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On page four, the fugitive, Interpol-wanted Lord Lucan was lolling on his South African veranda, tweaking his false moustache and betting with himself which tsetse fly would land on the rim of his whiskey glass first. On page six, Baywatch sex-pot Pamela Anderson was gasping in horror after snagging the toupée of her LA waiter on her charm bracelet, ripping the hairpiece off the poor man. But the tabloid headline that really grabbed me as we rocketed into Waterloo Station on this foggy, drizzly London morning was readable ten shoulders away:
“MAN SURVIVES 4 DAYS ON MARS”

I nudged through the wedge of bodies on the vintage subway car for a closer look. By Charing Cross I’d learned this much: it wasn’t the National Inquirer, but the London Daily Mail, and hey, it wasn’t the planet, but the candy bar. As we squealed into Leicester Square and the mash of wet wool and brollies fumbled for the door, I got the rest- that some Scottish bloke named Andy Wilson, caught in a Highland blizzard on cross-country skis, survived four days and three nights at -38C° by eating snow and sucking on a Mars bar!

Over-the-shoulder espionage and underground eavesdropping. You could learn all about London by spending a day as a mole, mindlessly riding the Northern Line, the oldest, longest line of oldest subway on earth-the London Tube. After a white-knuckle week of driving on the left, I was happy to be tubing around in a circa 1959 subway car scented with diesel and fish and chip grease. But headline-spying 67 meters underground was easier than eavesdropping. Morning London was like a big elevator, silent and embarrassed. I was trying not to look like a swaggering North American, but imitating that contained economical gait of a Londoner isn’t easy, particularly when you’re breaking in new Doc Martens. Snapping photos of the tubular tunnels, steep vertiginous 65-meter high moving staircases, snazzy billboards, graffiti, and “Dogs Must Be Carried” signs was tantamount to shouting "I am a stupid tourist!"

I’d been wandering around Goodge Street station with that mellow Donovan song in my head... “On the firefly platform on sunny Goodge Street/The violent hash smoker shook the chocolate machine,” wishing I had 50 pence for the Cadbury vending machine, when I snapped a train as it rattled into the station. Blimey if the driver himself didn’t come staggering towards me, to accost me for endangering the lives of other commuters.

“Are you stupid? Have you any idea what’s it’s like to be blinded by a flash driving out of a dark tunnel?! Flashing is forbidden in the underground!”
Stunned to a telephone box red, I fled the staring crowd. I didn’t want to be taken for a piece of Tube Theatre, the fringe show running Underground since 1972. You follow a comedian posing as a village idiot around the Underground to watch people’s reactions. With 249 miles of track, 270 stations and 2.4 million daily riders, it could be a long show.

The London Tube is so old. Think of it; when Union and Confederate armies were slaughtering each other in the Battle of Vicksburg in 1863, Londoners were chugging underground between Paddington and Farringdon on their new Metropolitan Railway, safe from the 1,102 tons of horse dung dumped on the streets every day. As “The Tube” spread out under Old Londinium’s ganglion of roads, stations took storybook names like Cockfosters, Tooting, Barking and Elephant & Castle (Emperor Claudius did pass through here with his elephants in A.D. 43.) And English schoolboys were inspired to pray:
Our Farnham which art in Hendon
Holloway Turnpike Lane
Thy Kingston come
Thy Wimbledon
On Erith as it is in Hendon...
Give us this day our Maidenhead
And lead us not into Penge station
But deliver us from Esher
For thine is the Kingston
The Tower and the Horley
For Iver and Iver
Crouch End.

The London Tube has inspired prayers, and it’s sold volumes of poetry, songs, place mats, fridge magnets, penny banks, tee-shirts and tea towels, to mention some of the stuff at the London Transport Museum, along with “conductor’s eye view” videos of jaunts on the Bakerloo and Picadilly lines. Except for a few fires and crashes on the notorious Northern (the “Misery Line”) the London Tube also saved lives. In the London Blitz of August 1940 its deep tunnels became air raid shelters. Sleeping bunks lined the platforms, but snorers posed more of a threat than bombs. Epidemics of raving insomnia prompted city officials to pass out ear-plugs to the sleepless masses, and ‘NO SMOKING’ signs were defaced into ‘NO SNORING’.

A day Underground would scarcely be complete without a stop-off at the London Dungeon, one of the few establishments to survive the Bubonic Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of 1666. Under the ancient Borough of Southwark, once known for its filth, brothels, prisons, and grave robbers, lies this museum on the history of European torture from A.D. 43 to 1901.

Quite educational, really. The Teacher’s Notes packet asks pupils to match up the historic figures with their fates: Burnt, Poisoned, Beheaded, Hung, or Crushed. The Deadly Dungeon Crossword offers clues like “What liquid were condemned prisoners placed in to boil?” And questions are enclosed in cute little puddles of blood.

The figures in the dim vaults are rather crude, thank God. Wax-museum quality renderings of disembowelments, head crushing, quartering, pressing, branding, and rat torture would be even harder to bear. What kind of junk food can you eat after seeing all these still-life bludgeonings, hack-saw amputations, witch burnings and impalings by Vlad Dracule? At the end of the tunnel of gloom, I’m blinded by the light screaming from the Pizza Hut. Bloody tomato sauce splattered on a fleshy crust - yum!

After this, The Northern Line feels positively benign. I’m happy to be staring over shoulders again. In Time Out, a giant inflatable chain saw proclaims “ Mahogany is Murder - Save the Rainforests,” and in the tabloids it’s “Torture Dad Turns Baby Into a Puppet on a String - He got Tommy Drunk on Cider.” Cider? Only cider? In North America he’d be jabbing the wee-un with smack.

Oh Tube of London, how I will miss your sensational headlines and rich dessert-sounding lines Bakerloo and Jubilee. Let me ne’er forget Frognall and Upney and Mudchute and Hornchurch, even though I must Peel away to Montreal, forever and ever, Angrignon.

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