Since everybody is on holiday this week except me and you (and I’m not even sure about you) I have taken to reading poetry on the Tube. Some elucidation is required, I guess. Reading poetry is one of those guilty pleasures — probably, on balance, the least harmful of them — in which I indulge when I should be “doing something more important”. It’s pure escapism, that’s why. Via a few exquisitely turned lines, I am lifted into someone else’s imagination, someone else’s world, someone else’s dreams and nightmares.

Films and novels do that, too. But they demand more time. And as I hit the chilly upland screes of middle age I find myself guarding my free hours like a stopwatch Scrooge. I resent spending 150 minutes discovering how lame a movie is, or a week on some lumbering tome that leaves me bored, bothered and bewildered. A great poem, by contrast, can often be digested quicker than a chocolate Hobnob.

Unfortunately, as with Hobnobs, I find that one nibble leads to another. Sometimes I start perusing an anthology around midnight, usually to put off writing a review of some mediocre show — only to blink and discover that it’s 4am, my review’s unwritten, my supper plates unwashed, my teeth unbrushed, and my eyes red-rimmed with tiredness.

That’s why, on the whole, I don’t read poetry on the Tube to work. First, I miss my stop. Secondly, it seems too decadent — too laid-back and indulgent a preparation for the office hurly-burly. Instead, I usually force myself to skim page after page of “vital” news stories. By the time I arrive, my head is spinning with Iraq and Iran, bank rates and pensions, Bush and Blair, overcrowded prisons and underperforming schools — rarely a word of which I can recall by lunchtime.

But this week, like some late-blooming, menopausal rebel, I’ve knocked all that current-affairs nonsense on the head. If everybody else is skiving on hot beaches, I’ve decided, I’m jolly well going to read poetry on the Tube. And to hell with the funny looks.

Besides which, I’ve discovered Generation Txt . It’s a collection of mostly short, sharp and sardonic poems by six British writers, none of them older than 27. I’m fascinated by this poetry renaissance among the young. Not long ago I went to an “open mike” night at the Poetry Café in London. Once I’d got over the awkwardness of being the oldest person in the room by about 25 years, I found the mix of styles exhilarating — and particularly the evident influence of rap’s astringent, quick-firing rhymes on young, white poets from middle-class backgrounds. To me, rap appears to have liberated an artform that was well-nigh moribund after decades of turgid and impenetrable modernism. Pop Art did much the same thing to painting. It’s not that today’s young British poets all write like Bronx hip-hoppers. Rather, they have been reminded that the most direct language is usually the simplest, that the most gripping subjects are often the urgent dilemmas of ordinary life, and that the most compelling way to communicate is to perform live to an audience. Hence the entertaining poetry “slams” that have sprung up round the country.

And how this new relevance comes over in Generation Txt ! The first poem in the collection is a blistering effort called Eating Out , by Joe Dunthorne. It paints a picture not just of obscene waste (posh restaurants throwing away tons of unfinished nosh) but of callousness too, because the discarded food is locked in bins to stop tramps from eating it. “You’d think they might be allowed to lick a strand of marinated pig fat from the inside of a bin bag,” Dunthorne muses acerbically.

Then there’s Laura Forman’s laconic nine-liner starting: “Studio flat, quiet location, no chain”, and going on to describe, in perfect estate-agentese, the premises’ “polished hard-wood veneers” and “screw-down security door”. Only when you reach the final lines — “Ideal for last-time buyers. Available sooner than you think” — do you realise that she’s talking about your coffin.

The subject-matter is often the warping or wasting of young lives. There’s a devastating poem by Emma McGordon, for instance, probing the last thoughts of those who jump from buildings. Several other poems are fuelled by ecological anger.

But what excites me about Generation Txt is not what these young poets are writing about — but, rather, that they are writing and disseminating their stuff at all. Rather than moaning about not being able to get a publisher or an Arts Council grant, as generations of their predecessors did, they have formed a collective, brought out their own paperback collection and organised a tour of fringy venues round the country, as well as a lively web-site (www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk).

The same sort of process is going on in the worlds of art and music. Old-fashioned channels and media are being bypassed or subverted by quick-witted youngsters who have grasped the potency and potential of the internet far faster than their seniors.

That’s great news. We read so many gloomy press jeremiads about the dumbing-down of Britain, or the educational shortcomings of the young, or the crass and illiterate nature of so much youth culture. But initiatives such as Generation Txt (and there are plenty of similar projects around) suggest a much more positive story waiting to be told. Even a raddled old dinosaur from Generation Typewriter can be thrilled by that.

After you on the No 141

David Cameron’s glacier-hugging gestures clearly cut little ice with his compatriots. New figures suggest that the British make more car journeys, creating worse congestion, fouler pollution and longer commuting-times, than anyone else in Europe. The reason is obvious (except to people who concoct transport policies). Our buses and trains are costlier and less reliable than anywhere else. We build fewer cycle lanes. And ministers are scared witless about taxing motorists.

They’re also chauffeured everywhere. They shouldn’t be. Remember how London built its sewers? Innumerable cholera outbreaks had no effect on Parliament, because middle-class MPs weren’t affected. But then came the Great Stink of 1858, when the Thames smelt so ’orrible that MPs were gasping for fresh air. Before you could say “Blimey, what a pong!” they had passed laws to get sewers built.

Compel ministers, MPs and the bosses of subsidised bus and rail companies to travel only by bike and public transport, say I. You would see huge improvements within weeks.

Time to rejoice

Congratulations to all Times readers who contributed suggestions to our campaign to bring back useful occupations that were prematurely abolished. We have scored a notable victory, it seems. Westminster Council has announced that it has recruited 38 park keepers to patrol its 54 open spaces. About time, too. A park without a keeper is a no-go area for the elderly and mums with young kids. Other councils should quickly follow suit.

Now to restore hospital matrons, railway porters, rag-and-bone men, police officers who deign to answer the phone in their own stations, milkmen . . .

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