Explain
Why the Tube is so hot in terms of a slow cooker
The London Underground is essentially a slow cooker, except instead of a gammon joint, you are the gammon joint and you have forgotten your antiperspirant.
The science is simple, if you consider a hundred years of trapped mechanical friction to be a culinary achievement. Trains and their brakes generate massive amounts of kinetic energy that has nowhere to go but into the air, and eventually the Victorian clay walls. These tunnel linings act like a ceramic pot, having absorbed enough heat over the decades that they now radiate it back at you like a radiator that is permanently set to the setting labelled despair. It is a slow, steady braise where the ingredient is a damp commuter clutching a lukewarm flat white.
There is also the matter of the humans themselves, who act as the garnish. Each passenger adds roughly the same amount of heat as a hundred-watt lightbulb, which is lovely for the ambient temperature but less ideal for the scent profile. By the time you reach the Central Line, the humidity has reached a level usually reserved for a rainforest or the inside of a boot kept in a shed. You are not so much travelling across the city as you are being gently poached in your own commute, tenderised by the sheer collective volume of armpits and regret.
Where the analogy breaks downA slow cooker eventually produces a delicious meal, whereas the Tube only produces a sense of impending doom and a damp shirt.