After ten years spent travelling around the world, Christopher Ross
came back to England and decided to get a job which was
sufficiently menial that he could think and observe at the same
time, while avoiding the danger of being taken over by a corporate
mindset. Soon he was a station assistant at Oxford Circus station
on the London Underground. While checking the safety equipment,
announcing delays and calming furious commuters his mind was
engaged on matters such as the nature of truth, the possibility of
choice and the different types of breakfast available around the
world. Written in a series of short interlinked chapters, this is
the record of Ross's outer and inner life during his time at 'Oxo'.
He writes plainly but vividly, and has a talent for creating
memorable images: the suicide on the tracks, and the station
supervisor inching forward with his hands in front of his face to
look down at the body; the pauper in Bombay to whom he gives a lit
sparkler on the way to a New Year's Eve party: 'I turned and looked
back. The crippled street beggar was spinning around and around on
his skateboard, laughing madly and tracing infinity signs in
phosphorescent white light against the black of the last night of
the year.' He moves smoothly between the events on the Underground
and the wide-ranging thoughts they inspire in him; from delays on
the line to the subjectivity of time, from the station assistants'
uniforms to the discrepancy between appearance and self. His real
interest is the nature of intellectual freedom, and the possibility
of attaining it. The highly regimented Underground system is the
ideal setting for his meditations, as he watches its thousands of
passengers hurrying down their accustomed routes, roused from their
emptiness of mind only when incited to fury and bewilderment at the
news that their usual passage to the Central Line is flooded, and
they will have to take an alternative route. His observations are
by no means always original, but his clarity of mind and perpetual
self-questioning ensure that they are never banal, and many will
remain with you long after you have finished reading. Surprising,
entertaining and stimulating, this book will make you take a fresh
look at the world around you. (Kirkus UK)
When Christopher Ross put on a hi-visibility vest and joined London
Underground as a station assistant, he discovered a Plato's cave of
reflection and human comedy, populated by streakers, buskers,
onanists and angry commuters. A meditation on life, a philosophical
enquiry into human nature and a profoundly funny dissection of
urban madness. Christopher Ross, philosopher and traveller, decided
to cease his journeyings and go underground, working for a year as
a station assistant on Platform 6 (northbound Victoria Line) at
Oxford Circus. After training school, where he is taught how not to
electrocute himself and always to look a member of the public in
the eye as they are assaulting you, he faces up to his new duties
with a mixture of curiosity and foreboding. 'Tunnel Visions' is a
delightful mixture of lived experience in the sureal world of
London's Underground and the more elevated ideas, thoughts and
imaginings that experience provokes. Oxford Circus station,
complete with its weeping wall, its streakers, buskers, onanists
and cupboard containing one employee whose ideal working day was to
sleep soundly 100 feet below ground, is a Plato's Cave of
reflection and human comedy. Christopher Ross, a still point in the
whirling stream of the bizarre and otherworldly life below ground,
has written a profoundly funny book.
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