Youngs do it again

To Tooting the other day to see what Youngs had made of the Castle during the recent refurbishment. Poked our heads in the door to be greeted by the noise of a lot of young people, clearly part of the gentrification of this part of south London. A boozer no more and we beat a hasty exit.

But it does seem that Youngs know their business of pub keeping - which is just as well since they have abandoned the business of making beer. They changed the décor of the Halfway House at Earlsfield and that, from being a quiet & comfortable old-style boozer, lots of the brown wood and shiny red (leather?) seat coverings which used to be the Young's house style, went to being full of young people, a managed house making lots of money. And now they appear to have pulled off the same trick with the Castle. I associate to a story - perhaps about a Biba refurb. in Kensington - I once read about the layout of big stores being terribly important: get it wrong and you get no customers, get it right and you fly. So a good retailer must have the feel for such things. It does not say much for us, the customers, that our habits are so easily shaped by such matters.

Back to Earlsfield Station for a quick game of aeroplanes, where I would have scored an easy three had I not worked out that the right most aeroplane was indeed coming into land at Heathrow until the left most aeroplane had disappeared behind the clutter on the horizon. I had not expected such a large swing round from a southerly course to a westerly one as it came over east London. But I had taken on enough alcohol to spend the remainder of the journey pondering about whether the three counted: it was there and I did see it, it was just that I did not know it for what it was.

At the level of the game one could easily make rules to cover this sort of thing, with penalty points if you called, say, a three, and you turned out to be mistaken, so discouraging over-calling.

But at the level of the subconscious, I think things are more complicated. I think the game arises from my fascination with the way that planes funnel down, from east to west, onto the one landing runway at Heathrow, with, at peak, one touching down every two or three minutes, each one trusting to the one in front being out of the way and off the runway in good time. I dare say the intervals are calculated so that if anything bad happened to plane 1, plane 2 would have time to pull up and go round again, but it does not look as easy as that from the outside. It all looks slightly scary, with the column of aeroplanes marching forward, to the drum perhaps, mechanically and in good order, without much regard for what might be in front of them. All very going over the top in the first world war. I think that is what gives the game its pull. So when you can't decide whether an aeroplane is in the funnel or not, the illusion and its pull are broken.

At another level again, is it all about trust?

Reference 1: for something on Biba see http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/b/biba,-barbara-hulanicki/.