well, I need to qualify that just a little. There was a Mister Clarence Birdseye who invented the fish finger back in 1955. The avuncular, uniformed figure who dominated our TV screens for about thirty years may have been an invention of over-eager advertising creatives, but he didn't blow in on a trawler during a squall. There was actually some connection to a real human being. These revelations about fish and yoghurt are causing me considerable disquiet, because I'm wondering h...

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