The Longest Day

It’s been a long day.  A really long day.  I feel like I’ve walked from Manchester to Milton Keynes. 

I arrived this morning at Warrington Bank Quay station to get the train home. There was no train home. There was a red line through my train saying cancelled. Panic set in and I ask one of the station staff “what does cancelled mean?”.  It means "there is no train" I’m told.  I will have to catch a train to Manchester (other direction) from Warrington Central station (other side of town).  The first step is to get a taxi because my sister dropped me off and then went straight home.  Everyone is trying to get a taxi to Warrington Central! Eventually I make it and try to get on train to Manchester.  Everyone is trying to get on a train to Manchester. Shoppers, Manchester City fans going to a lunchtime kickoff, a group of women going on some sort of train based pub crawl from Huddersfield, an elf with bells on his jumper that jingled every time the train swayed, and the poor lost souls like me who suddenly find themselves without a train. So it was crowded. I heard someone (I think it was the elf) say “my trousers are falling down and I haven’t got room to pull them up”.

There was a bridge collapse a few days ago in Wigan which has thrown the whole West Coast rail network into chaos. When I finally arrive at Manchester Piccadilly I’m in a part of the station I didn’t even know existed. A Manchester City fan took me under his wing and escorted me to the main part of the station and reassuringly told me I would easily be able to find the train to London because it would be the longest one there. 

I decide to try a more scientific approach and consult the departures timetable. Eventually I find a train but there are no seats. The best I can do is stand inside one of the doorways between the loo and the wiggly bit where the carriages are joined. By the time the train sets off this space is full of women. Being women we start to chat and soon there’s a bit of a party atmosphere going on. We swap stories about our journies. A woman set off at 8:30 this morning to meet her family for afternoon tea and a West End show. A young girl was going to meet her boyfriend in London armed only with the following instruction when she gets to the underground; ”follow the thin blue line to Walthamstow….” A woman from Northern Ireland was going to stay with her sister in Stratford (I think she came via Southport?). A young woman, who’s never been to London before, off to a works do at the South Bank. Another woman going to stay with her daughter and son-in-law (who plays rugby for Northampton Saints). And me. 

Whilst we were all chatting away I glanced through to the next carriage. There’s a similar group of people standing there but they’re all men. They were all playing on their phones. Not making eye contact. Certainly not talking and most of them were wearing earphones. Men are from Mars……….. 

A couple get off the train at Stoke and tell us that they’ve just vacated a couple of seats. We all look at each other but no one moves. We think we’ll stick it out together to the end of the line! I eventually got home hours later than expected and still had to stand for another 15 minutes because Igor was not there to meet me.  Another breakdown - in communication this time!

I took the image above because we laughed about how difficult it actually was to fight a way through to coach C to wet anything. At one point we saw a woman with a brown  paper bag of goodies and all felt the need to congratulate her on having made it through!! My blip for today should have been of the Lantern Festival in Wolverton but by the time I got home I’d missed it :-(((