The Long Road
The endless travelling has come to an end for a few days. I've been wondering how best to organise the avalanche of stories, thoughts, and recollections about the past few weeks, but a mixture of tiredness and fatigue is causing any kind of organisation to remain hopelessly elusive.
Perhaps the best plan would be to just write.
Owing to half the country vanishing beneath the surface of a vast inland sea over the last month, I had to become somewhat creative in my journey from Marlow to London each day. Normally the commute involves a walk to the train station, and one change of trains. These are not normal times.
For the past week I have been falling out of bed at 5:30am, having a wash, getting dressed, clearing the kitchen up, and then making the short journey to the nearest bus stop to catch the 6:45 service to High Wycombe.
Monday was something of a baptism of firemainly because the bus driver having no change. This caused the ridiculous situation where he couldn't let people travel for free, but couldn't give change either. I gave him too much money on the agreement that he would pay me back when he reached the bus station (which he did, and all was fine). Not all passengers were as amenable as meone man shouted obscenities at the driver, and told him to “shove his bus service right up his arse” before storming off down the road.
The next leg of the journey involved a ten minute walk across Wycombe from the bus station to the railway station. In the early morning this walk was mercifully quietI often saw nobody while traversing the bus station, the shopping centre, and the rabbit warren of roads leading to the station.
Once on the platform at High Wycombe Station, it took a couple of days to figure out where best to stand along the platformand which train carriage would have the fewest people in. I eventually figured out that one of the cars invariably had cheaper seats in it, and therefore the local snobs brigade avoided itwhich suited me fine. I didn't have to stand up all week.
The Chiltern Railways line from High Wycombe arrives at London Marylebone after about half an hour of thundering through entirely unremarkable countryside. My normal South West route to Paddington has far better viewswhen it's not submerged under five feet of water. Marylebone is a strange stationthe over-ground area is tiny compared to the likes of Paddington, or Kings Cross, whereas the underground lines are something of an ants nest of interconnected tunnels and escalators.
Mercifully the journey along the Bakerloo, and Victoria lines underneath London take very little time at all. It had never occurred to me before that although the more central lines are packed like sardines with commuters, the trains run far more often than the circle line.
Quite predictablygiven my previous stint of several years commuting into Londonit only took a few days for the tiniest of irritations with other commuters to pull away at me like loose threads;People pulling trolley bags along in crowds. No. Don't you dare. You have no idea of the chaos happening in your wake, because you don't think about othersotherwise you wouldn't have a stupid trolley bag, would you.
People standing directly in the middle of train doors, waiting for them to open when they can see there are a lot of people waiting to get off the carriage, onto the platform. Where do you think they are going to go, numbnuts? Through you?Old people that prepare to get off the train ten minutes before arriving at the destination station, and then walk slower than everybody else behind them all the way along the platform, causing chaos. Every. Damn. Time.
The pretty girls that cram in against you on the underground, and make no attempt to avoid falling against you as the train rounds corners, accelerates, or brakes. Of course if a man fell against a pretty girl there would be hell to pay.
I could go on. It's not like anybody does anything that wrongit's just tiny things that eat away at you, day by day.
Once out of the confines of Victoria station, a final turn delivers you suddenly onto the Buckingham Palace road, and within sight of the destination. Walking the streets of London is a skill all of it's ownavoiding being run over, and more importantly avoiding the masses of people.
I have never quite understood why some people make their way through crowds so much more quickly than me. While I might start out alongside somebody, within a very short distance they seem to be a very long distance ahead of me. It can't be size related, because I'm huge. It must be something to do with me being nice, and everybody else being a pig.
The greater part of each day was spent in the office of a client, and not really leaving until darkness had fallen. The hopes of learning my way around a new part of London were dashed pretty spectacularly. Apart from finding my way to the nearest grocery shop to avoid the all-too-accurate “overpriced coffee guy” from the LEGO movie, I really saw none of the surrounding area.
Actuallythat's a lie. A couple of weeks ago I had to walk from Paddington to Victoria because the London Underground staff went on strike. It was only a two mile walk each way, but it at least offered the chance to wander through Hyde Park. Of course fate intervened, and rained cats and dogs down on me for the entire trek.
Journey's home have been unremarkable in the extrememore by design than anything. I figured out pretty quickly that I could get from one end of my journey to the other in about an hour and a half if everything went right, which it always seemed to. The walk to the bus station for the final leg of the journey always seemed to be accompanied by nuttersI'm not sure whyor if I was one of the nutters.