Tony Blair, no fare!
This story reminded me of my first day in London in 1989: Blair ‘caught riding without a ticket’
Actually, the situation was totally different with my friend Ed and me. We were on a high school trip and the first day they let us loose for the afternoon with very little in the way of instruction or supervision. Ed and I decided to go to Piccadilly Circus and the Hard Rock Cafe. (It would be a few years before I developed a sense of shame for doing anything so typically touristy…) We headed directly for the Underground (aka. The Tube) never having taken urban mass transit before. It’s hard for me to grasp now, being a 12-year veteran of New York City with the subway map virtually ingrained in my mind, but that Underground map made no sense to us whatsoever!
The shocker, though, was the fact that neither of us knew you had to pay to ride the Tube! We just walked in and out of station after station without any idea we were breaking any rules! That would never work in NYC, where the turnstiles don’t cooperate if you don’t pay your fare. At one point, someone in a uniform ran after us, but his accent was so heavy and British that we truly had no idea what he was saying. We just looked at him like he was crazy, and I suppose he found it easier to grant us our assessment and wander off.
We never did find our way to Piccadilly Circus. We just got plenty lost. The next day on the bus, everybody had these little Underground ticket stubs. They were cool. We asked where they got them. "Umm…from the Underground?" And that’s when it started to put two and two together.
That day, we couldn’t figure out how we managed to get into the stations without paying. There were barriers, guards, ticket booths, all of that. There was no way we could have got on without a ticket!
In hindsight, it was nice of that guard to let us ride without tickets. I suppose in London, you don’t have to be Tony Blair to be treated like the former prime minister!