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Dreadful Nonsense

"I've read your blog. it's really funny. you should write a column." - Jon Ronson

On The Train

In the middle of the quiet chatter as everyone tried to move around the carriage, get their baggage on board, find their seat numbers, avoid each other’s toes and pay attention to the burbled announcements that keep coming over the PA system to make sure they’re on the 10.30am to Edinburgh and won’t accidentally end up in Wales, a young girl in a small pink top and hair pulled back so tightly over her scalp it looked like it was causing actual physical pain suddenly screamed at the top of her voice in response to a direction that no one had given her, “I’M GETTING TO MAE FUCKING SEAT! I’D BE THERE NOO IF EVERYONE WASNAE SHOVING!”

Boarding the train this morning was no easy task. For a start, all seats on the train were reserved, and despite the constant background noise of the train conductor advising people without seat reservations to wait for the 11.00am train, people were still trying to find seats without reservation tickets on them. Of which there were none. At all. And yet they still boarded the train with their massive bags and unsteady feet and they tried, and blocked the aisles doing so. My own particular problem was the fact that I was designated a seat on Coach F. Coach F did not exist. It was the gap that didn’t appear between Coach E and Coach G. I pondered this for a moment with glee, and then decided to ask someone in uniform, who politely checked a paper napkin she was carrying and told me my particular Coach F seat was to be found in Coach B at the front of the train. I trekked onward.

It seems that, when the GNER people discovered that Coach F wasn’t going to be travelling with them to Edinburgh today, they allocated all the Coach F orphans different seats up and down the train. Happily, there were only three or four members of GNER staff to be found that could re-direct the 70-something of us without an actual carriage to go to, and three of them weren’t making themselves readily available.

I eventually found my seat – I’m sitting, travelling backwards, at the very front seat you can get on the train which, you’ll already know if, like me, you’ve followed the dubious safety record of GNER, is one of the most dangerous places to be when the train derails (apart from in the buffet carriage). However, I’m not thinking about that. I’m more concerned about how the hell I’m going to get all my bags off the train when we get to Waverley, as this train doesn’t terminate there, but instead rumbles on all the way to Aberdeen, and I don’t want my beautiful black shoes to be going there without me.

I’m on my way to Edinburgh, peeps. The most stressful parts of the journey are, fingers crossed, already behind me. Good, good, good.

This entry was posted on 23 August 2007 at 11:31 am. 0 comments

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