The new idea that weekends are times for the Tube to take it easy is most unwelcome

To my brother's for dinner. He rang up on Hallowe'en and I had nothing on. Razors is away and the Duke is unendurable, being full of braying businessmen having early corporate Christmas dinners. (My God, the noise! The people! How can they make such a racket, and how can they imagine that anything they say is interesting?) The Hovel is not the kind of place that attracts trick-or-treaters, which I suppose isn't such a bad thing really. Earlier in the day, reading Steven Poole's non-fiction round-up in the Guardian, I learned that according to John T Cacioppo and William Patrick, "loneliness harms cognitive functioning, the immune system, and even the expression of DNA in cells". Being lonely, and having no wish to compromise my immune system any more than I already do, to harm such cognitive functioning as remains to me, or to repress my cells' ability to express their DNA, I decide to go along.

I very nearly bail out when I discover that there is no Jubilee Line for the weekend - indeed, half the Underground network seems to have gone bye-byes. Why did this kind of thing not happen in my youth? This cessation of services would have been just the ticket, then. I used to have to go to school on Saturdays, which I think is one of the things that has fucked me up for good, but has at least left me with a passionate hatred of private education. I remember shivering and cursing at 7.30 in the morning on the outdoor platform of East Finchley, my only consolation being that I could light up inside a warm, comfy Tube carriage on the way. I could also toast myself under the fierce heat of disapproval from the other passengers - you can collect some really filthy looks if you smoke while wearing a school uniform, even when you are of legal age to do so.

I had a great anti-smoking moment the other day. Ambling along to Waitrose, I unconsciously fell into step with a sour-faced, middle-aged woman. "I crossed the road to get away from your cigarette smoke," she snapped. "And now you're following me." Reader, be proud of me. I held my peace. I did not say anything along the lines of "Well, I'm going to have to cross the road to get away from your sanctimoniousness", or make some ungallant, Groucho-esque remark on the unlikelihood of anyone ever wanting to follow her, unless it was for some kind of bet. Instead, I just rolled my eyes and walked to the other side of the road again.

But the new idea that weekends are times for the Tube to take it easy is most unwelcome. One of the great things about the Tube - possibly its greatest thing - is that it is not a bus. It does not get stuck in traffic, sandwiched for 20 minutes between a removal lorry and an inconsiderate oaf driving a Range Rover. Do you know how long it takes to get from Baker Street to Dollis Hill on a rail replacement bus service? About as long as it takes the average sinner to get out of Purgatory, with the added proviso that your post-Purgatory destination is, if the authorities are to be trusted, a lot nicer than Dollis Hill, especially on a dark, dank October evening - that time of year when you know the sunlight has gone out of your life for the foreseeable future. Still, it is nice that they don't charge passengers to use these buses - which themselves have a shifty, provisional air about them. It's as if they've been naughty buses in a past life and are now in disgrace, not allowed to have a proper number again until they have expiated their sins. (Hmm. The purgatorial note again. What's all that about?)

The long and winding road

So these buses wind their tortuous way through the darkness, and sometimes the driver gets the name of the Tube station he's stopping at correct, and sometimes he doesn't, and London gets shittier and shittier, and the people on the bus don't look right, either - they're all people who wanted to avoid getting on a bus in the first place - and I have a sneaking feeling that if my brother and his lovely wife did not live in Dollis Hill, then I would probably never go to Dollis Hill of my own free will. I wonder, now, whether this magazine will be mobbed by outraged subscribers saying: "How dare he? Dollis Hill is an Eden, a Shangri-La . . ." But somehow - somehow, I doubt it.

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