choo choo

The platform was dense with those waiting. Either to meet what are tediously referred to as Loved Ones or to catch the train that wasn’t there, to be shunted further into the bowels of the country. It should have arrived at just gone 9 and it was now half past ten.
The guard was trotting up and down, loving it, bobbing here and there, totally unable to dispense meaningful advice and utterly in his element. His semaphore paddles bounced useless on his thighs. The information board kept edging forward, without explanation, the arrival estimate of the train, clicking it just out of reach.

I was waiting for my Loved One who was returning from Lords. We’d been a week in Cornwall and he had ducked out early to watch a spot of cricket.
“Any idea why it’s so late?” I asked the guard
“Delayed,” he said, thrilled. Which cleared everything up.
“My husband texted to say that the train was stuck in the middle of nowhere,” I said.
“Oh no, it won’t be there,” he said. “It’ll be somewhere else.”
Across on the other platform, a solitary person waited. His face an uneasy sweaty mix of anxiety and boredom. He smoothed his hands on the long ruffles of his long skirt and crossed and uncrossed and re-crossed his legs. Perhaps the Victoriana bootees were uncomfortable.
“’s fucking shite, that’s what it is,” a man to my left said.
“’s fucking outrageous. Orra comploine.”
E texted. “Moving backwards.”
I told the guard. “Ah,” he said happily, “That’s Gloucester for you.”
The chap in the skirt flounced off, holding his hem high up the steps. I half hoped he had plans of breaking into the car - would a man in a long dress fancy a spot of joy-riding in a Toyota? It would be one way of getting rid of it.

When E finally got in he was smiling with relief – we few, we happy few. “Nearly a stabbing at Swindon,” he said. “People were going crazy. One man insisting on a taxi. We all bonded over our compensation forms.”
The unspoken chill in the air was that the compensation is delivered as vouchers for more rail travel. Surely no one wants to get on a train twice?

The last time I went on a train I missed it. There was a problem – on-going, but unannounced at the station – on the tube en route to Paddington so, after being stuck without explanation in a tunnel for 20 minutes, we were disgorged at High St Ken.
“’s fucking outrageous!” shouted a girl. “Sorry,” she said, catching my eye. “But it’s so crap. I’m ashamed of this country. We get these people, clients, they come here and I’m ashamed. Third bloody world. It’s not like this in China.”
When she talked about work her right hand bent out – I understood later that a major part of her job, when not stressing about foreigners’ perception of the infrastructure of our transport system, was collecting dry cleaning.
Her hand shot out in anticipation of invisible clothes hangers. “’m not even meant to be in today, ‘smy day off. But she,” her dry cleaning hand jabbed, “she can’t bloody work out which car to get from the car-pool without me going across London and showing her. Christ!” She lapsed into hopeless boss speak, “‘Tee-nah, if it’s not too much trouble, darling, it’s all so confusing!’ Fuck. It’s my bloody day off! And which of us is on a hundred K?? Hey, let’s get a taxi. I’ll pay.”

So me, and her and my wheeled luggage and her invisible dry cleaning cut a swathe through the crowds and we caught a cab and he drove like the clappers and I got to Paddington Just In Time, Tina’s cries of “RUN!” speeding me on …. down the concourse, round the corner, up the platform, to see the train, to run some more …. to be denied a foot in the carriage.
The guard, a piggy, just stood there. “Door’s shut now,” he said with a little smirk. “Health and Safety.”
“Please open the door,” I said.
“No,” he said. Like that. Just, "No."
I stared at him through the window and he stared at me for nearly a minute and then the train rolled off.
I cried.
For I knew that this being England, that common sense had long left town. Presumably hitching or on a moped. It was my son's birthday and I was due back to make cake and I wasn't going to make it, in either sense of the word. In buying a ticket, I hadn’t simply bought the right to travel from London to Cheltenham but I had availed myself of ”a product,” being one seat on one train only. Everything is product now, from pensions to shampoo, bleach to trains.

My friend Susan had been on a train. She’d had a 24 hour clock confusion and got on the 7pm train rather than the 17:00 one. She is 52 and the carriage was nearly empty. She was relieved to sit down. The guard all but elbowed her out, chivvying her to alight at Swindon, to go to a cash point, to draw out £50, to wait an hour and to buy another ticket for this leg of the journey.
She apologised and pointed out that this train was cheaper than the one for which she had bought a ticket, that it was a simple mistake, that she was tired and the train was empty. It was a dark and windy night. It was November. She is tiny, and beautifully spoken, but lacking a credit card.
“You’ll have to get out and go to the cash point,” he said. “Your ticket isn’t valid.”
Her one fellow passenger said "May I?" and reached for his wallet, and bought another ticket for her. The kindness of strangers stepping in when the system is heartless and happy to throw you to the wolves.

I went to the help, ha ha, desk, heart a-sunk.
“You’ll have to get a new ticket,” the man said, “This one’s no longer valid. ’s too late,” he said. “That ticket was only valid for that train. Need to buy a new one now.”
“But it wasn’t really my fault I missed it,” I said. “I allowed nearly an hour to get from Sloane Square to Paddington. It’s six stops, I thought it would be enough. It took ten minutes the other way yesterday. I could drive from Cheltenham to Oxford in an hour. There was a fault on the line.”
The man couldn’t care less about that. I don’t know why I bothered. He punched my Oyster card and shook his head. “Insufficient journey time allowed.”
There was further nonsense since my seat reservation ticket was missing somehow rendering my ticket even more invalid, and I couldn't make him see that since the reservation was for a train which was now somewhere near Reading it surely couldn't be THAT important but apparently it was and it just showed the customer service man how very foolish I was and how very little I know about valid tickets. “Nah, you’ll have to go and buy another ticket.”

A serpentine queue, like the desperate line for returns at IKEA, was threaded through the ticket hall.
He all but flicked me away with a dismissive paw. As flies to wanton boys are we.

A little lad in a high vis jacket trudged like my shadow towards the monstrous Stalinist queue. I became aware that he was there and that he was frowning and that he kept muttering, "That should be plenty of time."
"I know," I whimpered prettily, eye to the main chance.
“You allowed plenty of time,” he said again.
He shot a glance over at the grim kipper of a customer service manager then shimmied with resolve. Chest out, shoulders back. He queue-jumped me ahead of 60 people trapped in queue-hell and he got my ticket re-stamped and I travelled home without having to shell out £70.

It was a massive triumph over the Kafka in Wonderland bureaucracy of Modern Britain, although it’s never that simple since there was more nonsense in Bristol (I had to go the long way round) where all the boards and signs said that the connection up to Cheltenham left from platform one and, lo, there IS no platform one. And no-one who worked there seemed to know anything about it.
"Oh, that'll mean platform 3," said a weary passenger. But of course.

I was telling my friend Simon about it later, he doesn't get out much. "What was the problem?" he said, quite reasonably, "you missed the train. Couldn’t you just get the next one" Poor innocent. Has no idea that life isn't like that anymore.

So we don’t want the vouchers. But it seems incumbent upon us to claim them. Apparently they pretend not to receive the forms, so the Swindon Band of Brothers were telling each other to scan them in, then they can't be "lost". The games we play. The games we have to play. The good times ended with Thomas the Tank Engine.