Bastards

After a torrid couple of days of commuting, constituting about a month's worth of misery crammed into two days, I feel I must issue forth in some detail about the experience. Before I begin I will however grant that ordinarily the service is very reliable and good, and only relatively rarely are there problems - this is one benefit of using trains that routinely do the entire Kent coast.

So yesterday we had delays and cancellations both in and out of London, so I wasn't really expecting any problems today because frankly that would be ridiculous. As a result you could have bent me over and buggered me sideways and I wouldn't have been more surprised than I already was to discover that the 6:50 to London had been cancelled. Again. Well - I say cancelled, but it was worse than that. Because it was delayed outside Ashford for more than 20 minutes, some middle manager somewhere took the view that in order to try to restore balance, what they'd do is **miss out our station altogether**  in order to make up some time. Right. So what they're effectively saying is that the thousands upon thousands of pounds that the village (and its collective) commuting community spends on its annual commute is somehow of less value than that of someone from, say, Tonbridge. That's bollocks, that is. The level of polite indignation among the commuters was quite extraordinary. One man even suggested people should complain!

There's a particular kind of irritation associated with this sort of thing when you've been up since 5:30am and attended to 4 horses, 5 cats, a dog and a goat, you've showered and ironed your clobber and still made it out the door by 6:35, only to be faced with a 20 minute wait at the station in the freezing cold when you could have been at home stuffing haynets or fussing goats. So we (the assembled throng) await the 7:10 and Jane, the nice lady at the station, keeps us amused with barely veiled cynicism about the whole sorry process, and we chortle gently, partly mollified at least by All Being In It Together.

Naturally enough, the 7:10 is late, and then crawls up the tracks in such  way that I idly wonder if things would proceed more quickly if I were to get out and walk, or attempt to pick it up and chuck it up the track myself. Eventually we arrive in London and there follows the inevitable loitering for a connection, and eventually I make it into the office, some two and a half hours after I left home.

The working day proceeds more or less as planned, except because of my late arrival at the office, I remain for the commensurate period and leave the office around 5. Get to the station only to see the 17:08 wafting out of the station, but don't concern myself because the 17:11 will be along in exactly 3 minutes' time. Or will it. It's only when I arrive on the platform that I become aware of the tannoy message informing me that, due to signalling problems at Cannon Street, the 17:11 is cancelled. And the 17:18, the 17:23, 28 and 33. Arses.

So I sit and make myself as comfortable as it is possible to be on a fixed metal seat on a cold night in November on an exposed railway platform in South London, and watch a procession of trains go through the station without stopping. 17:39 comes and goes; no train. It is advertised, but rather ominously with no time attached to it. I'd barely clung on to my good temper by consideration that with good luck and a dearth of further fuck ups I could somehow make it to London Brige in time for the 17:49, but that soon dissipated like the remnants of a fog on a sunny morning, to be replaced by gathering dark clouds and forked lightning. By this time the platform was heaving with bodies, the like of which has not been seen since the last signalling problem at Cannon Street. In the end it was 4 minutes short of an hour that I stood or sat on that sodding platform. Eventually the train arrived at a shade after 6pm and off we went to London Bridge.

Upon arrival I thought I know, I'll go and check the main board for the train times. I waded through the sea of bodies to the boards, only to find that the next train was in 1 minute. Arrghh. I already knew, looking at the mass of bodies that lay between me and my target, that there was no way on this earth that I was going to get there in time, but just for the extra piquancy of the moment I was permitted to arrive just in time to see the fucking thing pull out of the station. I almost lost it at that moment.

I, along with 50,000 others, milled about on the relevant platforms waiting for news and listening to the announcements, as advised. Luckily for me my sister Bulse called and restored my good humour, or I might have run amok at any moment. Thanks babe, that was a life saver.

The final straw for me was the rich lilting Caribbean accent of the staff member announcing the 18:36 to West Weeeck-ham (mon), in so doing drawing a near perfect image of sun, sand, palm trees, rum and reggae, the complete antithesis of a cold and miserable evening spent on a variety of railway platforms in South London. I couldn't help but smile to myself. At least I think it was a smile, but it may have been a rictus grimace.

The long and the short of the sorry tale was that I arrived home just after 8pm, some three hours after I left the office. That makes a grand total of five and a half hours' commuting today.

The only saving grace was coming home to a roaring fire, home made soup, the fact that Knickers had done the boys (including feet for the first time!), some new woolly socks and a set of lamb footrot shears for when vitnery comes to attend to Angie and the horses tomorrow.