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That morning I go to the Swiss Cottage tube station to take the Jubilee Line. I wanted to go to the Thames, perhaps to Greenwich or only to St. Katherine’s Dock to have breakfast there in the small yacht harbour. On Saturday mornings at 8 a.m. the Swiss Cottage tube station is almost without people, it is away from the axes on which visitors to London move. I look into the stairwell in which the escalators deliver on workdays thousands of hectic people in ceaseless operation, in the mornings downwards and in the evenings upwards. Swiss Cottage is an old tube station, opened shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War, and named for an old pub from 1803, the Swiss tavern, later renamed Swiss Cottage. The escalator leads down deep, more than 60 metres, one of the so-called deep tunnel stations that served during the War as air raid shelters. I walk down the long tunnel-like stairwell, over steps worn down by brass-covered heels, and through labyrinthine walkways that meandered in the belly of London to the platforms. Here a warm wind is blowing that brings with it smells of old diesel, of rotting materials and the odors of innumerable persons. The droughty wind of the underground: in summer warm, in winter cold, fanned by the pressure waves of the incoming and departing trains.The droughty wind of TIME.
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