A day away, and a journey home
I woke up yesterday morning in yet another hotel bed, several hundred miles from home. I only took a change of shirt and underwear with me, so getting up, showered, dressed, and ready to check-out took literally minutes.
Breakfast at the Holiday Inn Express is free, so I wandered down at about 7:30am.I guess you get what you pay for with hotel breakfasts – free gets you rubber scrambled eggs, cold sausages, luke warm baked beans, chemical orange juice, and passable instant cappuccino from a machine.
While trying to catch the various pieces of rubber egg on my plate, I took part in my favourite hotel activity – people watching. It always strikes me that hotel restaurants are a great leveler at breakfast time – filled with business people, families, old people, and the occasional ravenous teen that makes trip after trip after trip back to the buffet bar. I sat next to a petite businesswoman, dressed in a sharp suit, with jet black straight hair, and a plate full of pastries. Just across from us was a family from China, with small children sitting quietly, watching the rest of the room intently. The ravenous teen this time was a young man in a replica football jersey. I would estimate he ate perhaps six or seven pastries, and downed six or seven glasses of orange juice. Impressive.
After becoming distracted with my mobile phone for a while – reading emails, instant messages, and catching up on the news, the time came to fetch my bag and check out of dodge.
Hopefully you'll understand why I cannot share the middle part of my day (the boring part where I sit in a board-room in front of my laptop, and resist the urge to headbutt it for six or seven hours). Towards the tail end of the day one of the people I was working with asked how long my journey home would take.
“About 5 hours”
“Oh my word – we need to finish now then – you're not going to get home until 10 tonight!?”
“Pretty much...”
I smiled, and began packing everything away. After a waved goodbye, I started off down the road. While passing an underground car park en-route a homeless guysitting in the sunshine saw me coming and smiled – holding both thumbs up as I approached.
“Lovely day”, he said. I nodded, and smiled.
“I can't take this any more. I'm 56. I really can't take this any more...”
I had one of those awful moments where I wondered if it was more important to stop and talk to the homeless guy, or to carry on towards the first of three connecting trains, and home. It would mean the difference between getting home at 10pm, and 11pm. I carried on walking, but then felt guilty about doing so.
After standing on a never ending platform in the middle of the small city that is Leeds railway station for ten minutes, my train came rumbling through, and I started figuring out my best chance of finding a seat (I had no seat reservation). I was lucky. I managed to bad the very last seat at the back of the train.
A few minutes later an Asian guy sat down next to me. He was travelling with a girl – they were both in their early 20s – they looked like students. He sat next to me – she sat in front of him, so he spent the first few minutes of the journey leaning around the seat in front to talk to her. After a short time he turned around to me;
“I can see why you sit at the back – there's much more leg room, isn't it”
I nodded. He had a voice similar to Alan Carr (chat show host). It's the kind of affected voice that's funny for a few minutes, but ultimately drives you nuts.
About an hour into the first leg of the journey, while reading a book on the Kindle, I noticed his hand in my peripheral vision. He was slowly pushing the arm-rest down between us – using his finger tips to do it, as you might fondle something sexually. I tried and tried to ignore it, but eventually looked across at what he was doing. He stopped dead in his tracks, and slammed it back into position.
“It doesn't matter”, he said, shrugged, and turned away from me.
What the hell ?was an act, probably in order that she would allow him closer than she otherwise might have. He took a call while she wasn't around, and the entire act vanished – his entire accent, vocabulary, and character changed. When she returned he ended the phone call quickly, and switched back to the camp BFF act.
Unbelievable.