LOND-DONE

London…

Sigh…!

Every January I'm compelled to make a visit to the place and every time I come away from it so full of loathing that it probably takes at least ten months before I can convince myself that I could tolerate a return.

It's such a ghastly place.

Really, I don't know why anyone would want to live there…*

Still, I suppose people do… and some people actually claim to love the place which, quite frankly, I find slightly worrisome.

This year's trip included the extra frisson of being required to purchase a ticket for my cross-London Underground travel over to the Docklands which meant queuing up, fathoming the subtleties of a rinky-dinky machine, and risking the wrath of the hundreds of waiting users standing impatiently behind me as I fed an extraordinarily huge quantity of coinage to the beast.

If I might get "political" for a moment, I'm sure that removing all of the ticket offices on the tube will make that particular nugget of funfulness far, far worse...

Still, I'm now home from my latest adventure in the Smoke, and, astoundingly, I'm still chock-full of the same old sense of dislike I have about the old capital city. After the long wait I mentioned in an earlier post, I was just about to get on the approaching train when I opened my bottle of Buxton Spring Water, only to discover that I'd unwittingly bought the sparkling kind, and so I clambered aboard looking as if there had been a sudden shower.

Happily, because this was a British train, nobody commented upon it and I was able to sail down the country without having to exchange any pleasantries with any of my unknown and unknowable travelling companions, whilst tutting every so often at the loud (and very Northern) lady who had to spend the entire journey supervising her staff by telephone instead of just letting them get on with it.

I, of course, remained more-or-less "gadget-free" seeing as I would rather gnaw off my own leg than actually have a conversation within earshot of a load of strangers. I swiftly bored of my book, too and, instead, passed a happy hour-and-a-half or so looking out of the window and watching the world go by, and fretting (ever so slightly) about that ticket-buying experience which still lay ahead of me…

Unhappily, once the ticket was eventually purchased, the sticky, sweaty, filthy and vandalised unpleasantness that calls itself London was crossed within an hour, the usual pictures of GitWorld (a.k.a. Canary Wharf) were taken, and the Trade Show was arrived at, viewed, and departed from, having done horrendous things to my lower back which will take days to recover from.

Once again, I persuaded m'colleagues to cross back through London to Euston station with an excess of time ("just in case") and we found ourselves face to armpit with the Underground during the rush hour which is, as always, a most delightful way of passing another hour of your life.

Having partaken of the annual hastily grabbed burger meal and discovered, as ever, that you really do need three arms to manipulate it and consume it, I ended up perched next to a bin trying to gobble it down which is, as ever, one of the finer eateries which the capital has to offer the wary traveller.

Shortly afterwards there was the usual mad dash for the designated platform (once it gets announced) in that daily game of "Passenger Roulette" so beloved of the station announcers at Euston, and, after a slight altercation in which I asked to get to my allocated seat and consequently scared off the bloke who'd already parked himself in the one next to it, I silently endured the return journey home on another packed train upon which there was, apparently, unreserved seating in coaches "F" and "U" (about which I'll pass no further comment…) and arrived back home at my own little sanctuary at around about 10:30 in the evening.

But, I'm more than certain that you don't want to hear about my travel woes or my professional unpleasantnesses, do you?

I'm sure that you'd much rather hear about the depression, misery and woe that overwhelms me every time I am required to go out into the big wide world, and how I end up mulling obsessively about my inability to interact with other people (or rather "People") under such circumstances in that affable, easy-going manner, which appears to come oh-so-very easily to just about everyone else, but which leaves me feeling awkward and stupid and being regarded as that "utterly strange and silent bloke" who sat opposite you all the way home from London…

No…?

Okay then…

It's probably for the best that I did just shut up, then...

*This posting has (you might already have guessed) been in no way supported by the London Tourist Board.

CONNECTIONS

It's complicated...

Living outside the connected immediacy of the urban sprawl can, from time to time, make it a little more difficult to fit the jigsaw pieces of your life together, and that can mean that, on occasions, quite a lot of time gets wasted.

Take, for example, the year's annual business trip to London.

Now, it's not one of my responsibilities to order the train tickets. I just get presented with them and the person who does get to order the tickets has to take in a lot of factors, not least of which is the cost of them.

This meant that, in order to save a couple of hundred quid, my seat was booked on the 9:45am Express out of Blogfordshire Central, with a plan to arrive in London by noon, get across town, spend the afternoon doing the necessary, and haul myself back across town to catch the 7:00pm Express home.

So far, so frantic.

However...

My usual morning routine involves an early start and a dash to our local station in order for my Beloved to catch the 7:15 into our own nearest city, a time at which there are, at least, still parking spaces available at our not-quite-local station.

The logical, rational option, the one that you yourself would probably consider if you were me, would be to drop her off, go home, drink some coffee and saunter back to the station to catch a later train to Blogfordshire Central.

But I'm seldom rational when it comes to matters of travel plans. There's just so much which could go wrong. I might return and find that there's nowhere to park. I might be late. The train which I need to make that connection might get cancelled.

Basically, there are so many ways that a plan could get ballsed up when you live out beyond the fringe, where nobody seems to worry if they mess up your finely honed plans on a mere whim, that I always feel that it's just best to get to where you need to be as soon as you can so that you can be certain that the next piece of the jigsaw does, at least, have a lug to latch on to.

Instead I will find myself with a two hour window during which I will walk around and around the platform trying to keep my mind busy and mentally composing written works of dubious genius which I will have forgotten again by the time I get home,  because, as sure as eggs is eggs, the book I will decide to take along with me will suddenly seem to be the worst possible option to have chosen and I probably won't find it diverting at all. Sadly, I have a history of lugging far too much rubbish along with me on these trips, filling my pockets with all kinds of pointless junk, so a second book option is probably not a good idea.

Oh well, at least there's the coffee shop to kill a minute or three, and there is a newsagents, even if it usually means that I end up lugging a newspaper up and down the country for no good reason, but, well, if anyone does feel the need to arrange a meeting with me, if, for some reason, you feel that I've been avoiding catching up with you for far too long, I appear to have a two hour wait for a train connection and not all that much to do this morning...

So, I'll take that as a "no" then.

WHO IS DISGUISE…?

Although I'm almost sure that all of the bright young sophisticates will probably snicker to themselves over my use of such an archaic term, I may have to disguise myself as what I still term, in my ignorant and simple way, a "metropolitan" again this week.

Yes, it's that time of year again, the annual day out when I have to drag my reluctant body down the country once more and spend a few hours in the ghastly metropolis that they call "London" for business purposes.

This means, of course, that I have to look the part so that my simple, country ways are not taken advantage of my those wicked people in the big, bad city.

Of course, I have absolutely no idea what a "metropolitan" is supposed to look like, but I fear that it may involve moisturiser…

Anyway, I will do my level best to sift through the contents of the wardrobe and attire myself in apparel which fails to scream "bumpkin" to all and sundry as the pass me by and chuckle cruelly at my simple, homespun manner.

This, I imagine, will require me to tie my scarf in a particular manner and carry all my things in a satchel or "man bag" in order to blend in (or are those already SO 2013...?) I shall need to shun my annual treat of a swiftly grabbed fast-food meal and instead look longingly at the falafel wraps being sold at the healthy options outlet on Euston station.

There may need to be some sort of scent splashed on, and my dog-eared old book will have to be dismissed in favour of my rinky-dinky screen-based option just so that there cannot be any laughing and pointing or (even worse) "hilarious" photos taken of both me and my "old-fashioned" ways and cruelly posted to the world wide web so that they can mock me too.

Cyber-bullying is a very bad thing, people.

Remember that.

And even if the cyber-bullying is a surreptitious photograph snapped of a silly looking man who's just doing his best to blend in and will probably never even see the photograph you've taken, it's still bullying of a sort...

MY DAY OUT IN WORDS

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…

MY DAY OUT IN PICTURES

Cold Steel

Virgin Pendolino

Ice Warning

Snow and Ice

Mist and Steam

Euston 15 Minutes Late

A glimpse of a landmark

Trade Show

Gaming Machines

A glimpse of the Thames (probably)

Wandering Traders

Trading and Telephones

Euston 17:38

Train Home Version 01

Train Home Version 02

BURNING STICK

I don’t know really what to make of the grand tour that the Olympic Flame seems to be currently making, progressing (or processing) all around the country, meandering its way eventually towards London by the most roundabout way possible. The idea behind this is probably a pretty sound one, in that for anyone who wants to see the thing, it will pass within fifteen miles of every postal code in the country at some point during its journey.

Personally, I’m really not all that fussed about the Olympics, if truth be told. It just seems like a lot of running and jumping and standing still to me that seems to have added up to a huge bill for very little reason, but then I’ve always found most competitive sport to be fairly pointless, so I’m probably not the best judge.

In my humble opinion, once Greece had gone to all the trouble of building all of their stadia back in 2004, it would have made a lot of sense if the international community had accepted that the Olympics had finally “come home” and just replenished and refurbished those venues and held the competition there every four years instead of going through all of the rigmarole of bidding and building and overspending and security worries that always seems to come alongside any of the games.

Holding them in Greece might guarantee some decent weather, too, which is more than London can, although it might be lucky.

You never know…

I remember watching the rowing back in 2004 whilst I was working on a writing project during the early weekend mornings and thinking what a lovely backdrop the event had. Somehow any and all of the venues this year just seem to me as if they can’t help but be a little bit drab and ordinary, because that’s pretty much how things are over here. Mind you, I always thought that the Thames motorboat chase sequence in “The World is Not Enough” looked drab and ordinary, but international audiences seemed to like it, so what do I know? Perhaps it’s just that the place in which you happen to be living in always seems a little bit ordinary, whereas everywhere else seems more exotic.

Except Sydney. People living in Sydney always seem to look terribly smug to be the people living somewhere so spectacular and beautiful looking. That young chef who made that “Bill’s Food” programme (Bill, I think his name was...) always looked particularly pleased with himself…

Purely as a matter of passing interest, and mostly because I wanted to take umbrage at the fact that Lesser Blogfordshire is so far beyond the back of beyond that the torch would fail in its mission of passing within our fifteen mile radius, I had a quick look at the route and was rather disappointed to find that it was indeed passing within only eight miles of Holmes Towers. Curses! These planners are better at these things than I like to give them credit for...

Not that I’ll be going.

We did, when discussing it at work, wonder whether it was worth planning an “office day out” as an excuse for going and having a gawp, but we decided against it. This was just as well because it turned out that our particular opportunity to see the mighty flame is due to take place on a Sunday morning, and it will have left the area by 10.10 AM that day. Whether it manages to reach its destination at 7.30 in the evening after its thirteen and a half hour journey that day remains to be seen. After all, the route shows it passing through at least three areas in which I might expect somebody to have a go at nicking the thing and flogging it off for its metal content, or (if any of those hypothetical thieves are daft enough - as they might very well turn out to be) flog it off for the price of a small house on Ebay...

So cynical…

Still, I do wonder how many people they will actually persuade to get up to get into town for 6 o’clock on a Sunday morning just to see a burning stick go fleetingly by on its way to go everywhere but its proper destination for 70 days...

Well, it was always a bit of a hard sell in my book, but then I guess I’m not really in their target demographic, and I’m fairly sure that the whole thing will be terrifically successful and engender some level of “Civic Pride”. After all, who wants to be seen to be the only city that didn’t come out and support this great venture, or mad folly (delete as applicable), especially in the only part of the whole flipping thing - apart from the sailing of course - that actually seems to want to include anywhere in the country outside the capital…?

WORLD VIEWS

I was recently told about a friend of a friend who has just returned from teaching in South Korea and what a beautiful country she had thought it was, and how she couldn’t wait to get back there and it really set me thinking. This idea of that part of the world didn’t quite fit in with the image I had of it. It seems to me that in our parochial little existences, much of what we believe we know about a place is guided by the images we see in our newspapers, magazines and televisions and, rather sadly, that tends to mean that we either get horrific images of conflict and poverty, or else we get the Sunday supplement travel section sanitised version. Reality is, I imagine for most places, somewhere in between.

I read the “No, 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency” books by Alexander McCall Smith which the beloved put me on to (in fact I’ve just recently finished reading the latest paperback release) which manage in their own delightfully simple way to paint a picture of Botswana that is so delightful in comparison to most of what you hear about African nations. I’ve known people go off and live their entire adult lifetimes in Kenya and Zambia, but still, my ‘worry’ radar will start to ping if I ever contemplate going there myself. In my head, despite all the travel documentaries I’ve seen and the fact that I’ve actually stood on that continent myself, the whole notion of ‘Africa’ seems just a little bit scary. Why, for example, does my brain instantly think ‘murder capital of the world – best avoid’ whenever Johannesburg is mentioned and despite the fact that I’ve known people who quite happily head there as often as they have the option to…?

Strangely enough, before I read any of those books, I’d assumed from the book jacket designs that they were all set in India which probably proves something or other that’s not very impressive about my recognition skills when it comes to cultural symbols and iconography. This is probably why I need to travel more, and I need to accept that most places are fine as long as you follow the advice you’re given, read up on a place well in advance and avoid the designated ‘hot-spots’. Maybe another part of the problem is that we tend to prefer to tell our ‘horror stories’ to people rather than dwelling upon how lovely a place is. Maybe we all fear, deep down, that that’s just too dull a tale to tell, and we live in a culture where one of the things we most fear is to be considered ‘boring’ (these musings excepted, of course…).

However, you tend to hear a lot about how ‘horrible’ all kinds of destinations can be from returning holidaymakers despite having found the place delightful yourself. Long ago when former Yugoslavia was still Yugoslavia I worked with someone who returned from there with nothing good to say about the place, yet our family holidays spent there when I was little more than an ankle-biter were fine and lovely (although I did misplace a jacket in Dubrovnik once upon a long ago, something that still irks me…) and it was with a heavy heart that I listened to the news when Yugoslavia went into meltdown during the 1990s, and I was dreadfully upset when I heard about what was happening in and indeed to Dubrovnik at the height of the conflict there. Somehow whenever you visit somewhere you leave a piece of yourself there, and equally you bring a part of it back with you, so there always seems to be some connection with a place once you’ve walked there in your own shoes, I find.

But, of course, no matter what you might discover about a place, and no matter what may happen there to bring it into the media spotlight (and let’s face it, more often than not it’s not for the best of reasons on the whole…), so many people live perfectly ordinary uneventful lives in all of these places and are proud to call them home and look back on their childhoods and their sense of place with as much nostalgic affection as you are I have to the streets that we grew up in, despite how grey, dismal and unimpressive they might appear to the impartial observer.

Of course some people look back at where they grew up and think “I couldn’t wait to get out of there…” but if they actually go there, they are very quickly telling you how it’s changed and who used to live where which probably just means that this fondness for a sense of having once belonged ‘somewhere’ is more deeply ingrained than many of us choose to think, and we can still mourn the loss of those silly little icons of our own past that probably mean nothing at all to anyone else, when a familiar building or street is torn down.

If you believed what you see in American TV dramas, you’d probably never want to go anywhere near the USA, but I’ve generally been fine whenever I’ve gone there, apart from the occasional incident that I put down to my own shortcomings, and I’ve hardly seen any guns at all (although my idea of what New York might be like is a bit scary…). I do, however, find the very idea of being in New York terrifying, quite frankly, although I’ve known people who’ve been and thoroughly enjoyed it. I fear that if I did ever book that hotel just off Times Square that I’ve considered every so often, I might well be just too terrified to leave it. That’s just me, I suppose. I think I’d always prefer a knowledgeable local guide to show me the ropes before I head out on my own, but then I’d bet you’d find very few Americans who could understand that you might feel safer spending a week in South Korea rather than a week in their own great nation.

Did I not once hear that more than 60% of Americans don’t even hold a passport…? I can actually believe that if this story I once heard is true. A former colleague of mine was working in Las Vegas and had a conversation with a guy about the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and the guy said “We’ve got that, here in Vegas”, and had much the same response to mentions of various other European landmarks that followed. The replicas were, in his opinion, just as good, if not better than the originals and he had no intention of going to see those when all he wanted to see were the versions which he could see in Vegas. Interestingly, I know of a British couple who flew to a Las Vegas hotel to get married because it has a replica of Venice in one of the hotels, and were frankly surprised when someone suggested that they could have flown to, er, Venice instead.

The televisual image that America presents to the world is of disaster-prone cities where you daren’t venture out on the streets, even in broad daylight for fear of shooting or worse, or a countryside strewn with freakish ‘small-town’ communities full of psychopaths and weirdos who want to inflict any kind of humiliations on any passing stranger who might fall into their clutches. Either that or homogenised corporate town where no-one is allowed to step out of line or be the slightest bit nonconformist, full of teenage sex, drugs and sports obsessive townsfolk who are continually bursting into song or striving to grasp the elusive American dream. I suspect that the truth is nothing like most of these things, and wonder whether the American Tourism Bureau shouldn’t have a quiet word in the ears of the Networks…

Mind you, and to be perfectly fair, London can be a place that you either think of as being the greatest city on earth or a dreadful place that you’d have to be dragged kicking and screaming to, and I’m sure this is not helped by recent images from those mean streets of rioting and looting. Many Londoners fail to understand how you might think this if you mention it to them. “How could you not want to live there?” they will ask, their eyes wide open in that horror-struck metropolitan dinner-party manner they have whenever you mention a thought that is considered ‘unfashionable’.

Then there are the emigrants to Australia who have left these shores full of hopes and dreams and returned within three years having truly hated the place. I spent eight years of my life living in an area of Manchester that was always considered by people I talked to as being ‘a bit rough’ but I survived it and look back on it with a certain amount of affection. Yes there was an above average level of crime, but you can get robbed pretty much everywhere if you’re not careful.

One of the great pleasures in my life is listening to test match cricket from all around the world, and if I was ever lucky enough to have the means to do so (very unlikely…) I would follow the tours around as much as I could, but I’ve always thought that I might be selective about which of the tours I went on, thinking that I’d maybe prefer to follow the New Zealand, Australian and West Indies tours in preference to the perception of how chaotic it might be to try and follow those in India or Sri Lanka. This is, of course, my own fear that is speaking to me because our “cricket correspondents’ seldom have anything bad to say about any of the countries they visit, and in fact some go as far as to say that any true ‘fan’ of the sport should really experience Cricket in India at least once in their lives, so maybe I’m wrong.

The problem is, I’m never very good if I feel out of my depth or out of control, as I suspect I might in these places. Even now I still wonder how I managed to cope with the fascinating organised bedlam (as I saw it) of Egypt as, if I’m being totally honest, I’m the sort of scared traveller who once had a kind of cultural ‘panic attack’ in a hotel in California and that was despite having been there before and having no language barrier to worry about. I put it down to having just flown in, but when even a country’s light switches or urinals can cause confusion to the unwary, what hope is there for any of us?

Looking at things another way...

Most places are home to someone, and most places hold fond memories, too. A place that can look frankly terrifying to an outsider has its own rules and internal logic that works quite happily for the people who live their lives there. After all, even Paul Simon’s love letter to New York contains the line “Looking down on Central Park, where they say you should not wander after dark…” and I guess that home is wherever you are living right now, or a place where you once did, and should be place where you feel safest, and, ultimately, it doesn’t really matter what anyone else might think of it.

THE BIG METROPOLIS

Once or twice a year, I have to head out of my humble hermitage here in Lesser Blogfordshire and go to London for the day on a business trip. It’s for the annual trade show(s) for the business I happen to work in and it is seen as a necessary component of my working life.

Some might consider such a thing to be something of a perk, and many of my friends and colleagues in the industry do tend to stay overnight and involve themselves in the social networking that seems necessary for the wheels of commerce to keep on spinning or, at the very least, turning for a little longer.

Now, living as I do in this rural backwater of Lesser Blogfordshire, the prospect of being in the big city doesn’t fill me with any kind of joy at all, so I tend to slink in like a thief in the night and try to sneak back out again without anyone ever really noticing.

I know a lot of people who live in London rave about how utterly fabulous the city is but every year I spend a few hours there and head home feeling utterly defeated by the old place. It doesn’t help that, no matter how sparklingly fresh and clean my clothes were when I put them on in the morning, by the time I arrive at my destination I just feel filthy, although, to be fair, as part of the travelling is the getting there, not all of that can be down to London itself.

It didn’t get off to the best of starts. Heading into town from Lesser Blogfordshire was pleasant enough, as I got to share my train journey with the beloved for once, and despite my usual timekeeping angst due to the fact that I had to queue up to get a ticket, we had a happy enough journey in.

I had a long wait for the scheduled train journey I held a ticket for and so I popped into the platform’s café for a swift coffee and I ran into a couple of former colleagues from the company I used to work for once, and had a pleasant little chat, catching up and so forth which, as you’ll well know, is not really me at all.

Then the train before mine got cancelled and, when mine came in, this meant that everyone from the previous train was also on it and any previous reservations had been cancelled. I briefly spotted m’colleague surrounded by the folk who had swiftly overwhelmed him and left him unable to save me a seat nearby and headed off to find a seat otherwhere. Before that, of course, there was the slight spat that happened before my very eyes as one commuter with more gumption than me demanded that someone vacated the seat he had reserved and was being terribly emphatic in his insistence, despite being told of the new arrangements. Eventually the chap who had filled the seat stood up angrily and flounced away with an “Oh have it then!” whilst I had a terribly English “Well I’m not trying that” moment.

More mild commuter rage came later from the seat next to the one I eventually found, back in the “quiet coach” so I couldn’t even bring myself to switch on the phone for fear of it beeping with m’colleague’s frantic messaging of his own woeful travel tales. A woman nearby asked the ticket inspector to ring immediately as she needed assistance with disembarking at Euston but she had arranged this from the now cancelled train. Her response to the young lad’s polite enough question “Were you put on the train at Piccadilly?” was met with a frosty “I was assisted onto the train, I am not a piece of luggage!”

Which is fair enough, I suppose.

Mental note made to self on acceptable terminology.

Apart from that, London was achieved easily enough and my paper and my book whiled away the journey. M’colleague and I met up and, after a brief exchange of our tales of adventure, headed off into our nation’s capital with a renewed sense of purpose.

"Welcome to the Pleasuredome"
A theme park ride but without the "fun" part

I know that I’m not seeing it at its best on these trips. Arriving at a railway terminal, descending into a tube station and connecting to a monorail – kind of like a theme park ride but without the “fun” part - to get to an exhibition centre is hardly the brightest and shiniest way to view any city, but the place always seems to be so soulless and uninviting. M’colleague and I work in separate places and are rarely in the same space, but we spent a jolly enough few minutes trying to spot any green amongst the concrete as we chugged along on the DLR system.

I’m not one for glamorising the idea of a place, believing that you have to take it as you find it, but I really find precious little to love in the Urban Jungle and I really fail to see the appeal. Ultimately I really don’t have any “London Pride” or sense of “National Identity” with my nation’s capital and am happy to get out of the place as swiftly as I can once the business that has taken me there is done. Now, I’m sure that, as an international capital city, it serves its purpose terribly well and that those of the population that are bothered by such matters find it suitably admirable, fit for purpose and adequate for the task in hand, but crikey o’riley it’s a grim old place.

I’m not sure that easy access to museums, art galleries, theatres and monuments would ever be enough of a compensation to me having to actually live there. Once upon a long ago I did spend a late Saturday night/early Sunday morning walking around the streets near the monument with some friends, but I do believe that it’s probably my only happy memory of London.

Anyway, with the exhibition viewed, the overpriced luncheon eaten and the necessary chat chatted, I set out alone in the rush hour to head for home, essentially reversing the morning’s journey under cover of darkness and leaving m’colleague to spend his overnight stay socialising in the company of others in the business.

I did allow too much time for my crossing across town after compensating for an endless wait last year for a DLR train to turn up, and so, after braving the horrors of the Northern Line, I spent a soul-destroying hour or so in Euston station trying to decide what to eat and when to eat it.

“When” because I’d managed to actually blag a seat in the concourse and I needed to time it so I didn’t have to stand for too long after I’d relinquished it to go for my food.

Timing in these matters is everything.

“What” was slightly more difficult for there is a multitude of choices to be had to fill the stomachs of the weary traveller as they set about their journey. I queued briefly for an evil burgerzoid before changing my mind when I spotted a “healthy options” type hand-made sandwich shop as I walked off to have a look to see where the toilets were, even though I very quickly decided that things were really not all that desperate and so was able to decline the opportunity for a 30p pee.

A brief and fruitful visit to the newsagents for some supplementary reading materials and after some standing around and attempting to eat whilst obviously somehow managing to get in nearly everybody else’s way, the train was finally called and, with a great deal of relief, I settled myself down on a half-empty train and was soon heading back towards what I think of as civilisation.

So that’s me “Lon-done” for a little while at least, and I’m gratefully back home in my little green and pleasant corner of this land, far away from the hustle and bustle of the big metropolis and its strange people and their odd little metropolitan ways, and I really still can’t see what people see in the wretched place.

To each their own, I guess.