![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Trains and guardian angels
Dec. 5th, 2006 12:26 amUp at 6:45, after a very late night trying to catch up with the email I have missed lately (last week when I was down in Cambridge handing over the keys to the house, and at the weekend entertaining my lovely children). I didn't sleep very well as I was sharing with a very wriggly -- albeit wonderfully warm and snuggly -- child. I got two sleepy kids (one very reluctant) ready for school, then we all sat in traffic for over an hour. It takes 35 minutes to go the first 1.5 miles, to the Morrisons in Bredbury. Whatever time we leave the flat, we get to school 5-10 minutes after registration. Never mind: with luck and a following wind, I will have moved somewhere much closer to their school in only another two weeks.
Swiftly out to Stockport station, worrying a little about the car which has started misfiring a little. I should have stayed in it, and driven to Bristol....
The train due to leave Stockport at 10:03 actually left at 10:29, arriving into Birmingham New Street five minutes after my connecting train to Bristol left (on time, unlike every other Birmingham/Plymouth train today).
Birmingham New Street, for those who don't know it, is a little corner of hell transposed to the Midlands. Just awful. If you want a vision of it, imagine a Very Loud Robot Announcer, shouting into a human ear, forever. While poor colourless specimens of humanity, our souls drained away by the brutal architecture and our spirits crushed by the endless delays, shuffle from Sbarro to WHSmith and back again. Ah, the irony that half of us are wearing iPods. Of course, I left mine at home.
Needless to say, the Very Loud Announcements included a 35-minute delay to the next Bristol train. Also I learned that Oceania is at war with Eurasia, and has always been at war with Eurasia. And the "eleven ... eighteen ... service from ... Plymouth ... is delayed by ... one ... hour and ... fifty eight ... minutes".
I didn't get to the client site until about 14:05.
Work went really well: the client is both clever and sensible, and the project breaks down nicely into small steps. It's going to keep me busy for the next week or so, and there's the prospect of more next year, for me and maybe for my colleagues. And somehow I stayed awake through it.
I left the client at 18:10. The taxi took 20 minutes to arrive, then took me to the station. I found somewhere to eat dinner (having missed breakfast and lunched on a something?-and-mayonnaise sandwich at BNS), and was then told that the next train to BNS was delayed by 30 minutes.
It wasn't the speediest of trains, and had to stop at Cheltenham Spa to wait for a relief driver. By the time it arrived at BNS at 22:01, the last train to Stockport had left. The late-evening Virgin trains north take two hours from BNS to Manchester Piccadilly. I'm hoping that I can find a bus from Man Pic out to Stockport, to pick up the car. If I'm lucky, I'll be back in bed by 01:30 tomorrow morning....
If there were any justice in the world, my guardian angel would have swooped down on me in Birmingham, carried me back home, and put me to bed. But there are no guardian angels, any more.
The train just slunk through Stockport, like an ex at a wedding, and I could see the car in the carpark.
Obviously my fatal mistake was stopping to eat dinner. Or maybe it was getting out of bed this morning.
[the above written on a train with dodgy 3G reception; I'm back at the flat now, at about 01:15]
Swiftly out to Stockport station, worrying a little about the car which has started misfiring a little. I should have stayed in it, and driven to Bristol....
The train due to leave Stockport at 10:03 actually left at 10:29, arriving into Birmingham New Street five minutes after my connecting train to Bristol left (on time, unlike every other Birmingham/Plymouth train today).
Birmingham New Street, for those who don't know it, is a little corner of hell transposed to the Midlands. Just awful. If you want a vision of it, imagine a Very Loud Robot Announcer, shouting into a human ear, forever. While poor colourless specimens of humanity, our souls drained away by the brutal architecture and our spirits crushed by the endless delays, shuffle from Sbarro to WHSmith and back again. Ah, the irony that half of us are wearing iPods. Of course, I left mine at home.
Needless to say, the Very Loud Announcements included a 35-minute delay to the next Bristol train. Also I learned that Oceania is at war with Eurasia, and has always been at war with Eurasia. And the "eleven ... eighteen ... service from ... Plymouth ... is delayed by ... one ... hour and ... fifty eight ... minutes".
I didn't get to the client site until about 14:05.
Work went really well: the client is both clever and sensible, and the project breaks down nicely into small steps. It's going to keep me busy for the next week or so, and there's the prospect of more next year, for me and maybe for my colleagues. And somehow I stayed awake through it.
I left the client at 18:10. The taxi took 20 minutes to arrive, then took me to the station. I found somewhere to eat dinner (having missed breakfast and lunched on a something?-and-mayonnaise sandwich at BNS), and was then told that the next train to BNS was delayed by 30 minutes.
It wasn't the speediest of trains, and had to stop at Cheltenham Spa to wait for a relief driver. By the time it arrived at BNS at 22:01, the last train to Stockport had left. The late-evening Virgin trains north take two hours from BNS to Manchester Piccadilly. I'm hoping that I can find a bus from Man Pic out to Stockport, to pick up the car. If I'm lucky, I'll be back in bed by 01:30 tomorrow morning....
If there were any justice in the world, my guardian angel would have swooped down on me in Birmingham, carried me back home, and put me to bed. But there are no guardian angels, any more.
The train just slunk through Stockport, like an ex at a wedding, and I could see the car in the carpark.
Obviously my fatal mistake was stopping to eat dinner. Or maybe it was getting out of bed this morning.
[the above written on a train with dodgy 3G reception; I'm back at the flat now, at about 01:15]
