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.
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.
Airports were the bane of my life for years. No more thank God.
ReplyDeleteI once had to wait 6 hours for a bus, on a Sunday; it enabled me to explore new and quite unsatisfactory levles of boredom. Everything was shut, the world had been switched off and I'd been left running, or so it seemed. After 4 hours I started to wonder if I'd imagined the whole thing and no bus was coming; yet when it did turn up it was all remarkably dull. I wonder how many years of our lives are spent simply waiting for things to arrive or happen; with less years left than when I started, I am learning to be more creative with my boredom...
ReplyDeleteMy worst wait was for a bus back to the station in Reading after an interview for a job I was never going to get… I waited for so long that I missed my train home on the first day of the new timetables. However, with some "creative" timetabling connecting I was able to use six short train journeys to get home only ten minutes after the "direct" train was due in, despite setting off an hour later.
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