My sorry tale

This weekend gone by was miserable. My repeated viewing of X-Factor and other such reality TV shows has taught me that without public catharsis, or "closure", one can never move on from traumatic events. So, here is my sorry tale.

G and I were invited to lunch by a work colleague of G's, who lives in Essex. This should have been a happy event but, sadly, the trains were largely not running this weekend ("engineering work"). Our journey to Essex for lunch therefore began at 10.15 and lasted until 1 pm. It consisted of:

- a walk;
- tube ride;
- exchange at information desk with rude train information lady;
- further tube ride;
- wait in the cold for a "replacement train service" (ie, a bus);
- long journey on bus;
- short journey on train; and
- walk.

I should add that the weather this weekend was unbelievably crappy, and so our waits involved standing in the rain and wind, trying vainly to stop our umbrellas from turning inside out.

The ensuing lunch was lovely but somewhat marred by the knowledge we were going to have to repeat our journey to get home. And I also went through lunch rather traumatised by something that happened on the train leg of the journey.

I'm going to have to ask for indulgence here, as my story can't be understood unless you have some understanding of English train toilets. Thankfully, on this (as every) topic, there are numerous pictures available on the Internet and I have attached a couple.

The above shows the basic train toilet module. It's a unisex toilet. As you will see, the toilet faces the door. The sink is to the left of the toilet, although you can't see it in these photos. The door to the toilet cubicle is quite wide. The door opens and shuts by way of an electronic mechanism and you can't open or shut it manually. To go into the toilet you press the "open" button to the left of the door. The door then very slowly moves on its casings to the open position. Once inside, you press the "close" button on the inside of the door. You then press the "lock" button. This means that no one else can open the door from the outside (a trite fact, but one that it seems not everyone appreciates).

I avoid using train toilets at all costs. They are fraught with problems. My experience of communal male/female toilets has taught me that many men can't aim. That, even on a stationary toilet, some men have difficulties. Those difficulties are magnified on a toilet inside a moving train. And some men and women are just grotty. However, on this occasion, after a three hour journey and two coffees to keep me awake, I had no choice.

The train was packed, and outside the toilet cubicle, in the cabin, were lots of men and women standing as they couldn't get a seat in the train.

I went to the toilet cubicle and pressed the "open" button next to the door. The door then slowly opened to reveal a man peeing. Evidently, this man did not grasp the necessity of pressing the "lock" button. Worse still, he wasn't peeing in the toilet. Instead, he had chosen to pee in the handbasin. If he'd been peeing in the toilet, like a normal male, he would have been able to see the door open. As it was, peeing in the basin meant his back was to the door as it very slowly opened in full view of the numerous commuters standing outside it.

I have previously blogged about the complete lack of emotion shown on trains in England. This was an exception to that rule. There were gasps of shock as the man pissing in the sink was put on display. Worst of all, the noise of the gasps of shock, horror and then laughter drew commuters from the adjoining carriage to the area outside the toilet, to see what the fuss was about. All this while the door slowly opened and the man inside was completely oblivious. I think he may have had an IPod in his ears or something, as it was apparent he didn't hear the commotion. Meanwhile, I was standing by the toilet door frantically hitting the "close" button. Unfortunately, I discovered that the train toilet door won't begin to close until after it is fully open.

While I stood there panicking, hitting the close button, the commuters turned on me. Questions must have been asked as to how this had happened, and I heard a few very loud "she opened the door on him" and saw fingers jabbing the air in front of my face.

I think the man in the cubicle then realised what was going on, and I heard a shout from inside. So I panicked and I ran. Unfortunately, I mean this literally. I went from a standing still position to sprinting out of the carriage, which is quite a difficult thing to do, and causes some commotion in and of itself. Particularly when you have my lack of coordination. The unintended consequence of this, of course, was that anyone who hadn't already been drawn to look at the toilet area by all the noise now did so, and the laughter stopped being about the man peeing in the sink and I'm sure it was directed at the crazy running girl who opened the door on him.

I still hadn't recovered from the shock of the incident when we arrived in Essex. Worst of all, I couldn't even debrief by telling the group about the incident, thinking it perhaps not appropriate to relay a toilet story over lunch when first meeting a senior work colleague of G's.

I have another train journey to Shropshire this Thursday. I'm travelling for work, so first class. Nonetheless, I am going to avoid using the toilet.

Seville, the Midlands and Barristers

Seemingly only moments after landing in Heathrow last week, I was off again.

Last weekend was spent with C having a girls' weekend in Seville. Seville is the capital of flamenco dancing and tapas. C and I enjoyed the latter far too much, and the weekend was spent largely moving from tapas bar to tapas bar, drinking and eating. We also tried to enjoy the flamenco dancing but, I must confess, it wasn't really my thing. I found it hard to take seriously the flamboyant costumes and jerky movements combined with the overly stern expressions of the dancers.

Monday I was back in London and then that afternoon was off to Oxford University, to conduct a recruiting talk for a bunch of eager students. Or that was the plan. In fact, only 12 students turned up and most of those were from Oxford Brookes (the former polytech up the road from Oxford University), rather than Oxford University. Monday night I was then off to the midlands to attend a trial.

There is a misconception that all barristers in England are wine quaffing, Telegraph reading toffs. My barrister (let's call him Joe) is the antithesis of this. In my defense, he came recommended to me. I was not warned that his personality is as big as his shiny bald head and 6ft 5 frame and as subtle as his navy pinstriped suit, waistcoat and clashing blue tie.

Joe is very proud to have been educated in the school of hard knocks. This being, he made clear, the infinitely superior school to any of the universities in which I and many other lawyers have been schooled. He calls all women "darlin'" and refers to himself in the third person. Within five minutes of meeting the man, I knew his life story. I knew that he hadn't gone to uni until his late 20s, and before his career in the law was a union rep. I had also seen photos of his wife, two children and even his dead dog (the photo, thankfully, was taken before poor fido died). I knew of the threats he made to his 16-year-old daugher's boyfriend to break his legs should he be so foolish as to expect the daughter to show an inch of flesh let alone remove her chastity belt. In short, I knew far more about the man than I know about many of my closest friends. Thankfully Joe didn't expect the same level of disclosure from me. He was too busy talking to ask me any questions. The only exception to that was when he asked me if I had or would have children. My response was the usual "no, and I have no immediate plans either" to which he responded "just as well, because I'm rather busy today."

It was an entire day that we had to spend together. Perhaps the worst part was lunch. Or at least it was my lunch - it turned out Joe is trying to lose some weight from his large frame. While I ate my cheesy tuna melt, wiping the excess oil from my chin, he happily told me about his diet, which consists of eating nothing whatsoever during the day and then eating whatever he fancies at night. It soon emerged that his evening meal contains more calories than most of us eat in a week, as he complained to me that the night before he had to send his burger and chips back to the restaurant, as he discovered his burger missing the requested bacon, egg and cheese and his chip portion to be rather small in size. I'm therefore not entirely sure how this diet works but had, by this point, realised that Joe was not fond of questions that might hint at criticism of his methods or madness.

It may not surprise you to hear that the trial did not go brilliantly. Our judge liked Joe as much as I did, and made that quite plain during the course of the trial. The rest of the week has therefore consisted of me, back in London, frantically trying to organise new counsel and an appeal.

Thankfully my feet are now again on London soil for some time. Admittedly the soil is rather damp and cold at this time of year, but nonetheless it is nice to have my feet firmly planted on it for a week or two. It is also rather nice to know that Joe and I are no longer in the same borough and that I have left him safely in the midlands.

Good neighbours

It is often said that good fences make good neighbours (although by some conservative American judges, that phrase is quoted without the irony which Mr Frost intended). When you live in a flat, I'm not sure what makes a good neighbour. If you know, please tell me, because I suspect that very soon our neighbour downstairs may lose his patience with us.

It began with a flood. The installation of the new dishwasher in the flat did not go entirely well, and resulted in G being woken at 3 in the morning (I was thankfully away for work) by our neighbour, in his pyjamas, reporting that water was flooding through his ceiling, down his light fittings and into his kitchen and dining area. The water was promptly turned off and a plumber called. The plumber, in an impressive display of tact, then tightened a tap, explaining to G that you have to ensure the taps are turned tight before turning a dishwasher on. Apologies were made to the neighbour, a bottle of wine was offered and the disaster was over.

Then G's sister came to stay. We realised there were no curtains in the spare room in which she was to sleep, the window of which faces the street and is visible from the pavement. Thankfully, I craftily was able to piece together some make-do curtains out of two brightly coloured, fraying beach towels and some paper clips. Our neighbour did not complain, notwithstanding the fact that from the street our block of flats now looked like a squat for acid-dropping junkies.

When G's sister left, and we had bookshelves built in the sitting room, our neighbour didn't complain about the two-day long building project which involved banging and sawing that could be heard from one end of the building to the other. When we apologised to the neighbour for the noise, our neighbour simply shrugged, and said that he understood that every now and again renovations had to be undertaken.

Unfortunately, only a week later, when I was happily leaping about the sitting room to an aerobics video, we received a telephone call from our neighbour, who ever so politely told us that my exercise was causing his sitting room ceiling to vibrate and cracks to appear in it. He said that he didn't mind us doing aerobics in one of the (carpeted) bedrooms, but would it be possible for us not to do it on the floorboards in the sitting room, for fear his ceiling may collapse.

It is just as well our downstairs neighbour appears to be verging on being a saint, because whatever it is that makes good neighbours, we don't have it.

coming home

G and I have returned from our sadly very brief holiday in Perth. We arrived back in London on Monday with golden tans, a stock of cherry ripes and tim tams and, less happily, terrifically bad jetlag. A few days on and we are returning to a pasty white colour, have consumed all the cherry ripes and tim tams but, happily, have almost recovered from the jet lag.

The trip did not get off to a brilliant start. The 22-hour flight from London to Perth is never pleasant, but this flight proved particularly bad. We were on Singapore Airlines, normally known (at least by me) for its great inflight entertainment, decent food and service. Sadly, perhaps because we had only paid 400 pounds each for these return flights, all of those aspects were missing. We found ourselves with a dire selection of movies; after trying (and abandoning) such cinematic delights as The Ugly Truth and The Time Traveller's Wife, I gave up on the inflight entertainment. I also discovered my newly purchased book was dreadful, so the flight was spent largely with me blankly looking at the back of the chair in front of me or trying to entice G into a game of I Spy (he refused, after pointing out that there are only so many times you can spy a chair, fold-up tray and seatbelt before the game becomes boring). G had also, with the best of intentions, requested a special meal to accommodate my seafood-eating vegetarianism. Unfortunately, rather than ordering the vegetarian meal for me, he ordered the seafood meal. As I discovered, this was a meal exclusively of seafood. And not just any seafood, but overcooked, inedible seafood. Given that in the current security-conscious climate, airplanes are unlikely to stock steak knives, I decided that eating my seafood meal would prove physically impossible, and so concentrated my efforts instead on stealing G's dessert and crackers. As a result of all of the above, I suspect that G's enjoyment of the flight was approximate with my own.

Thankfully the holiday in Perth was significantly better than our flight there. We celebrated our birthdays, caught up with dearly missed family and friends and succeeded in gorging ourselves on food and wine, thanks to those very kind family and friends. We were also able to reintroduce ourselves to an adorable niece and two nephews. Aside from a minor incident involving me setting off my uncle's house alarm by breaking into his house (who knew?) all went very smoothly.

While it was wonderful seeing our friends and family, I confess it was strange returning to Perth. It took a little while from when we arrived for me to acclimatise myself to the place. Being now used to the incredible human traffic in London, seeing entire streets devoid of any visible people took some getting used to. I also made the mistake of (very innocently) being surprised at a dinner party when someone mentioned the West Australian had a food critic, and before I could stop myself blurted out "but are there enough restaurants to justify a food critic?". Not surprisingly, that latter comment was not met well, and I quickly found myself trying to backtrack and explain, honestly, that what I meant was that in London, there's a new restaurant opening every minute due to the enormous population, but surely there couldn't be that many new restaurants opening every week in Perth. Admittedly, the comment made me sound like a pretentious tool. It also served to show me (and this is a lesson I ought to have learned by now) that I need to find a way of disconnecting that part of my brain that causes me to blurt out whatever I'm thinking without screening it for sense and soundness first.

I love Perth. I love the beach, I love the weather, and I love the sense of space (once I get used to it). But I have to confess, I missed London while I was gone. While I was very sad leaving Perth and my family and friends (and there were more than a few tears shed for those I was leaving behind), I was also looking forward to getting home to London. And for the first time, I realised I was calling London home and really meaning it.