MIDDLEBURGH

Middleburgh Minds the Gap

My youngest son is a great fan of the London Underground.

A couple of trips on the Central Line and irrespective of travel direction, he could name the next station. He enthused (in so far as a 4.5 year old can) over the "mind the gap" and "mind the doors" announcements. I suspect he found it so exciting because it was different from riding on the Hong Kong MTR (the quaint old carriages, the Dickensian mix of passengers etc) .Each to his own .... Personally I find both the trilingual (Cantonese/English/Mandarin) MTR announcements and the passengers more entertaining than those in London.

I once had a colleague whose ringtone was the Hong Kong version of "Mind the Doors" which I thought it was really cool but unfortunately he left before I could copy it. I searched on the net (without success) and even tried to record it myself (poor quality), Last week after writing up the previous post on our recent London visit I did another search.This time I found (amongst other things) Emma Clarke's (Voice of London Underground) "Mind the Gap clip. (AJ's girlfriend might like her chipped nail spoof.) I also found a local HK site with lots of MTR announcement clips albeit of variable quality.

The ironic thing is that I now have absolutely no intention of using any of these clips because these days I audio code incoming calls eg .

• If my wife ,who is Chinese, calls, the ring tone is naturally the Chinese National Anthem (March of the Volunteers).
  
• If any one else on my contacts (ie White) List calls they are normally announced by the National Anthem of the USSR aka the "Internationale".This is not a political statement but a play on the notion of "Comrades" ie those whom we regard as friends etc .
  
• If any one else calls,they get the Wallander ringtone. Typically these will be people I don't know, mostly Chinese Telemarketers who can't handle English and who invariably put down the phone when asked to take me off their call list (which they never do). Recently I worked out how to block incoming calls by specific phone number so that I can effectively consign any subsequent calls conceptually into a "Gap".
  

Labels: London, MTR, Tube, Underground

Posted at 4/27/2013 05:29:00 am by David Middleburgh   Permalink

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