It’s my return journey that by far offers the most opportunities for Carriage Captures as I think I won’t be able to bring myself to deviate from my beloved Carriage A on the morning London bound journeys. My method for getting back to the homestead involves getting to Paddington as quickly as the cursed Circle Line will let me and then jumping on the first train leaving in a westward direction as by and large they all stop at Reading. Once at Reading, if I’m running early I can get a stopping Turbo to Thatcham or if running late I can meet the 18:05 Frome service.
The advantage to this tried and tested method is that if everything goes wrong I’m at least a good mileage nearer to home but on the other hand the obvious risk is when the service I’m using to get to Reading goes kaput and I’m overtaken by the Frome train with all the other Thatcham warriors pulling moonies at me as they thunder past.
Tonight I was just in time to leap gracefully about the 17:49 service to Worcester Shrub Hill and as it was in reverse formation I somehow ended up in Carriage E. There some spare seats despite the habitual “vestibule-standers” even if I did have to ask an “aisle sitter” if I could squeeze my lithe body through to the window seat.
Now let me make one thing quite quite crystal clear here. Anyone who chooses to sit in a aisle seat whilst keeping the window seat free is a twat. They are only hoping that no-one will be brave enough to ask them to move and the result will be they’ll end up with both seats to luxuriate in and not have some sweaty fleshy mountain fighting over the arm rest. Excuses of “long legs” or “getting off at the 1st stop” whilst not necessarily fabrications are just excuses and anyone with a jot of honesty would admit that they are all just part of a double-seat hopeful ploy. Don’t get me wrong, there are different levels of “aisle sitters”, pretty obviously someone with their bag on the window seat, headphones on so they can pretend not to hear you and then huffing and puffing when you have the temerity to ask them to move are much much worse (i.e. King or Queen Twat) than someone who immediately gets up with a smile on their face, (baby-boo-boo twat) but make no mistake, they are all cut from the same cloth.
This particular aisle sitter got up willingly enough (a sort of toddler twat) but he hadn’t put the arm rest down which meant we had far far too much neighbourly bodily contact for my liking but maybe I’ll go into this in more details in a later episode.
The only other thing of note on this particular journey was the Train Manager (TM), who seemed to think that he was the starring DJ on Fab FM as every announcement was performed with a faux American slur and worse pauses and running words into one another than the great tit of the news, Robert Peston. So we didn’t have “security” we had “secuuuridy”, we didn’t have “authortity” we had “authooridy”, and we didn’t stop at Maidenhead, we stopped at May-den-ed.
That said, we did arrive on time, so…….Let’s Rock!
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