On a Road to Nowhere

[thedeadlyhook]

I seem to be rather spamming today. It's because Toys is out of town, and I'm trying to keep the loneliness at bay by writing as much as possible.

Links, because I've been finding all sorts of fun stuff doing on-the-fly research: A History of the London Underground, in helpful tables, including station construction and opening dates. Even more fun, Disused Stations on the London Underground. This is a great site. For Neverwhere readers/viewers intrigued by the closed British Museum station or the idea that there really are shepherds at Shepherd's Bush, it's the equivalent of finding leprechaun's gold. What I wouldn't give to go on a (echoing spooky voice) underground tour of the deep levels! Mwha ha ha ha ha!

Comments

[magista.livejournal.com]

Hmm... do you suppose there once was a Crouch End station...? Brrrr... Or Hobb's Lane?

[thedeadlyhook.livejournal.com]

Well, there is Hobb's End, from Quatermass and the PIt. Which was, as I recall, on Hobb's Lane...

[magista.livejournal.com]

Crouch End is from the Stephen King story of the same name. His homage to Lovecraft. Most chilling.

[londonkds.livejournal.com]

I don't know the King story, but Crouch End was a station on a branch line in North London that was supposed to be absorbed into the Underground in the 1940s, but the work was never finished because of the war and the line was later closed down (the Alexandra Palace branch, if anyone knows what I'm talking about). Does a station that never was fit with the story theme?

[londonkds.livejournal.com]

That's on the second site Hook originally linked to, under "Northern Heights"

[magista.livejournal.com]

Now it's even creepier, knowing how close it was to reality.

[londonkds.livejournal.com]

Curiously, the same disused railway line (now a footpath, I have actually been to the remains of Crouch End station) is used as the setting for another ghost story, Ruth Rendell's "The Green Road to Quephanda".

[magista.livejournal.com]

Hmm... if I weren't a hard-nosed sceptical physicist who believes that most 'hauntings' are caused by the effects of subsonic vibrations on the human nervous system, I'd say there had to be something to it. Of course, that doesn't stop my primitive lizard-brain from freaking out after scary movies.

[magista.livejournal.com]

Here's a reference to what I mean.

[thedeadlyhook.livejournal.com]

I've been reading Steven Pinker's book The Blank Slate recently that covers similar ground - basically, advances in brain mapping are finally starting to fill in the blanks of a lot of previously unexplained behaviors as having a physical origin, and in consequence, explaining a lot about the shape of human nature, our inborn drives and urges and repeating behavior patterns. Once I've gotten through the whole thing, I'll probably do a rambly post on the subject, about how our human brains are both a variable and a constant, and that the stories we tell each other (this ties into my whole explain the human urge behind storytelling kink) are an attempt to communicate both universal and personal truths. Eventually that sentence will make sense. I hope!