Trains. Again.

These days, I seem to spend most of my time in trains. Unfortunately, most of these trains are not going anywhere exotic but are destined for somewhere in the Midlands. And I'm not going there for pleasure, but am usually carrying an over sized suitcase full of documents, trying hard to look vaguely professional and not trip over my heels as I make my way to a court room.

Train travel in England, as you will have gathered from previous posts, isn't great at the best of times. At the worst, it's positively horrid. Usually, the reason it is so horrid is because of the other people on the train. This is why I now travel first class whenever possible. The service, food and seats are no better than standard class; the real benefit of first class and the reason I now make my employer spend the money on it is simply because the chavs cannot afford to do so. The extra money is spent to ensure a chav-free zone.

Unfortunately, not all trains have a first class carriage. My train home to London from a work trip in Lincoln this week ought to have had a first class carriage. In fact, I believe it did, because I had a ticket for it. Unfortunately, that wasn't the train I got on. The train I instead (accidentally) got on was the express to Nottingham. That train did not have a first class carriage. However, that was the least of my worries, as I found myself having to do a detour through middle England, from Lincoln to Nottingham to Grantham, in order finally to get to London. If you want to see the path I followed, click here.

I only realised I was on the express to Nottingham when the conductor on the train came to collect my ticket. Admittedly, by that point, several announcements had been made over the load-speaker, presumably informing all passengers where the train was going. But, while I was conscious of announcements in a general sense, the content of them had not sunk in. The conductor, therefore, understandably gave me a look of bemusement when he took my ticket and asked if I was, in fact, trying to get to London, as I appeared to be on the wrong train. Upon hearing that I was trying to get to London the conductor, quite rightly, assumed I was a fool, and wrote the details of how to get to London from Nottingham in large print on the back of my ticket. He also gave me a short, but very loud, lecture in geography, to the amusement of several other passengers.

It was a very long trip home. This was made even worse by the fact that sitting opposite me was a woman who seemed to think it appropriate to wear baggy boxer shorts underneath a skirt and to sit with her legs up, at waist level, on the chair next to her. I spent the trip home trying to avert my eyes and erase the picture of the woman's pubic hair from my memory. It is a picture that even now, several days later, I still haven't succeeded in erasing. I'm hopeful that the upcoming xmas festivities (involving, as they do, copious amounts of booze) will assist in this regard. I will keep you posted.