‘Plan your journey’. This advice flashed at me as I set off for work on Friday. In big urgent letters, the sign warned of the impending train strike whilst also offering sage counsel as how to best respond to the imminent crisis. But of course! Plainly, my preferred approach of not planning my journey would no longer suffice. Stepping outside my front door and letting anarchy ensue simple does not cut the mustard in these strike-plagued times. A different approach is called for.
‘Plan your journey’. This advice flashed at me as I set off for work on Friday. In big urgent letters, the sign warned of the impending train strike whilst also offering sage counsel as how to best respond to the imminent crisis. But of course! Plainly, my preferred approach of not planning my journey would no longer suffice. Stepping outside my front door and letting anarchy ensue simple does not cut the mustard in these strike-plagued times. A different approach is called for.
Until now, it has never occurred to me to plan my journey. Usually, I just get my things and set off, hoping for the best and generally arriving at my preferred destination several weeks after I was first expected. Sure, it’s inefficient but I believed Robert Frost when he said that taking the road less travelled had made all the difference even if it also made him chronically late. Until now, getting from A to B has been something of a magical mystery tour that has taken in C, D, E and various other parts of the alphabet in between.
To be honest, I was expecting that my trip to work would be a car park that rolled forward a metre or two from time to time and one in which my usual travel experience was painfully extended. It wasn’t like that at all. In fact, there was less traffic than normal. It could only mean that a large number of fellow commuters had either decided to work from home or taken the day off. They had, it seems, planned their journey by abandoning it altogether.
There have, of course, been public transport strikes throughout history. People often forget that the only reason it took Odysseus ten years to return home to Ithaca after the fall of Troy was because of a snap tram strike. Clearly, Odysseus did not plan his journey. When Johnny Cash sang, ‘I Walk the Line’, it was something only made possible because there were no trains running. Not that this is much comfort when the Frankston to Flinders Street service vanishes for hours on end.
Having been told to plan my journey, there was little else for me to do other than to take this advice to heart. I poured over maps, I stared at the heavens in a desultory attempt to predict the weather and I wet my finger before holding it aloft to see if I could tell which direction these ill-winds were blowing. But no matter how much effort I put into these activities, there was simply no getting around the fact that I was ‘here’ and I needed to get ‘there’. Frankly, no amount of planning could change that stark fact.
My first attempt left much to be desired. The initial draft of my plan saw me get from the house to Caulfield Station by riding on a donkey. There I would use an invisible sword to ward off evil spirits before training a dragon that I had doted on since infancy until it was willing to wear a saddle and fly me the rest of the way to the office. As planned journeys go, mine was exquisite. But if it had a fault at all, it was (perhaps) slightly impractical and not as time efficient as it could have been. In terms of being late to work, telling your boss that it took you longer to train your dragon than you had first anticipated is rarely going to be viewed as an acceptable excuse.
Perhaps I’ve got it all wrong. Maybe I’m being far too linear about it all. When the sign told me to ‘plan’ my journey, it could well be that this was not literally a direction to stare at a map for hours on end as though I was planning to deposit troops on the beaches of Normandy but a more philosophical suggestion. ‘Plan your journey’, much like ‘Count Your Blessings One by One’ is not something to be taken literally – it’d take you all afternoon. In fact, perhaps ‘plan your journey’ is not so much a piece of advice as it is a musical suggestion.
Without a moment to lose, I quickly downloaded Don’t Stop Believin’ by American rock group Journey. I would plan my journey by creating a playlist containing the only song by the band Journey that I know. To be quite honest, I feel conflicted. Whilst according to the Internet, Don’t Stop Believin’ is an anthem that contains one of the greatest opening keyboard riffs of all time, it’s not really to my taste. The fact that it’s just over four minutes long means that I’ll need to listen to it roughly forty seven times on my way in to work. This, I feel, is unlikely to do much for my mood.
Let’s be honest: public transport strikes suck. On Friday at a rally of striking workers, one of the union officials was quoted as saying that this would be a long campaign as it was ‘a marathon, not a sprint’. To be fair, it’s only a marathon because the train from the city to Frankston isn’t operating. It seems we’re in it for the long haul and that there will be a lot more journeys to plan in the weeks ahead. If we are heading back to the 1970s, perhaps we can do so in a more complete sense. Along with public transport strikes, maybe we can look forward to other things that made the seventies great, like flared trousers, power blackouts and stagflation. Here’s hoping. Until then, don’t stop believin’.