Well good day all and welcome once again to the land that is my blog, I can tell you’ve all been missing it terribly, I’ve just been very busy for the past few weeks and to drain my spleen for your delectation is a trying process and it’s very difficult to be in the right mind to do this.
Now I have been asked if I will return to my safer raging ground of Britain’s train services and indeed given the last week’s debacle in my train journeying this would be a very tempting prospect. For those unaware I was visiting my Alma Mater the lovely Aberystwyth over the weekend and it was a very much last minute decision which meant that not only would I have to travel on a Saturday (which I genuinely try and avoid because of all the screaming infants) but also that it cost more because I had the temerity to choose to buy my ticket and to travel on the same day, what other division of society would this be allowed in? Would you get a letter demanding an increase in your road tax because you’d used your car without first alerting the highways agency which roads you planned to use? No you would not so how can these leeching train operators get away with charging you more simply for buying a ticket on the day you’re travelling?
Also if you’re going to get a reserved seat for gods sake use the thing! Okay I appreciate it doesn’t take much for someone to get on a train and look at the ticket in the back of the headrest and realise that the person who is supposed to be using it either has some terrible wasting disease and is now invisible to the human eye or they haven’t taken their seat but that’s not the point, you reserved that seat so you can damn well sit in it, the types that reserve are often the first to demand you give up their seat when they want it even though there are ample numbers of other perfectly usable seats available so why should they then have the right to chose not to sit there? If I had my way we’d shackle them into said seats and just say “if you wanted that particular seat so badly you can enjoy it all journey whiles imprisoned in it!”. Now as you may have guessed I am not the kind of person who usually books a seat but if I get on a train and see that my reserved seat is being used as long as I can find another seat I would usually just say live and let live. It is all rather like my beloved local arthouse cinema, now those who know me well will know that the kinds of films I enjoy seeing are very rarely mainstream blockbuster types, they are generally arty, emotional and usually subtitled so there is usually ample space in the auditorium for every person who has chosen to see the film to probably have an aisle to themselves if they chose so can someone explain to me why people feel the need to sit in the exact seat their ticket says? I normally just go in and find the first seat that’s in the area I like and sit there but you can guarantee I will have sat in a seat that will be given to somebody else who will then either come in, see me in “their”: seat and sigh loudly before sitting elsewhere or ask me to move, now this never ceases to really anger me, for gods sake we’re here to see a French film about Algerian monks, you and I are probably going to be the only ones here why do you feel the need to sit in the seat the cinema has allocated you, there are hundreds of other seats what is about this one that I have chosen that means you have to sit here and disturb me?
Anyway back to the train debacle, having made it from Merseyside to sunny Shropshire we were informed that all services to Aber were off until Tuesday and a replacement bus service would be provided instead, from Shrewsbury to Aberystwyth. That would be 3 hours by coach, no honestly I’m not sure what it is about coaches that is so different to trains but it just is. For all my complaints I do love to travel by train, there’s some kind of inherent romance in it, you look at all the great love stories that have happened in the confines of the station and the train; Trevor Johnson and Celia Howard in Brief Encounter, Eva-Marie Saint and Cary Grant in North By Northwest there is a true sense of romance within. To the best of my knowledge nobody has ever set a romantic liaison within the setting of a rail replacement coach, it just doesn’t carry the same clout. There’s something about getting down from the guardplate of a train onto a platform and imagining the hot girl from the train waiting for me to finally declare she’s been feeling the same way as me for months, okay it never happens and generally I just shuffle away to a hotel for a weekend of sexual frustration but nevertheless the romantic overtones are there. With the coach it will pull into the station and everyone will just suddenly charge lie demented cattle at the exit, some old lady will drag a suitcase from an overhead rack and thwack you round the head with it and generally when you get off you just feel in massive need of a large gin and tonic to make you feel human again.
I suppose ultimately for all my complaints about them I do love the trains and generally my complaints are limited to the selfish people who just have no care for their fellow passengers, the kind of person who, on a rail replacement coach, will recline their seat and crush your patella simply because they wish to maximise their own comfort and genuinely never think that might in some way impact on yours. No as Cary Grant says in North By Northwest “it sure beats flying doesn’t it” and for all its faults, rail travel truly is the best and most romantic way to get around.
This week Matt:
- Had a week off which he spent reading about Henry II and Eleanor Of Aquitaine - quite the bitch it must be said!
- Went to watch Submarine at the pictures, seriously so funny I almost herniated laughing!
- Won tickets to a meet & greet with Clare Balding, absolutely can't wait!
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