A happy state I used to know

Occasionally one stumbles upon useful concepts for which no words exist. “The Meaning of Liff”, the 1983 masterpiece by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd, catered for this need, with definitions such as  the verb “to hucknall”, meaning to elevate one’s legs while seated in order to allow someone to hoover beneath, or “alltami”, named for a small community in Flintshire and referring to the ancient art of balancing the flow from the hot and cold taps when running a bath.

Another such unnamed concept is the pleasure I used to experience, and still can, along – I suspect - with many other mildly aspy males, from planning transport routes, joining up isolated fragments of motorways or railway lines, making connections across cities and countries, plotting imaginative routes across the map. As the most complex but self-contained system in the UK, the London Underground was always a prime candidate for this activity, long before the abandonment of the Aldwych shuttle, the wasteful rejection of the Jubilee Line link between Charing Cross and Green Park, or thoughts about Crossrail or, indeed, Crossrail 2, as the Hackney-Chelsea trajectory has been dubbed of late. Such deficiencies and opportunities would lead to musings on the borderlands of imagination and practical utility, what-ifs at the joyful interface between geography and dreaming, all ecstatically played out along that uncertain frontier that meanders between cartography and playing God (or trains), untroubled by boring worldly concerns like geology or economic viability. So what happens next when the Bakerloo reaches Camberwell ?

I was reminded of this kind of activity when reading the April “Modern Railways” this week, with its proposal for the Euston Cross, which would cleverly link HS1 (Eurostar) and HS2 (the contentious projected high speed line to the Midlands and the North), in a deep level through station somewhere in the immediate hinterlands of the British Library. Running at right angles to the traditional traffic flows at Euston, St Pancras and King’s Cross it would benefit from the considerable connectivity of those stations, while permitting direct journeys between the English regions and continental Europe. The Euston Cross should not be confused with the Eustachian tubes, which are somewhere else entirely, or with the Euston Arch, the pointless demolition of which made many people very cross indeed.

In short it is a very neat piece of thinking, and one which reactivated the old psychogeographical pleasure obtained from such ponderings. It also provoked the idea for the name for this otherwise nameless concept. Following the pattern of words such as euphemism, euthanasia and euphoria, which derive from the Greek root “eu” meaning “well”, I suggest that this particular happy state of mind should be named eustonia.