Picture of the Week: #51

I know this picture's not very festive, but I have an annoying tendency to forget my camera every time I'm going off to do something Christmassy. Luckily, I think this should at least fall under the "interesting" category.

These four photos are all of the same table. The table in question is in the waiting room at my local train station, which is where I was yesterday on my way back to Oxford for the day. First up, it's a weird place to put it. There's no apparent reason why there should be a table in the waiting room - there's nothing on the table, and no chairs around it. It seems to be just taking up space. Secondly, although I'm no judge of these things it looks practically antique, and leaving it among the commuters seems like a poor idea, to say the least.

The other strange thing about this table (and I hope you can see this - the picture quality's not great, thanks to my having to use my phone's camera) is that it is absolutely covered in graffiti (see my earlier thoughts on this subject here). The cheap-looking yellowy gold paint has been systematically scraped away, regardless of the security camera that was up in one of the room's corners. Whether this indicates that the locals are psychotically aggressive towards tables or simply very, very bored is a question I'm not going to try to address, but I do think it's interesting to see what people have thought worthy of note.

People's names figure prominently - "Andre" and "Luke" both wanted everyone to know that they'd been there - but there are also celebrity names ("Bowie"), words that bored travellers had seen on their packet of sweets ("Trebor"), or just insults without any context (one of the heaviest-carved words is "slut"). The whole table is practically a work of art now. It records what was on the minds of the people waiting for their trains, who they were, and in some cases their state of mind at the time.

More generally, it's testament to the fact that no-one cares whether it's covered in graffiti. To that extent, it's a sign of mindless destructive tendencies running completely unchecked - but at the same time, the fact that no-one's gone further than simply scraping the paint indicates that there are semi-official acceptable and unacceptable levels of vandalism.

To the people who have "edited" it, it was nothing more than a way to pass the time. Now, though, it's a social document. Not bad for a cheap piece of woodwork.