To be honest I really didn’t want
to go this time.
I was still struggling to get rid
of my New Year cold, there was still the ongoing minor family crisis, and when
the weather took the turn for the worse that it did last week, and then stuck
around getting even more worse than that, and so the prospect of dragging my
weary bones all the way to London for the day for this year’s annual trade show
really did not appeal.
After all, it was bad enough
worrying about how and whether I was going to get there without facing the
prospect of battling and struggling to get home again afterwards. Reports from
the Capital implied that the transport system was struggling to cope and when
your tickets have specific journeys printed upon them, things like connections
can get a little too dicey for a punctuality-obsessed person like myself.
I vaguely remembered – possibly wildly
inaccurately - that there had been some talk at one point about not “having” to
go at all this year, but then the tickets got ordered so what could I do other
than grin and bear it…?
And so, once again I faced a long hard
day of travelling and trying as hard as I could to be vaguely sociable, after a
lousy night’s sleep and a whole day of anxiety and trouble, simply to have the
prospect of walking around an exhibition hall, finding out what all of our
competitors are up to, and then feeling bad about it, and all with the added
prospect of perhaps having to face some imagined fallout from some of the
technical issues which we were aware had developed during last week’s final
frenzied push to try and get everything done in time.
Basically, it was not expected to
be the “fun day out” some might think it might be.
And then there was a quandary.
Would it be best to drive all the
way to the main line station, risking rush-hour traffic jams in the ice and
snow, but consequently not having to deal with possible cancellations of the
local trains due to the adverse weather conditions and the horrors of late-night
connections…?
Or would it be better to just catch
the local train and live dangerously…?
After much dithering, I went with
the train option, which did give me a rare opportunity to observe a woman doing
her complete make-up routine, from pancake to final touches, whilst sitting
upon a moving train.
Arriving at the main-line station,
I had a forty-minute wait there rather than risking going to the city centre
station and possibly missing my connection after enduring the “sardine can”
effect that tends to happen after the intervening stops.
The train rolled in on time and,
despite the snow and the ice, and I think for the first time ever, m’colleagues
and myself all managed to actually end up travelling down on the same train at
the same time, instead of one or other of us having a connection crisis and
having to buy a brand new ticket in order to get there at all.
Granted, the vagaries of online
booking meant that we didn’t get to sit together (which may have been very
shrewd planning on someone’s part…) but we
were all going in the same direction at the same time, even if our train was
reportedly “back-to-front” with those of us in the common herd being, for once,
in the carriages at the front of the train, and “first class” being at the
back.
I did wonder how that could
happen, given that the train runs backwards and forwards on rails between Manchester
and London every day.
It must have been one heck of a
skid…!
Anyway, we got to London with the
staff apologising for the 15-minute lateness of our arrival which, given that
the entire country was coated with snow at the time, seemed to be pretty
impressive to be honest. We crossed London using the time-honoured tradition of
Underground trains (in their 150th anniversary year… the Northern
Line we were using being one of the oldest, as I was able to drearily explain
from a factoid I learned from book I read last year) and the Docklands Light Railway with the opportunity it offers to jeer
at the bank buildings.
We arrived to be greeted by the
boss wearing an astonishingly colourful tie, and telling us jovially of “101
problems which might be about to become 102…” Later on he would tell us tales
of the extortion being committed by the venue electricians demanding hundreds
of pounds to install extra sockets which you could only use for the three days
of the show’s duration before they took them away again, and the threats to not
let you have any power at all if you refused to pay up.
Then it was the usual routine of
going around the stands, looking at what everyone else is working upon,
assessing your own relative professional shortcomings and hoping to improve
upon them, eating an overpriced sandwich or two, and meeting and chatting to
some old acquaintances, whilst also managing to not meet others who you heard
were around but never actually ran into, despite it being a small and rather
enclosed world…
Perhaps they tended to leap behind
a handy pillar whenever they spotted me. After all, if I was better at
recognising people, it’s what I would probably do...
A few hours later, I turned around
and headed home again, stopping at a “Burger King” to buy that annual
indulgence which I pay dearly for a dozen hours later, and arriving home
completely exhausted around about ten o’clock at night and wondering, like I do
each year, whether I get as much out of these events as I really ought to be
doing…
No comments:
Post a Comment