Lundinium!

I had to go to London yesterday to attend an afternoon meeting at short notice. Travel was arranged through work and my train tickets were waiting for me when I arrived in the office in the morning. Imagine my delight when I saw this:

Yes, that's a FIRST class ticket to London. Me! In first class, away from the plebs. Oh yes, this is more like it, things are looking up. Until I got to my seat.... it faced backwards all the fucking journey. And then if that wasn't bad enough, I got fed all the way there: coffee; water; croissants; bacon toastie; more coffee; more croissants. By the time I reached Euston, I was covered in greasy crumbs and I felt a bit sick.

Still I suppose the first class ticket was a sort of sweetener to soften me up, since they all know that I hate: a) deputising for people in meetings; b) London; c) public transport - especially trains.

On reaching Euston, I had to negotiate the Underground. I was a bit scared of this because I didn't really know what I was doing and there never seems to be anybody to ask; everybody always seems in such a rush in railway stations. There are never any police men because they're generally practising shooting the faces off innocent immigrant workers. The rest of the workforce in the stations tend to be immigrants who possibly don't speak English too well and wouldn't have a hope of understanding a strong northern accent. Oh we provincial types must be such a hoot to watch for the natives!

Anyway, the underground is a doddle and I don't know what I was worried about. It's quite spooky the way the train's arrival is announced a few seconds beforehand by a blast of warm air up the tunnel. Woosh!

So I got to my meeting and didn't really say anything, but looked good in my suit. Got back to Euston and fished my going home ticket out and, to my horror, saw this:

Yes, that's a standard class ticket! That's right, they soft-soap you so you on the way down there so you don't kick off in the meeting or just fuck about doing shopping, but they know you'll be so desperate to get home that you'd accept a ticket in a livestock transporter just to get out of there. Cheap bastards. Saying that though, the going home ticket was well expensive compared to the going there ticket.

In all honesty, there's not much difference between the two and it's not really my idea of "first class" to find myself in an It's a knockout-type challenge as I try to drink coffee or eat pastries on a tilting train that's doing fuck knows how many miles an hour. Tilting trains eh? Whatever next?


People I saw
I was pleased to note a couple of people who were sat in the first class carriage with standard tickets.

And then the Inspector lady was nice to me as she tried four times to get me to show her the right ticket for my journey home. They all looked the same and it's a good job I hadn't slung the one she wanted because it was actually the underground ticket for getting to Euston from Victoria. Phew.

This chap had interesting eyebrows. I liked him.

There was a woman across the aisle from me on the way home. She appeared to be a member of the Sisterhood, but she wore her trousers with one of the legs rolled up. I found this very strange. She also used her Blackberry a lot and picked her nose and ate it. I think she worked for the TUC, so I wouldn't put it past/passed her.


Mobiles on trains
It was weird that I had no problem with mobile phone reception on the way down, but hardly had any reception on the way home. Do first class carriages have signal boosters?

One of my favourite games on public transport is "Bluetooth stalking". You just ask your mobile phone or other bluetooth device to search for other devices. I found three on my quick search yesterday. I quite like the names people give their devices too and was particularly fond of "Crumple".

I wrote this post ages ago, but my PC crashed before I had chance to click "post". The original was much better and included the story of the two people having sex near the toilet when I went for a wee. And pulling your trousers up on a tilting train is really difficult.