Earl's Court Platform Announcements

The next train will be calling at the G Spot

Saturday was a fairly rubbish day for travelling on the Tube. You might imagine that I would be the first person to check the realtime travel news, but I had my weekend head on, the sun was shining and I thought, nothing could be simpler than going to a factory sale at Olympia and then heading off to see my friend and her new baby. She lives in Woodside Park which is probably the furthest north I've ever travelled on the Northern Line. Remind me to check the Tube's site before I do that again.

The Sadistic Line had engineering works with no trains running between Whitechapel & Earls Court. This led to Earls Court looking like Piccadilly Circus with people looking lost and piling themselves into the first train that appeared. Trains heading towards Wimbledon seemed unnaturally popular.


Our platform assistant was giving minute by minute countdowns of the every train leaving Earls Court but he took great pleasure in announcing the ones heading for Olympia. "Your next Olympia train for the Erotica exhibition will be here in 9 minutes time". A few minutes later "Your next Olympia train for the Erotica exhibition will be here in 7 minutes time" and so on.

It was as though he felt those heading for the Erotica exhibition were itching to get their hands on .... well whatever you'd get your hands on at an Erotica show.... that they needed these precise blow by blow accounts.

When I left the train at Olympia it wasn't quite the hedonistic experience I was expecting with people in sexy black boots or whips charging off to the exhibition. Erotica is now mainstream with 31,000 people attending the exhibition and as the blurb says of "all ages and sexual persuasion".

The ticket touts took this to heart as it was impossible to spot likely Erotica attendees so were dashing round trying to hawk cheap tickets to everyone. A few sad looking blokes with bad highlights and leather trousers were un-enthusiastically handing out flyers for "out-there" nightclubs. And weirdly, someone who at first glance looked like they were in a foam rubber Subway Man sandwich outfit was at the gates with postcards. However, I'm sure he wasn't from Subway, the foam was definitely more flesh coloured than normal, and as for the special sauce around his cape. Mmmm, I won't go there on a Monday morning.