Tunnel Visions: Journals of an Underground Philosopher
Christopher Ross
Fourth Estate £12.99, pp178
Christopher Ross had a somewhat curious CV when he applied for a job on the Tube. Few of his fellow applicants for the £8-an-hour position of station assistant, you imagine, could have claimed to have started their careers as corporate lawyers, or to have subsequently made a small fortune smuggling Persian rugs from the People's Republic of Iran, or to have trained for several years in martial arts alongside the Tokyo riot police.
His reason for applying for the job was simple enough, though: he needed the money. Ross had just returned from India, where he had attended a friend's wedding. While there he had worked a little with street children - buying them clothes, taking them to restaurants - and had been so struck by the contrast between their absolute poverty and the lavishness of the wedding that he had ended up giving away everything he owned.
Back home, he felt the need to take stock. For 15 years or so he had lived a semi-nomadic life and, at 40, he was struck by the thought: where next? In transit between adventures, the job on the Underground seemed to offer him the opportunity of mental space. It would also allow him to pay the rent.
Ross, an unusually intense, highly articulate, smiling man, had hoped, he says, that he would be assigned to a dull platform on the District Line, but because he 'got 100 per cent in all the tests' he was found a job at the flagship station: Oxford Circus. He ended up working there for a year; one of the men in a uniform and cap who says 'Mind the gap' and gets harangued by commuters. He kept a note of some of his observations and experiences, which he has turned into a unique little book. Tunnel Visions carries the subtitle 'Journeys of an Underground Philosopher' and is both a spiritual quest and a telling examination of working culture. It is also very funny.
A long-time student of Eastern philosophy - in Iran he enrolled in the Ayatollah's theology college in Q'om and while in Japan he imbibed the Buddhist framework of aikido - Ross takes a Zen view of work, in a light-hearted, deadly serious way. His book is both a manifesto and an example of the fact that 'you can do any job badly but it takes a considerable amount of application to do any job, even simple tasks, well. There is, I believe, a perfect way to sweep up leaves, and that is something worth striving for.'
In many ways, the crumbling and morale-free Underground was a perfect environment to put these theories into practice. Ross believes that 'there are so many modern philosophers who are incapable of doing ordinary things', so he wanted to produce a thoughtful book that was 'not the collected thoughts of some metaphysical guru' but a practical attempt to 'marry ideas with actions'.
'I have been interested in my life in acquiring skills,' he says. 'I can cook, I can fight if I need to, I can converse in many languages and I can enjoy doing menial tasks without any sense of feeling devalued. If we do things properly then we don't have to lead the kind of discursive, disorganised lives that leave so many of us feeling dissatisfied.' Having gone through the formal strictures of martial arts training at the dojo in Japan, Ross found himself curiously well-equipped to deal with the initiation courses prepared by the Human Resources Department of the London Underground.
He had a faith that boredom was an artificial construct, born of raised expectation. On Platform 3 he examines that faith and it seems there is rarely a dull moment: he bottles mosquitoes and finds breeds unknown in Britain; he argues the toss with irate commuters about concepts of time ('Ah Phaedrus, must we not first agree on exactly what we mean by late running'); and is faced with daily doses of the surreal and the extreme.
There is the man who, having been told by a world-weary station assistant that it might be quicker to walk than wait for a train, does just that and emerges from the tunnel at Oxford Circus strolling down the tracks; the heart attack victim who is brought back from the dead by paramedics while commuters continue to pester Ross for information about the nearest exits; the miracle of the Weeping Wall through which water seeps despite a generation of efforts to prevent it; and the suicide who follows the wisdom on his Nike sweatshirt, 'just do it', and jumps in front of a train.
Ross adopted a series of unconventional responses to those travellers who felt the need to shout at a man in uniform: 'I used to say to people when they were ranting at me "I forgive you" and then smile sweetly.' Didn't they ever hit him? 'Well,' he explains, 'from the aikido I have a strong sense of when things might turn violent.'
One of the triumphs of the book lies in its revelations of what we think about when we think about work. Ross argues coherently that much contemporary malaise comes about because we are 'making our lives in a world that has accidentally come about essentially for commercial purposes. We are still leading what is essentially an industrialised lifestyle that was devised for factory production in the nineteenth century.'
He questions, too, British attitudes toward public service. Once when he was conducting a conversation with some Japanese tourists in Japanese a man who had been eavesdropping suggested that he was wasted here. His reply was that it was an honest job. 'More complicated types of work always carry the danger of dishonesty,' he suggests, 'In general the idea of helping people transit through a complicated network of tunnels is a fairly straightforward one, whereas working as a lawyer, say, is not.'
Many of Ross's small ethical stances went against the grain of the culture of pessimism he inhabited. He had, for example, 'a Japanese attitude to illness. I was never late, and never not there. I didn't believe in the "sickie".' This was considered bad form among his colleagues, some of whom Ross attempted to educate in different views of the world. 'I did my best,' he says smiling. 'I would suggest to the younger ones a number of things that they might choose to do. But a lot of them had settled down to prophylactic lifestyle strategies: go out and get pissed with your mates, skive off work as much as possible. I found that rather depressing after a while. There is a saying which I quote: "Everything which goes into a saltmine eventually becomes salt".' With Tunnel Visions Ross proves himself an exception to this rule. He has emerged from underground to tell a compelling tale.
