Apathy Sketchpad

According to today’s Metro:

[Manfo Kwaku] Asiedu, 33, of no fixed address, is one of six Londoners who deny plotting suicide bombings in summer 2005.

Presumably the other 7,499,994 Londoners did plot bombings.

We’re all going to die. Oh, well.

I don’t know about you, but when bad things happen to me, I like to have someone to blame for them. Often, things are nobody’s fault, so in those cases I blame the person with the worst excuse. Generally, in the case of travel woes, this mantle falls to the train companies, because I know what a train looks like and I know what a leaf looks like and I don’t see how the latter can stop the former. “Leaves on the line” is a rubbish excuse.

Yesterday I was stopped getting home by leaves on the line, but I think that since the leaves were still attached to the tree at this point I shall have to concede that it is a pretty good excuse. The fact is that due to The Great Winds (which after that hurricane last month seem to be taking the piss a little) all the trains that might have taken me home yesterday (i.e., from Manchester to Leeds) were cancelled, and I had nobody to blame. But wait, what’s that slightly-jazzy, a-bit-too-much-like-swing-for-the -nineties, brass-heavy music I can hear? There’s only one transport company with its own theme music!

I phoned Network Rail and they said that since my life was in a mess, my best bet was to call the National Express. So I did. I said “I just want to check your service is actually running.”
“Yes,” he said, “and it’s a regular service, too.” This made me smile. I got him to assure me, and repeat twice, that there were no significant delays to National Express’ coaches. So I booked a ticket. It cost me four pounds. That’s about $600, for any Americans reading. This was around quarter to five. At about quarter past six I arrived at the coach station, to find it full to the brim with what looked like all human life that had ever existed. Grannies, babies, students, parents, everyone.

But nobody was singing.

I waited half an hour, and then a coach arrived. It was the five past three coach, pulling in almost four hours late. Now it seems to me that if the five past three coach arrived at quarter to seven, then at quarter to five they should have known something was amiss and told me so. I voiced this opinion to the man at the coach station’s control point, who told me — and I love him for it — that the man I spoke to on the phone was “an ass”.

Eventually I slept at my brother’s halls in Manchester. So I won the office Who Took The Longest To Get Home game, with a total score of seventeen hours and counting, and I saved a few quid on a train, and I reduced my carbon footprint by two train journeys.

And, I get to whinge to National Express until they send me some free stuff. I won’t settle for no-free-stuff.

So life could be worse. Tomorrow, as they say, belongs to me.