So I took the walk from Wood Green up to Alexandra Palace rail station the other day, up the hill along Station Rd. Just missed the train, much to my ire. I could've probably run for it, but I've got this weird principle about not running for public transport - especially when I'm probably not going to get on the train. I mean, it's quite a run from the top of the station.
Anyway, the service from Ally Pally has improved quite a bit over the years, and for some reason First Capital Connect run a really frequent service during the day (yet not so frequent in the evening) which meant that I only had to wait for 10 minutes for the next train.
10 minutes.
10 minutes, when you have nothing to do but wait, can be a long time. Especially on an exposed, open platform like Ally Pally. I mean, there's nothing particularly unpleasant about the place, but there's definitely nothing pleasant about it either. It's just so... bleak. So grey, so dull, so meh. Now I know most suburban rail stations in London fulfil those criteria, but the size of the station, the number of tracks running through it and to the side of it, it all adds a sense of scale and majesty to the level of mundaneness that seeps out of the place. Thanks to it all running through a trough through Haringey, you get minimal sense of the surrounding environs as well - it's its own little world, its own enclosed empire of humdrum.
I think people know this, because there's rarely all that many people on the platforms, which seems odd considering there are four operational platforms at the station. Given how crowded the line always is, there are very few people ever at this station. Perhaps people don't like standing in the oppressive enclave, the boredom punctuated frequently by the violent rush of express trains seemingly too close and too energetic.
And because I had 10 whole minutes to waste, and nothing else to occupy them with, I ended up thinking of all the times I've ended up at this concrete hole, and all of the times that I've waited here.
Like all the times when I'd get dropped off on Saturday mornings after playing football for school because there were no stations near whoever we were playing, and because Ally Pally was usually on the route home for my mate Dave, so his dad kindly would drop me here. Waiting on that platform, usually in school uniform (stupid pre-match attire regulations), usually despondent after a heavy defeat - a feeling amplified by the misery of the surroundings (and by the extra-long waits at the weekend on that line).
Or the times I'd have to wait at the station, because Ally Pally is the last stop before the line branches, and for some reason I'd consider it better to wait there than to miss a train at Finsbury Park even though the arrival time would be the same, probably just to trick myself into think that my journey was actually making progress.
Or the times that I'd waited on that platform drunk, what with our Rugby League team having occupied a residency at The Gate just opposite the main entrance to the station. I'd usually be a bit more cheery waiting then, not least of all because I was intoxicated which helped by to phase out the bleakness. It was either the station, or the walk back down the hill and a long bus journey. The station doesn't seem so bad then. Some good times.
It's weird how your sense of nostalgia can get tied up in places like this. Nothing particularly momentous ever happened to me in this not particularly momentous place, but even so it took very little to trigger a sense of remembrance. It's not even a question of remembering events either - I don't think I could even tell you about a specific time I waited at the station. It's all a memory of feeling, of experience, of things happening with no consequence at all. It's just a place where nothing happens, except waiting, and yet my life has intersected with it on so many occasions. Life is a series of nothings punctuated by the occasional something, and both have to happen somewhere - I guess Ally Pally is an accumulator of nothings. Perhaps when enough nothingness builds up, your brain converts into a something.
Then a train came. I got on it. Yet more nothingness for the collection.
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