Who's been sitting in my seat?

I bet Portillo doesn't have to put up with this!

In possibly the greatest rehabilitation of a personality since Paul went from tax collector to apostle, Michael Portillo is now better known as a presenter of charmingly inoffensive soufflé-weight documentaries about train travel than as The Hammer Of The Poor.  Essentially, the format of ‘Trains to Charming Places’ is that Michael, sporting a wardrobe that makes one question his sexuality and clutching a guide book as outdated as the ideas he had when in the Cabinet, takes trains hither and yon and stops off to discuss heritage trades like being a farrier, fletcher or cooper (back when these were trades and not merely surnames.  Presumably following the tradition of names deriving from trades, a century hence Tommy Callcentre and Susie Barista will be common enough names) before announcing ‘look at my bright trousers and tremble’ and ambling off towards the station.

Anyone watching this programme for longer than the necessary time (which is the length of time it takes to press the button on the remote to take you to the next channel) will note that when the presenter makes his train journey, he is inevitably in a not terribly crowded carriage.  This of course makes perfect sense as crouching across from the presenter is a cameraman, sound guy, director and the girl who fetches the paninis.

Anyone who commutes on a regular basis will know that such space is far from the norm, but then again the programme probably wouldn’t have the same relaxed air if Michael were standing in a vestibule (loom it up, it’s the right word) between carriages with his nose rubbing the camera lens, thanks to the overcrowding.

Neither does Michael apparently have to find his won seat by excavating a pile of used Metros and the debris of what appears to be a takeaway Medieval banquet.

Naturally, railway companies have to make huge profits somehow, and the latest trend appears to be charging ridiculous ticket prices and only employing cleaners every third day.  This means that you usually have the opportunity to play the Goldilocks Game when alighting, in other words ‘which anti-social fucker has been sitting in my seat’.  If you are lucky, it’s somebody who has carefully refolded their copy of the Metro before dropping it on the floor, if you are unlucky, it is somebody who has either breakfasted on the flakiest pastry ever made, or is a leper.

Occasionally though it’s just a single coffee cup.

What, Watson, can we deduce from this.  Firstly, that the drinker favours decaf, as their coffee has obviously not given them the energy required to bin the fucking thing.  Secondly, that there are either an oligarch or a fare dodger, as it is unlikely that anyone purchasing a ticket at today’s prices can also afford store-bought coffee.  Finally, that they have joined the growing tribe of adult litterlouts (yes, leaving a coffee cup for somebody else to clear away, when you actually have to walk past a bin in the carriage to exit, is littering).

Cardboard coffee cups are the new fag butts and as such are the very worst and most offensive sort of litter because coffee, like fags, is a product consumed by adults.  Crisp packets and sweetie wrappers are annoying litter but one can almost understand why Little Fuckers, sorry, why children, discard them, it’s because they are careless, have not been brought up properly and have never spent a Sunday morning tidying their front garden by plucking Haribo wrappers out of their hedges.

Commuting, I think, makes one more intolerant of stupidity, be it passive aggressive littering, leaky headphones or the inappropriate use of the mobile ‘phone in any carriage, actually, on any train I am in or on or even waiting for.

Which is why it would make for a magnificent conclusion to the series to see Portillo completely lose his fucking mind with an annoying fellow traveller who has their shitty music on too loud and beat the little prick to death with his Bradshaw.

Now that I would watch.

Commuting with nature

It’s becoming obvious that commuters have not got the sense that God gave a goldfish and that their memory span must be about the same as that apocryphally attributed to that piscine pet.

I base this deduction on two incidences of observed behaviour.

First, the carriage crowd.  This is the little knot of people that form on the platform at the point where, once the train has stopped, the carriage door will open.  This allows them to spring lithely from platform to carriage and thence to seat, the better to spread their enormous, pale, office chair shaped arse cheeks onto a vacant seat rather than what must, given their imperative to do this, be the alternative – finding themselves standing at a point equidistant to two carriage doors and, unable to decide which one will offer the better chance of getting a seat, scuttling crab-like from side to side until the doors close leaving them on the platform in a lather of indecision.

It’s fascinating and alarming that the crowd can remember, every morning, at which point on the platform the carriage doors will open but cannot remember, every morning, that people will be wanting to get off the train.

If you are on the train and getting off at any station short of the train’s destination, you will be faced with a wall of people.  It is the closest an unfamous person will ever get to exiting the stage door and finding a crowd there, except they don’t want either your autograph, or their money back, they just want to get on.

The carriage crowd are not, let me be clear, wholly without an understanding for the needs of the emerging passenger.  They do grudgingly leave a gap narrow enough for you to pass through, if you can convert yourself into a stream of anorexic particles, or a Rizzla paper.  Your alternatives are to slather yourself in Vaseline and apologetically slither your way out, or do what I do and stick your leg out and then follow it with the entire weight of your body, just like Indiana Jones does when he takes the ‘leap of faith’ in ‘Last Crusade’.

The second type of behaviour exhibited is when the carriage crowd try to get on an already full carriage.  If you fill a glass with water, and then very very carefully slightly overfill it, then surface tension will mean that you can have a few micrometres of water above the level of the glass.  That’s how full commuter carriages get, but that doesn’t stop people trying to join them.

This is achieved by two methods.  The first is waiting until the breathing of everyone in the carriage is synchronised and everyone is breathing in, before flinging yourself on and hoping that the carriage doors shut before everyone breaths out and you are catapulted back onto the platform.  If the doors close, you are mashed against the glass like the world’s ugliest Garfield doll but hey, at least you’ll be at your desk on time.  The second is to bellow ‘can you move down please’ because fuck, yea, the people wallowing in all that prairie-like space wouldn’t think of doing that themselves.

What’s amazing is that nobody bellows back ‘no, can you not just get the next train?’ but instead everyone collectively shuffles a micron and makes room.

This is the twenty first century.  Let’s put aside that by now, by rights, we should be commuting by jet pack.  The commute should be relaxed, ideally completed sitting at a table while you are served a hot breakfast that concludes with a cigarette, coffee and an early morning digestif to take the edge off.  At least, given the price of the fucking fares, that’s what I think commuters should be entitled to.

Perhaps the commuters are not to blame after all and what is happening here is the suppression of uncomfortable memories, but on a daily basis rather than those adults who can’t watch one of those clip shows about seventies television without getting an unexplained twinge in their bottom.  It would explain an awful lot, starting with why they never think that getting an earlier train might be an idea.

The Village Hobby Pt 2: Men and train sets

Hobbies are a low key Faustian pack, at least among those who are in gainful and resentful employment. The deal is that you will work in an unrewarding job that is simply there to bankroll your real life. It's like being a super-hero, you spend all day pretending to be normal, and spend your nights making dioramas of famous scenes from World War II if dinosaurs had been involved - and who doesn't thrill a little when confronted with a 1/32 scale recreation of a T Rex battling a British tank unit on a Parisian street corner, or a Spitfire downing a pterodactyl over Big Ben (yes of course the dinosaurs fought on the side of the Axis - they were recreated using perverted Nazi science, what are you, thick?)

One of the positives of this trade-off is that while you sure as hell don't give work a thought while you are away from it, you can devote time at work to your hobby. Not overtly of course, as for instance waders, a tackle box and a keep-net writhing with angry fish might cause comment as you take communion, but you can certainly give your pastime some thought.

This is because, as anyone who has ever sat in a meeting featuring PowerPoint and has spent the time from Slide three until 'any questions' idly wondering if you could capitalise on the upcoming badger cull by introducing a range of 'Woodland Soups' without being too specific about the content, or the likelihood of contracting TB as a result of ingestion, will be able to confirm, musing is not easily detectable (unless you operate a lathe or are a surgeon, in which case bloody well concentrate and stop wondering whether that triceratops model you ordered for your recreation of the siege of Stalingrad has arrived yet).

If you have a hobby, and you are at work, and your badge says that you are 'happy to help', then you are a fibber. But that's OK because badges that read 'Hello, I'm Gary, ambivalent about helping, but if you want to discuss what would win in a fight, a T Rex or a Cromwell, I am very much your man' are difficult to find, even on the Internet.

When you leave work for good you are unencumbered by nine to five distraction and the fear that your colleagues might find out what you do at the weekend and judge you because you rather like folk dance, or weaving, or competitive masturbation, and you can level up from hobbyist to enthusiast. And there is no better place to see retired folk in enthusiastic action than a railway line run by enthusiasts (unlike commercial train companies, which are staffed by unenthusiasts).

Retired enthusiasts are such a regular feature of steam train lines that you could be forgiven for concluding that the train crew came with the engine when it was new and have simply stuck with it after it was acquired by a trust formed of people who like grease, polishing things and smelling faintly of equal parts soot and sawrfega.

Because maybe it's the grimy faces, but bloody hell do the enthusiasts look happy when they smile. And who can blame them? You know that whooshing feeling you get in your stomach when you see a bloody big loco thunder by and the whistle shrieks and the clouds of steam flow back over the carriages like a white mink stole thrown over the shoulder of a silent movie starlet, well they get that all the time, from marmite to horlicks and in their dreams as well.

Steam enthusiasts are the ultimate hobbyists. You can be enthusiastic about your skydiving, or your golf, or your fishing or God help you your Morris dancing (by the way, putting on some bells, thwacking a twig and doing a jig in a car park followed by ten hours of drinking makes you a Real Ale enthusiast, not a folk dance enthusiast, although the two are often confused), or about dressing up as a Roundhead or investigating paranormal activity (usually in pubs, handy for accessing spirits) but being a steam enthusiast, traction or rail, is commitment. And romantic.

Say again?

Back when wireless internet networks were complicated, expensive and rare, they were usually to be found in commercial spaces. Geeks developed a secret code called war chalking to inform other geeks of where they could get free wireless internet. These days, mobile devices that can access wireless internet can also detect wireless networks but back in the day, you’d need some savvy software and a Pringles tube. It’s true, the Pringles tube, an aluminium cylinder, was a sort of cross between a metal detector, a radio triangulation device and a dousing rod. Quite how you mashed it up with your heavy-as-a-housebrick old school laptop I have no idea, but I bet chewing gum was involved.

So, geeks would prowl the streets, detect wireless networks with no security passwords and would then chalk on pavements or walls that a network was available. The war chalking was evocative of the secret signs that American vagrants would leave outside the homes of folks during the recession, signs that could be interpreted by others such as ‘food for work available’, ‘angry dog here’ or ‘wireless network will be available here next century’.

There have always been secret signs. The problem with most of them is that they are a one way thing. One by sea, two by land may be all very well, but does it allow for the recipient of the message to send something back along the lines of ‘I am standing on the beach frantically waving my towel because my cover has been blown and I want to come home right now!’? Possibly not.

Railways, of course, have plenty of signals. Famously, when they go wrong or don’t work at all, this can lead to problems. Just this week some criminals decided to steal a load of copper wire. The problem was that it was live and providing power and information to loads of trains that were supposed to be leaving Waterloo. The result was a lot of inconvenienced commuters. But signalling equipment is notoriously delicate. For instance, it freezes when, er, the temperature drops below freezing. Obviously the design geniuses who keep a national network of thousands of trains running simultaneously are too clever to consider slathering the signals in gose grease between November and April to ward off frosted signalling.

More informal signals have been spotted on the platform of the station I commute from this week. The mysterious message sent via strategically folded chocolate bar has been added to. A lone wrapper has appeared adjacent to, but quite separate from, the original wrapper totem. This, I think, is some sort of coded conversation. What does this new reply mean? Could it be an invitation, a warning or simply somebody thinking that this is how we dispose of wrappers now?

Whatever it means, the effect is that in addition to having to run in a manner so undignified it makes a squid being fired out of a cannon into a brick wall look like an exercise in coordination just to catch my train, I now have to build in time to se if any new ‘message’ has been posted.

Birthday cards

There are certain reliable images that you can have for birthday cards. Cake is good, so is booze, and some kind of gaily wrapped prezzie is always an acceptable image.

Then you get the cards that break down on gender lines, or rather gender stereotypes.

For women, shoes feature a lot. As do those amusing cards featuring either a black and white photograph of some 1950’s housewife and an amusing caption along the lines of ‘Daphne knew she was growing old when she only got off her tits on ketamin at the weekend’, or a cartoon of a woman and a caption about binge drinking or binge chocolate eating being more fun than anal.

For men, sports are where you can traditionally turn. Vintage golfing images or images of footballers in long shorts and longer moustaches from the days when they were happy to play for half a crown a week and people thought ‘superinjunction’ was something to do with Crewe railway station.


Vintage is still big business, taking a vintage travel poster and slapping ‘happy birthday’ on it usually works a treat, because men, by and large, are genetically programmed to like trains, boats and young women in flimsy dresses drinking alcohol in foreign parts far removed from the restraining influences of vicars, aunts or anyone who knows your reputation.

Browsing the racks there’s another sort of card that appears as a genre – the image of a sports car racing the steam train. The sports car is usually in the foreground (winning the race?) with the train in the background.


This is the perfect card for a gent. He may not be getting a train set or a sports car for his birthday, but he’s got a card that shows both and he can imagine himself behind the wheel or on the footplate, as his temperament dictates.


Quick quiz – if you were presented with such a card, would you consider yourself to be driving the car, driving the train or as a passenger on the train? And what about the person who gave you the card?

It depends to an extent on the illustration. Is one alone in the car or does one have a lady companion? Does the train look like it might have a really good restaurant service?

a) I am driving the car. I have personal freedom and I like the smell of petrol. And I don’t mind paying lots for it. And I quite like petrol garage sandwiches. And porn.

b) I am a passenger on the train. I appreciate the idea of swishing through the English countryside knowing that, according to all the books I have read and films I have seen, it is only a matter of time before I am embroiled in a murder or an act of espionage. I will use that time to drink an entire bottle of claret.

c) I am the driver of the train. I am not on strike because it is a steam train and I am an enthusiast. I am also not on strike because as well as coal I am feeding into the boiler any evidence from the bank raid it took to fund the restoration of the steam engine.

d) This is the one I always go for. I am racing in the car to intercept the train at the next station, its final stop before it crosses the border. On boarding the train I will take my seat in the restaurant car and smile to myself as my car, now driven by a close associate who just happens to be a world class racing driver, sets off with some vile foreign agents in pursuit. The secret plans are safely in my possession, the wine list looks acceptable, my sleeping berth is a double and a woman who looks JUST like Gillian Anderson has just taken the last available seat in the restaurant car, opposite me.

I concentrate more on the idea that the woman looks JUST like Gillian Anderson rather than the fact that the seat opposite me was the last one to be taken.

Of course, thanks to a section of society that likes to take things that are great, and turn them into things that are shit, the last restaurant car on a regular service is now a thing of the past. Apparently first class passengers will now be served ‘airline means’ at their seats. I can see how this is cheaper than running a kitchen and providing tablecloths, service, china and civilisation, but it was interesting to note how everyone pronounced the words ‘airline meal’ in a certain tone.

I am sure that in business class and first class travel on certain airlines it’s possible to still get a decent meal with china and food you could identify. Personally, I love the idea that when you fly you get little trays of plastic with food in them, plastic cutlery, and sachets of salt and sachets of sauce. It adds to the novelty and, to be fair, nobody expects a working kitchen at 35,000 feet. But a train, a train is different, on a train the expectation rather than the exception should be a dining car.

(It’s got to be time to fight back and here’s how. First Class picnics. OK, you know your flight or your train or whatever. Waiting for you at check in or the ticket barrier will be your First Class picnic. A box of delights that will contain all you need to make your journey a transport of delight. For trains you get a small linen tablecloth designed to fit across your table or seatback tray, along with china and cutlery. For aeroplanes the only concession is plastic cutlery and that your bottle of decent red comes in the form of a dozen or so tiny plastic sachets that you can take through security.)

What the card does not show is the motor car racing a steam train across a level crossing – or trying to. A few tonnes of athletic metal and flesh vs several hundred tonnes of flaming, smoke-breathing steam train and heritage? Inside illustration: a single wheel, on fire, rolling down the road.

Manchester by rail...standard class!

Ahh, the romance of train travel! Clouds of steam, assignations in the dining car, genteel murder, stoking, assignations in the luggage car, gin, amusing incidents in the sleeper compartment, bribing the border guards and, of course, thanks to terrorists and strict border controls, it's still the best way to smuggle smack or shooters into the country.

Modern day train travel has much to commend it. There's the quiet carriage, where mobile phones and, apparently, loudly rustling your crisp packet is frowned upon to the point of Paddington hard stares or second degree tutting. There's the buffet car, with it's cornucopia of snacks meaning that some offer up to three flavours of crisps to compliment your twelve cans of Stella.

Recently, I had to travel up north for work. I love the train journey up north. You go through what is now a deprived area of the country but what was once a glorious industrial powerhouse. That's one of the reasons why there is a railway track there at all and also the reason why for so much of the journey the railway runs alongside the canal network. Railways were laid alongside the canals they would eventually replace because the navvies had already done all the hard work of levelling the area, building embankments, finding the best pubs and composing folk songs.

Previously I'd done the trip first class. Not this time though, this was austerity Britain and I was under the distinct impression that my class of travel was one above having to shovel coal into the engine for 200 miles. Or whatever.

The view, however, was still first class. England was in the grip of winter and there had been a hard frost that night, now the same clear skies that brought the frost let the sun illuminate it in dazzling style. You could see the cold, the white countryside, the breath of the cattle and, in the canals, a thin skien of almost ice on the iron dark chill waters.

Inside all was jolly and warm. First class travel means that you get fed and watered. Tea and coffee and coffee and tea and a hot breakfast. Not so in standard class. Luckily I am a man of immense resource and enviable pic nic skills and so using only the most basic of amenities; a M&S simply food, a coffee shop and an artisan bakers, had cobbled together a light three course breakfast.

Then, as we left the station, came the announcement that because the catering crew has missed the train, there would be no catering, at all, on the journey. The howls went up from first class while, sitting in a fug of smug, I debated whether to eat my BLT or auction it.

I ate it, of course, and enjoyed the view. But I wonder if future travellers will have that same opportunity. The canals today are used for holidays and colourful narrowboats putter along, a reminder of a time when the world moved at a slower pace. I can't see the holiday makers of the future getting away from it all on a motorway cruise, although journey times might be similar.

One of the more colourful sights was, in the middle of an expanse of what at first appeared to be suspiciously well groomed countryside but was, of course, a golf course, two golfers striding forth across the frozen fairways. Colourful trousers making an impression in the black and white surroundings, clouds of breath steaming over their shoulders like the puffs that would have come from my train decades ago. They must really love their game, or have really shit home lives.

It was refreshing, at journey's end, to see the northern city I was visiting in the sunshine for the first time ever. No kidding. The place looked transformed. But no wonder they shot 'life on Mars' there. It was like going back to the 1970s. Everyone was smoking (remember smoking?) and everyone was overweight, probably due to the wheezy queue that seemed to be a permanent feature outside the door of Greggs. Not that I blame them, if I hadn't of feasted on a BLT that morning, I might of joined them.

Postcard from Edinburgh – the Castle

What’s more festival than seeing a show…having one cancelled. With time to spare we visited the castle.

Bloody. Hell.

OK. First off, the battlements. Huge cannons look over the city, ready to blow the hell out of anyone trying to open a Starbucks. They could now be manned by the many tourists who have their pictures taken next to them. But if ancient cannons aren’t your thing…they have the real deal, a functioning artillery piece that’s described as the ‘one o’ clock gun’ but is, when you think about it, a major artillery piece on the highest point in the centre of the city.

Next up, the stairs and ramps. If you managed to fight your way to the top of the castle, you bloody deserve to run the country. And that’s without an opposed attack.

Have to say though, like many castles, the weak point is attack through the gift shop.

The castle also holds the crown jewels, the ‘treasures of Scotland’. There was a little bit of debate about whether they were actually the real things. But, looking at the two huge safe doors that marked the only entrances to the room where they were kept and based on the idea that they are kept in the centre of a room in a castle, with eight foot thick walls, I can think of no better place to keep them.

Want to rip them off? Bring a siege tower. And an army.

Also, it has an audio tour. I bloody love an audio tour. You know what the sign of a good audio tour is? Mood music and sound effects. The section on the one o’clock gun starts with a huge ‘boom!’. Even as I shrieked like a girl, I loved it.

The Scottish national war memorial.


I am not sentimental, alright. It’s just that, like many of the other chaps who were visiting the spotless, dust-free war memorial that day, I have an allergy, that makes my eyes red and my nose runny. Must be allergic to marble.

The war memorial itself is astonishing. A casket containing the battle honours of the regiments sits atop a marble plinth, which is in turn mounted on the bare rock that rises out of a polished marble floor like a rock rising from a still ocean at night. This is the rock of the castle, the living rock of Scotland, the very roots of the country and the memories of the glorious dead, forever remembered, are directly connected to it.

For the record…just about held it together reading the inscription about the war dead being beyond hurt. Lip tremble time when I read the inscription about even the nameless being forever honoured, for their names are written in the book of God.

As I said, allergic to marble.

Postcard from Edinburgh – the Caledonian Express

The Caledonian Express is that rarest of railway birds; the sleeper. And an intentional one at that, having bunks and berths, stewards and a lounge car, instead of just knackered commuters dozing.

Sleeper trains essentially take the concept of the romance of rail and raise it to the power of crime and sex. Think sleeper train and you think Orient Express; where essentially posh people commit murder by perforating a chap while he sleeps. Knife crime is, as we know, a major issue in our inner cities and among the young, who would have thought it would also be such a problem among rich international travellers. And that’s just on a train. God alone knows what the murder rate is like on a cruise (for answer see ‘Death on the Nile’). And of course sex – the infamous ‘60mph club’, as made famous in ‘Don’t look now’ and ‘Belly of an archetect.


The reality is somewhat different. Trying to sleep on the Caledonian Express is not unlike trying to sleep in a tumble drier. Trains clank, and sway, and rumble and go over-the-points, over-the-points, over-the-points. They speed up and slow down and they are passed by other trains in the dead of night with a sort of swooshing roaring noise that has you reaching for your own genitals because hey, you’ve got to hang onto something in the event of a crash and that’s a good a thing as any.

But who cares about any of that, because charm triumphs over all. For any little boy who dreamed of being an astronaut, the Caledonian Express is as close as you are going to get to a space ship, or a submarine. The little cabin is perfect in every way, you even get a luxury toiletries kit. (Luxury being a relative term here. You may regard toothpaste and shaving as essential rather than luxury. Maybe it’s just there to impress the French). They should use these to offset complaints about prison overcrowding, give people a tiny cell but with a luxury toiletries kit and they’ll think they’re on holiday rather than starting a ten stretch for G.B.H.

I’ve always loved little toiletry kits. They are second only to those dining kits you get on aeroplanes, plastic cutlery and individual servings of condiments. I used to think that these were the height of sophistication because they came from airline meals. Of course the really sophisticated airline meals came with silver knives and forks and home-wrecker trolly dollies. Now, of course, you’re lucky to get a spork and if the security people had their way we’d be trying to eat soup with our fingers.

And who cares how small the cabin is when the countryside is rolling past in so stately a manner. Or, at least, I presume it to be. Even with the blind up the thing about a sleeper train is that it travels at night. I had a romantic notion that I would travel with the blind up and, looking out of the window, see the English countryside slip past, illuminated by moonlight with the occasional soft pinprick of light showing a distant farmhouse or crofter’s hut. Not quite. What trains do is travel, very quickly, through stations which at night are lit by sodium orange lights, the exact colour of sweets that they don’t make any more because of concerns about sugar and e numbers. This means that you have a fluorescent flashing light illuminating your cabin every few minutes and while that’s great if you’re off your tits on ketimin at some rave in Dorset, it’s no aid to restful sleep. Of course, having the blind up also opens you up to the very real risk – and this happened – of waking up the next morning to find yourself parked up in a station with a bloke in a high-vis jacket outside trying to pretend he’s not just seen you naked.

Where reality met fantasy was the lounge car. This was an eccentric mix of foreigners who did look like they had murder in mind if you pinched the last seat.

So while sleep may have eluded me as surely as it eluded MacBeth, the compactness of the cabin did impress. It was small the same way in which a cottage is small. It’s small because it’s just so, right and proper. It’s a cabin on a train and if one were to extend it, then interesting things would happen the first time the conservatory attachment went through a tunnel. The compact cabin means that everything is in reach while you’re lying in bed – genius! More, you get your breakfast and a paper delivered to you by your steward.


The compactness extends to the narrow-gauge corridor running the length of the sleeper carriages. To maximise cabin space the corridor is the width of a telephone box. Ironic that a train that serves a country with a love of fried food should have ‘you must be this thin to ride this train’ attitude. It’s OK for anorexics, corset enthusiasts and those that don’t have a problem wioth salad but what about Americans, Germans and fried-food fans? My bag was just about slim enough to squeeze down the corridor but getting it and me in to the cabin at the same time was something of a logistical feat. All those years of playing tetris finally paid off.

And you end up pitching up in Edinburgh in the early morning, a few minutes after the last reveller has gone to bed and the pavements are still wet with dew and the mixture and the weak solution of bleach they use to remove the signs of over indulgence. Make the most of it because this is the only time you will see the pavements empty of crowds and people trying to give you leaflets about their show.

Manoflage

Sat on the train this morning next to a woman who was, as occasionally happens, putting on her make-up.

You never see a bloke doing this, do you? Possibly this is because blokes, as a rule, don’t wear make-up. On the occasions that they do, you don’t want to be sitting next to them. Could you, for instance, stay sitting next to somebody who started applying green, black and brown stripes to their face? Possibly, but only if they were not also muttering under their breath.

I suppose a chap may be putting on his make up for work – although this only applies if you are a) a clown or b) in a KISS tribute band.

Sorry seems to be the hardest word

In the unlikely event that the young woman I almost trod on when getting off the train the other morning is reading this – apologies for almost treading on you.

I did say ‘sorry’ at the time, honestly. It’s just that it was early in the morning and my voice, rather rusty from several hours of not being used and several hours of red wine abuse prior to that, turned a cheery, apologetic ‘sorry’ into a growl that even scared me – so I’m not in the least surprised that you gave a ‘no problem’ smile but there was a flicker of apprehension in your eyes.

I am not at my best in the morning. To be honest, I am frequently not at my best but mornings are a particularly bad time in that the undertaking of normal social exchanges, like the one above, result in my coming off like a loon. This is, I think, in part because of the media. Before crime shows dominated the telly schedule, I looked like an inoffensive, gangly bispected bloke. Thanks to CSI etc. the world now knows that the gangly bispected bloke is the one with the lock-up full of dead cheerleaders. Thanks television.

So, AM social interaction best avoided I think. Apart from picking up my coffee and doughnut from Krispy Kreme, which is always a pleasure. This is because as I wait behind somebody buying their double dozen I occasionally run through what Hollywood calls the ‘cute meet’ scenario in my head. The ‘cute meet’ is when a couple are thrown together by a shared experience, for instance reaching for the same last doughnut and then getting into a ‘you have it, no you have it’ before the doughnut guy chops it in two and they pair bond over their doughnut and waddle off to have fat wheezy sex.

The reality is, at best, the bloke would say ‘you have it’ and the woman would say ‘thanks’ and that would be it, because I have learned that you do not get between a woman and doughnut. Or, more likely, it’s a hair-pulling, scratching rollaround fight over the last original glazed. Which is, of course, a ridiculous exaggeration…nobody would get into a fight over an original glazed. A custard filled chocolate coated though?

The Biggish Dump

Is that it? Three sodding inches? Given the media hysteria I was expecting to wake up to yetis. I think, to be fair, that my little corner of the world has gotten off lightly. Naturally, we had the usual issues – barely had a flake fallen when all the trains lost traction and all the schools closed. This meant that all the kids had to stay at home but that’s okay because the parents can’t get to work because no trains are running and the council has run out of grit.

In truth, it wasn’t the snow that was a problem, it was the freezing temperatures. The snow fell, then turned to ice. Which English people do not know how to drive on – moving over the ice with about the same level of style and confidence as a sobbing fat kid in a sequined jump suit a confidence building course, about to attempt a triple axle in front of the entire school.

The snow reveals a new landscape. Like Narnia with litter. It also reveals that after a week of snow last year, people still don’t prepare for the weather. Or, rather, the public appear to break down into two groups. There are those that go out dressed in the gear they bought for camping/walking or skiing holidays. The ones that spent a fortune on gear for a skiing holiday don’t look smug, they just look bloody grateful to finally get a chance to wear their expensive skiing jacket, because they can’t afford to go on the skiing holiday after the sterling exchange rate went down faster than a chubby girl on a black diamond run.

The rest fall into two sub-categories. There are those who take the sensible approach that layers of normal clothes are the way forward. This has two results, the first is that everyone is wearing so many layers of wool, gloves and scarves that they are only one top hat and case of rickets away from looking like the front of a Victorian Christmas card, the second is that they are well padded when the inevitable slip and slide occurs.

The second sub-group is teenagers. Presumably the shame of being seen outside enjoying themselves rather than hanging around in their bedrooms being sullen keeps them toasty, because leggings, a track suit top and ugg boots sure as hell is not going to do the trick.

Could the Government do more to prepare the population? Well, I reckon that they should hand out vouchers for pasta meals so that people can put on some winter weight and lower their centre of gravity for safety on the snow and ice (fat people are looking smug in this cold weather, it’s payback for all that sweating they do in August). Personally, I’m eating chips until the crisis passes. In addition, there needs to be a Government approved reading list; starting with ‘to build a fire’ by Jack London (does your spit crackle and freeze before it hits the ground? No, then stop whining). Also on the list – ‘Commando’ war picture library stories for boys; which regularly show plucky paratroopers making their way through the white stuff fortified with nothing more than Bovril, then laying waste to some Nazis.

The one group of people who really come out of this well are the weather broadcasters. People look at their telly screens during the weather bulletins like stone age man looking at the shaman making his way through chicken entrails, hanging on their every wise pronouncement. ‘More snow’ is a pretty safe bet at the moment. I don’t know what they use at the Met Office to forecast the weather, a supercomputer or a KFC family bucket, but for once they can do no wrong. It’s an old wise-mans’ trick; forecast doom and gloom and if only doom, or only gloom, or if neither doom or gloom arrive, nobody minds that much.

Except maybe those who were hoping for another day ‘working from home’. This allows you to do several things, including having a bottle of red with lunch and fortifying yourself with a snooze in the afternoon before knocking off early to get in some tobogganing before the light fades.

The blog entry now at platform 1...

Trains are by far the most romantic form of travel. Air travel had a brief flirtation with glamour but that ended when Concorde was removed from service. All the flat beds, showers in departure lounges and head massages in the world can’t disguise the fact that, even in the premium first cabin of a modern passenger jet, you’re still breathing the recycled exhalations of the proles back in super-economy and still possibly at the mercy of some bearded freak with a sharpened spoon.

First class travel on airplanes sells itself as luxury but the truth is that the huge passenger airplanes of today are really just big cattle wagons with wings. If first has beds, does economy now consist of a penny hang with a beverage cart option?

Rail, however, appears to be getting more and more luxurious. The newly refurbished St Pancras station has the longest champagne bar in the world! Train late? Who cares! Trains mean excitement, spies, the lady vanishes, nazi agents, stylish murders, brief encounters and assignations in the sleeper cars. Airplanes mean not being able to take your swiss army knife on board with you – a problem as it means you have nothing to fight off gremlins with.

Trains are great. Stations…less so. Recently there was some sort of train trouble on my morning commute and during a fifteen minute wait on the platform I and everyone else was subject to a audio torrent of announcements, all recorded. The first was apologising for the delay, the second reminding us to keep a look out for suspicious packages, the third telling us we can’t take bicycles on the train and the fourth making other announcements about delays and then the whole thing started off again! Bloody hell.

The worst thing is that the apology is so obviously computer generated. It’s maddening that something without a soul says it’s sorry – it’s like your VCR apologising if it records songs of praise over the porn tape you put together through recording the ten minute free view on the Hot Channel for two weeks. Even creepier would be if it was actually programmed to feel sorry. You just know that one day it would get into therapy and channel all that sorrow into aggression and the next thing you know you have a computer with a chip on its shoulder directing you to the wrong platform out of spite and laughing. That’s why I’m uncomfortable with anything more technologically advanced than a kettle.

Rage!

There seems, to me anyway, to be a lot of rage around these days. I think one of the reasons for this is that people feel victimised by nebulous forces of oppression beyond their control and that, when they get something to focus their aggression on, they turn from a seemingly normal person into a red-faced screaming quivering bundle of pressurised vileness, spittle flying from mouth, one step away from peeing themselves in anger or developing a nosebleed.

The other day walking across the railway station concourse, I saw a swearing young woman rushing in that way women do in high shoes, a sort of clip-cloppy run, knees bent and arse out as a counterweight to maintain balance, pursued by a ticket inspector who was trying to stop her without actually grabbing her by the boobs.

The scenario that fell into my mind was that she had caught a train but been unable to buy a ticket and, on getting to her destination had thought better of queuing to pay a penalty fare for the privilege of standing for twenty minutes on an overcrowded train that was running late and smelled of wee. Those exit barriers became the focus of all of the bottled resentment about public transport.

The problem is that there is no direct redress for the indignities we cannot escape from. That’s why blogs are so full of bile, vitriol and shite - we’re punching fog.

For example - the documentary about the death of Diana. (Why is it even on? Educating people or cynical exercise in rating grabbing - what the fuck are they trying to prove? ‘And so, we see, it really is safer to travel by pumpkin coach if you are a princess!’) I was fairly wound up by there being a(nother) (bloody) documentary. Then wound further up by the documentary team showing photographs of a dying young woman. Then wound even more up by their refusing to pull the photographs even though the woman’s young sons asked them too. But the capper was undoubtedly the defence that ‘her face would be obscured’.

What. The. Fuck.

That’s okay then is it - face obscured so it’s okay to show the pictures.

Well. I’m taking direct action. I considered chartering a Lancaster bomber loaded with 12 tonnes of horse shit and charting a course for the C4 building but, finally, decided on a boycott. That’s it for Channel 4 and me.

Actually, this is not so much of a sacrifice. The C4 schedules appear to be solid Big Brother for (checks paper), er, the rest of time. Still, must be easier than actually, you know, thinking up a programme idea.

Mobility

Why is it that with so many many many options for communication, what people actually say is dross.

The other morning on the commute (not quite hell, but I wouldn’t be surprised if one day Virgil and Dante were in the seat across from me, Virgil explaining that this is the Hell of the Procrastinators), a young woman spent the entire journey, and I mean 20 minutes, telling her friend that if the friend left the friend’s boyfriend, she’d ‘f**king dump her, right, because, right, it’s not right to treat people like that, right’.

I suspect that she’s actually shagged the friend’s boyfriend and that this is exactly the sort of thing that comes up during break-up conversations and our shouty mouthy phone fool doesn’t want that, as the last thing she needs is an assault from a former friend, powered by 20 bottles of WKD blue, holding the last two, broken, in each hand and about to try out some moves she learned from ‘Tekken’.

What struck me, other than that somebody can spend so much time on a conversation of so little import, was the poverty of the language on display. I think that this girl must have had a lexicon of about 200 words. No kidding, in her personal dictionary the entry for ‘right’ must be chuffing enormous, because it appears to cover just about every conversational possibility.

I’ve little doubt that to her, this was, right, really important right. I also suspect that I now know why mobile phone executives can afford such large yachts.

Right (!), off to what the Council term the ‘recycling centre’ but which I am still pleased to call the dump, to get rid of accumulated sacks of garden waste. This will be a bit tricky, as some of them have been in the back garden, basically composting in the rain. Oops. This means I’m going to have to try and transport sacks of stuff that are one step away from being declared ‘wetlands’ and protected as a habitat for damp and twigs.