LAND OF MY FATHERS

For the first time in quite a while, I had to go to our head office in South Wales on Monday for a meeting, which meant a long day's travelling and might also explain that it took me a while to "get back to you" if you'd been wondering…?

No…?

Ah well, never mind. Barely even noticed I'd gone, eh…? That's the ticket.

Anyway, it was the sort of meeting where there was an agenda issued.

Yes, and I've become the sort of person who has to go to meetings now...

Meetings are cool! 

Not only that, but they're the kind of meetings which have agendas…

Now, you'll probably be thinking that I've perhaps gone up in the world and maybe attained some level of importance, but (thankfully) that's not the case. It's more a question that the game of "Spin The Blame Bottle" found the neck pointing towards me, and so I had to go and place mine upon the executioner's block.

Okay, so I am exaggerating a little, but that's how it felt when I woke up at 3.30am with the prospect of two hours of staring into the darkness ahead of me before I needed to get up and drive to the station to catch the first train of the day, and, given that the only item on that agenda of any significance seemed to be (to paraphrase slightly) "Give Martin a damned good kicking… A lot." I wasn't really looking forward to it all that much.

Coffee and lunch were both on the agenda, too (because it was that sort of a meeting), as was my departure for the station to catch my train home, so, as you can see, apart from the "good kicking" item, they were rather struggling to come up with anything else for us to put on the list.

Luckily, my "severe talking to" looked as if it might take some time, so a short agenda was probably a bit of a blessing for everyone else who received a copy.

Anyway, I got up on a freezing morning and grabbed a bowl of cereal before we headed out of the door to scrape the ice off the car. Then I bought my single fare to town because I was being collected by m'colleague to travel down in his "authorised and properly insured for business" vehicle, but, because he was staying longer to endure a training course, I was to travel home alone.

Hence that final item on the agenda.

Anyway, despite that early start, it transpired that the traffic from m'colleague's house to the station I was waiting at was very, very, very lousy, and so I ended up lurking hopefully at the kerbside for the best part of an hour and a half.

Did I mention that it was also very icy…?

So, the long wait in the c-c-cold made me feel rather c-c-cross and there was much ch-ch-chunnering and ch-ch-chuntering as I "reckoned" away to myself thoughts like "You wouldn't treat a dog like this" whilst pondering upon the belief that I'd done my time lurking about waiting outside in the cold and the darkness back in the days when I used to get up at 3.00am to do overtime, or when I was a boy newspaper delivery operative.

I did, to be honest, get more than a little testy, as the various messages I sent to the Beloved might just testify, because, whilst I know it's bad enough with me being miserable all the time, me being cold and miserable takes it to a whole new level.

Still, despite the fact that m'colleagues Sat-Nav took him to completely the opposite side of the station to the one at which I would have expected it to, we met up eventually, and my mood thawed alongside my body temperature and my countenance for the duration of the journey was far less grumpy than it might have been.

After all, we do need to act professionally towards our fellow professionals, do we not…?

The length of the drive meant that we ended up arriving about twenty minutes late for item one on the agenda ("Arrival") but nobody seemed all that concerned, least of all me, because I thought this would leave less "kicking" time...

On the way down I was able to witness first-hand some, at least, of the extent of the recent (and ongoing) floods around Gloucestershire which did, at least, put back some of my own worries into some kind of proportion.

The other thing about that journey is that it takes me past two of the more significant areas with regard to my own humble existence. We passed through the town where I did my degree in Graphic Design back in the days when I last felt free from the burdens of responsibility, and the part of the world where my father was born and raised until he departed for the Second World War and chose never to return to live there.

I always feel a tad melancholy when I pass by those places because they make me think of lost hopes and dreams, I suppose.

Anyway, the meeting was fine and nobody had to kick anybody, which was especially good news for me, and, after a bit of other business, I was driven to the station, bought myself a sandwich, and caught the train home again, listening to a series of "Cabin Pressure" to fill much of the four hour journey.

There was just enough daylight still around as we whizzed along for me to catch a glimpse of the green-domed building which used to house the art college at which I studied, which was kind of nice for me, and gave me a momentary nostalgic buzz.

It's not a college any more, of course, (possibly due to the standard of designers that it was churning out), but has been transformed into much-sought-after and rather exclusive (at least that's what it says in the papers) "Designer Apartments" so at least it has now finally managed to get something of the designer about the place.

I wonder if the old place still smells of cabbage…?

Ah well, after that it was all pretty uneventful, really. The timings got a little tricky towards the end of the journey, and I became fairly convinced that my connection wouldn't work and I'd be spending another hour waiting on a platform for a later train out to the sticks.

It was a little touch-and-go, to be honest. The first train arrived back at Stockport at almost the same time as the train out again was due to arrive and I did a little bit of a run-ette from platform four all the way over to platform zero, and was momentarily dismayed to see a moving train adjacent to the platform. Happily, it only took a moment for me to realise that it was slowing down, not speeding up, and, because it stopped, I was able to reach home a full hour earlier than expected and end up by making a long day slightly shorter than it might otherwise have been.