Scared of the Tube

Thanks to Holly who runs a interesting site - Minor Delays (more on that next week), who told me about an audio project called Urban Scrawl. It's a series of podcast dramas based on every station on the Piccadilly Line.


So far they've covered Ickenham, Ruislip, Sudbury Town, King's Cross and my favourite Hammersmith.

The one on Hammersmith is about a guy who is scared of Hammersmith London Underground Station. Not just a particular part of it but "just the main part, where the District and Piccadilly Lines go through. I can't go there..."

Maybe he was scared by Shane Ritchie leaping out of the Minder poster there!

It's a funny five minutes, mainly because I'm fairly familiar with Hammersmith station as, it's my daily interchange station. Although I'm sure that phobia of the Tube isn't great.

My ex-husband used to be really scared of being in the underground part of the Tube. When we started dated, it's a pretty weird thing to have to tell someone and I thought he was joking. But he got often got panic attacks underground and I could feel him shaking & sweating, particularly when the trains ever stopped between stops (which they appear to do fairly often when you're scared of them).

He got over this after a while, but we had to make a number of convoluted trips and get off the Tube early & continue our journey by bus, when things got really bad. I'm not sure exactly how he got over it. It was probably eventually, him getting a job, which meant he had to use the Tube everyday. However, the time when the Underground was his personal Room 101, wasn't a pleasant memory for him.

When I was very young, I had a massive fear of escalators (not just Tube escalators). I thought my feet would get eaten by them and I had to physically dragged up Tube ones whenever we came into central London. Thankfully I'm over it now, but I bet there are a lot of people around guarding secret phobias of the Tube or parts of it. Perhaps you're one of them or know someone who is?