May I have your attention, please?

They are so polite, these public information messages. Whether they are imploring you to take your rubbish home with you instead of just dropping it and forgetting it the moment it leaves your fingers, or asking you to look out for suspicious characters acting suspiciously with their suspicious belongings, the message is always in phrases of which Sergeant Wilson would be proud.

“Would you mind awfully not dropping litter?”

“Please report that chap in the funny hat to a member of staff.”

“Sorry about the CCTV cameras, you know how it is.”

“We do hate destroying your luggage, but if you will leave it unattended, what can we do?”

So here I am, standing on platform 1 of Brockley Station, listening to the polite young man telling me about the security arrangements, which he ends with the phrase “All footage is recorded.”

All footage is recorded.

My first thought is the cameras are not being monitored. If I’m mugged or beaten up by sailors, the transport police won’t be turning up to rescue me. The footage will be used to gather evidence afterwards, or shown on News 24 to illustrate the alarming rise in criminal activities by Naval personnel – like the kid on a bike lobbing a brick through the car window.

But then I thought, what? Run that by me again?

All footage is recorded.

It doesn’t make sense. Of course all footage is recorded. It wouldn’t be footage, otherwise. Try this:

All writing is written

See what I mean? It’s incomplete, a grocer’s apostrophe of a sentence. You find yourself thinking ‘all writing is written - what?’

All footage is recorded - what?

All footage is recorded on a sticky label on the back of the cassette.

All footage is recorded, illuminated and indexed by silent monks in Poland (the recording process has been sent abroad, but within the EU, so that’s all right).

All footage is recorded at a frame rate of 50fps, though we would like to record at 1000fps, the better to appreciate the poetry that is the morning rush hour. We have souls as well, you know.

Watch out for sailors.