The London Underground is, like most subterranean metro systems, something of a mixed blessing. It allows you to quickly and easily traverse London without having to take your own life into your hands every time you cross a road, but sometimes I wonder if the very nature of the transport system makes it less efficient than it perhaps could be.

Take my journey to where I am right now, for example. (In a hotel overlooking Tower Bridge.) I had to catch a Circle Line train from Kings Cross to get here. In order to get from the platform where my train arrived into Kings Cross to the platform where Circle Line trains departed from, I had to walk for a good 10-15 minutes, including up and down a few sets of stairs and through a labyrinthine series of corridors that the Minotaur would be proud of.

It gets worse if you have to change lines somewhere. Not only do you have to walk all the way to the platform, you then have to get off and walk for another 10-15 minutes to get to the other line in the station, which is inevitably a very long distance away, somewhere deep in the bowels of the Earth.

And then when you poke your head back out above ground, you realise that the fifteen stops you’ve taken have actually caused you to travel less than a mile, and that you can still see your starting point from where you are sitting right now.

Despite all this, though, I kind of like travelling on the Underground. It presents a curious assault on the senses, the likes of which you don’t get anywhere else. There’s the smell, for one thing — and I’m not talking about the pissy scent of a tramp who has collapsed, possibly dead, somewhere in the station. I’m talking about that strange smell you get near the platforms. I have no idea what it is, and it’s probably something unpleasant, but I kind of like it.

Then there’s the sound. Underground trains make great noises. From the vwwwwoooooooo they make when they’re moving to the clackity-clack of running over bumpy bits in the track (fear my technical knowhow of how the rail systems of this country work) to the unnecessarily plummy voice of the automated announcement system, there’s a great combination of sounds.

Plus, if you ever get bored waiting for a train, you can always play the Which Rat Is Going To Get Electrocuted First game, the rules of which I probably don’t need to explain.