—may those who take the Jubilee Line to St John’s Wood meet the Test.

OK, so it’s two months late for National Poetry Day (Oct 4th) whose theme for 2013 was supposed to be ‘water’. But the poem below popped up on Twitter soon after a trip to London, during which I traveled much of the Under- and Over-ground and a subsequent lively discussion with a friend of the relative merits of Boris reneging on a promise to keep Tube ticket offices staffed.

Compared to two Scots’ high-minded debate on efficiencies, workers’ rights and the best way to get about the place, this poem somehow better captured both the ubiquity of the Tube and knowledgeable and irreverent way the real locals ‘dahn saff’ treat any such unavoidable omnipotence that has come to dominate their daily existence.