1) It's London - my least favourite city on the planet. Expensive, dirty and full of bar staff/waiters/shop assistants etc who seem to have what could most generously be described as a deficiency in manners and a limited grasp of the English language.
2) It was for an insurance awards ceremony - yes, that is as dull as it sounds. Loads of bow tied managers and their secretaries getting pissed up, making tits of themselves and engaging in a back slapping love-in of biblical proportions.
3) I travelled by train.
Now it is the third point that I wish to cover today (although I'm sure that the other two will appear on the blog in the not too distant future!).
For those of you who may not know, "Great" North Eastern Railway (GNER) are the company tasked with transporting those of the populace daft enough to do so between Edinburgh and London.
GNER are quite a big company, with employees numbering in the hundreds, if not thousands.
It is not unreasonable, therefore, to assume that within this multitude of staff at least one of them would know how many seats there are on their bloody trains!!
Let me expand on this for you.....
On the return journey from London (a Friday afternoon, therefore a lot of people are looking to get out of the hell hole that is our capital and return to somewhere approaching civilisation) I had a "reserved" seat. This, you may think, would mean that there was a seat somewhere on the train with my name on it. Being relatively experienced in the art of train travel, I was fortunate to get on the train before the ensuing chaos set in.
I plonked my rear end in the designated seat, prepared to enjoy a peaceful three hour journey back home. Within five minutes, a young woman came up and barked at me that I was in her seat. I dutifully showed her my ticket, showing that my not inconsiderable arse was, in fact, in the correct location. Being the well brought up gentleman that I am, I promptly sat back down with a look of "sorry, not my fault, you should have got here earlier".
Another couple of minutes passed and then the same thing happened again with a different person. At this point I noticed that the same thing was happening up and down the carriage and the train was absolutely packed (aisles and corridors included) by the time that the train pulled out.
Whoopee - three hours on an overcrowded train full of half pissed Scots in a bad mood and whingeing for St Andrew.
Now I appreciate that GNER might want to sell unreserved tickets to people who want to take a chance on getting a seat and are prepared to stand for hours on end if they can't, but this was quite frankly taking the piss.
Especially when you consider that, for a lot less than most cattle class rail tickets, you can fly just about anywhere in Europe by EasyJet or Ryanair (although you do run the risk of the plane not turning up or not working, or the destination airport being a four hour bus ride from the city to which you thought you were travelling).
So, the upshot was that I put on my Walkman, ignored every human on the train and steadfastly refused to give up my seat (even for the sake of a trip to the bog in case I lost my seat to one of the aforementioned inebriated jocks).
This is the age of the train. Is it bollocks...............
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