Fuddland

Back home again after the mother of all journeys. The flight was fine — a momentary “Oh for eff’s sake” when somebody somehow lost their credit card during their purchasing of overpriced cologne and a tacky teddy bear with a shamrock on its belly, and we were told that security would have to meet us when we landed, but they found the card and we weren’t delayed.

But the train … gah, the train.

An earlier derailment at March Station meant that we had to catch a replacement bus service between Ely and Peterborough, which added about an hour and a quarter to my journey time, but couldn’t be helped. As the bus left Ely we saw the poor chaps fixing the line in the dark and the driving rain, and we arrived at Peterborough without any traffic problems.

Now if I were Central Trains I’d have a put a train into service specifically for those passengers arriving by bus, and have it waiting for them to board when their bus arrived, and not just leave them to wait for [or miss by two minutes] a connecting train that happened to be going to their destination, but unfortunately I happen to possess a certain degree of common sense thus clearly I am not Central Trains. After about forty minutes another Leicester train pulled into the station — twenty minutes late, during which time the arrivals display switched several times between showing the correct train and “This train not in service”, which made me a tad nervous. I boarded and waited whilst the crew presumably started their standard thirty-minute checklist which goes along these lines: scumpled-up newspapers strewn around the carriages? Check. Almost-empty coffee cups tipped over and spilling their remaining contents over the tables? Check. Bizarre, pervading aroma no-one will quite be able to place? Check. Train driver? … Train driver? Anyone? Anyone? Damn, knew we’d forget something.

Yes, according to the announcement which was eventually made, the driver who had taken the train as far as Peterborough was done for the night, but they didn’t have anyone to continue the journey. Understandable, it’s not really something you think of until it comes up, is it? On top of this, the rest of the evening’s trains had been cancelled due to other screwed-up tracks, but — if you can believe this — they’d not realised they needed to order replacement buses to carry people for the rest of their journey. Whilst I tried to even process how people who work in the industry could be so unbelievably bad at dealing with unforeseen events, the customer service people came up with a solution [bear in mind this is a train company and so you’d think it’d involve trains, right? Wrong]: put us all in taxis to our destination stations. So after a shy security guard had rounded us all up, and a very nervous-looking member of the station staff wandered around making a tally chart of the number of people wanting to go to each station along the scheduled route, a number of cabs were booked and another half-hour later I was in a minibus with six pissed-off, half-asleep people, and with the rain still pouring it took about an hour to get to Leicester. Another cab took me to my house, over two hours later than I should have been.

You’d think I’d have been in a foul mood the whole time, but luckily I’d made the genius decision to take with me on holiday an MP3-CD containing about twenty-six hours worth of editions of I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue and Just a Minute, so I spent most of the evening with a smile on my face, trying not to disturb the other passengers with a mad cackle as Bill Bailey redefines the word “quince” to mean “not quite a coincidence” or Graham Garden sings the words of The Teddy Bears’ Picnic to the tune of She. I’d highly recommend everyone take a similar CD whenever commencing a long journey, it makes every delay bearable.

The following are entries which follows on from the above:

1. Durhammed [Fuddland]. Excerpt: I got back from Durham last night on train journey which was the complete opposite of the last one in terms of quality of service--these new Virgin trains are very nice indeed. It was a good week, full of merriment...

2. Not blogging, only working [Fuddland]. Excerpt: I can scarcely believe it myself, but I've fallen way behind on all things bloggy--writing, reading, commenting, erm ... there must be a fourth ... nope, that may well be it-- due to being a little busy with fuddage. There's...

#1

Jann | 2004 / 06 / 24 – 00:14

A truly legendary journey, sir.

I heard the Teddy Bear’s Picnic/She when it was broadcast. I was driving home from work and nearly crashed the car from laughing so hard.

I’m still waiting to hear Serge Gainsbourg (it was him wasn’t it?) do a reversal - or did Elvis Costello already try that?

#2

David | 2004 / 06 / 24 – 15:45

Re #1: Now there’s an idea: get bona fide music stars to create an entire album’s worth of professionally-recorded “One Song to the Tune of Another”. Why has this not been done already?

By the way, if the subtle concept of the game “One Song to the Tune of Another” is too complex for any of you to understand, perhaps you need to read some of Humphrey Lyttleton’s infamous explanations, for example:

Perhaps the simplest way to understand it is to thing of a song as a jam roly poly, with the tune being the sponge, obviously, which is rolled up neatly to contain the jam, or words. It would be perfectly possible to unroll the sponge and scrap out the jam, which might be strawberry or raspberry, and to replace it with different jam taken from a second roly poly, perhaps a summer fruit compote or even orange marmalade (although obviously you wouldn’t want to use a thick cut variety as that would have lumps of peel poking out through the sponge). But please don’t get bogged done on fruit preserves, the type isn’t important, what you should be concentrating on is the state of the sponge pudding that’s been unrolled. It will doubtless be damaged and possibly broken in places as a result of the unrolling and scrapping. So where does a useless old pudding come into this? At the piano we have Colin Sell.

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