Dom Davis (The Blog)

The Zozo has her birthday very close to mine which means that celebrations tend to get all mixed together. this year we’ve got some of my family coming up and the plan was to go out for a few drinks. The Zozo had then asked if she could go off with her girlie friends and have a girlie night. Not a problem, thinks I. I can head off into London and go clubbing. Job done.

But no. You see, to get to and from London I need a train. There’s no way I’m driving as I can’t drive back with no sleep, it’s simply not safe. While there are trains they are, thanks to engineering works, infrequent and beset with changes onto buses and then back onto trains. If I didn’t mind turning up a bit late I could leave Cromer at 8 rather than the more usual 9 but then I’ve got a huge problem coming back. My options are:

1. Leave Slimelight at 6am, walk to Kings Cross, get a train to Cambridge, train somewhere else, bus to Norwich, train to Cromer and arrive 5 hours later paying £48 for the privilege. That’s £10/hour.
2. Leave Slimelight at 7:30 (kickout time), kick about London for 2 hours (bearing in mind I’ll have been awake all night and really just wanting to get home to bed), then get the train, bus, train, train home for 1:30.
3. Leave Slimelight at 7:30, go to a hotel, crash and die, get a later train home.

The first option is a pain, expensive and morally reprehensive. The section option is doable, but real faff. The third option is expensive since I’m to early to check-in for Sunday and I’ll want to make use of the room for longer than most checkout times allow so I’ll need to book for two nights. I’ll need to mull over whether I can be arsed to deal with the faff and if I can get away with ditching the family early, and if I can occupy myself for 2 hours in London on a Sunday morning since, lets face it, that’s what I’m going to have to do.

In the mean time I’m also wanting to go down on the 18th of June to see [X]-RX. This is too far in advance for me to book at the moment and I’ve no idea if there are even going to be trains. Between now and me being able to book train tickets for that I shall be getting some extra toys for my pram because, believe me, if it’s not a case of normal service and easily getting to and from London on that night I’ll be throwing all my toys out of the pram.

Great. I’ve just been sent a document by a friend who has access to these things that would suggest there are going to be buses from Marks Tey to Ipswich that weekend. The London to Norwich line is just a joke.

The iPhone is a remarkable bit of kit. With it I can check what station the Sheringham train is currently at (Wroxham at the time of checking) thus confirming that Attleborough (being the station I was currently pulling out of) hadn’t been added as a surprise new stop on my journey home. It is then able to ascertain which train you’re really on (Cambridge) and where the next stop is for a hasty decamp, turn round and head back the way you came (Eccles road). It’s also able to tell you when the next train to Norwich is, something I should have done before getting off the train since it transpired that wasn’t until tomorrow (Eccles road quite literally having 2 trains each direction stopping a day).

Once stranded at the station it’s able to pinpoint your location and plan a route home. When that proves to be too far it can be used to summon a taxi to take you back to Attleborough to get a train back to Norwich to get a train home. It can then tell you that you won’t be getting home until nearly 9 and allow you to convey this to the wife. Meanwhile you’re able to update your status and location on Facebook so everyone can follow your plight in near real time.

What it can’t do is tell you that between looking at the departure board and the train pulling in (about 2 minutes) they’d switched platforms on you and you’re on the wrong train. Normally I listen for the announcements on the train, but for some reason didn’t bother today. The ticket inspector can’t have been looking too hard either as he never raised an eyebrow over my having a ticket for another train. The who escapade has cost me £15 and 2 hours of my life. Not happy.

One of the many problems associated with being a hardened commuter is that I take very little notice of anything. All I care about is platform alterations and departures. It would seem that, since moving to the country, my Spidey Sense is off.

Now, to be fair, both Colchester and London Liverpool Street stations did have a habit on putting the posters advertising engineering works somewhere where you were going to trip over them so it was kind of hard not to notice that, yet again, busses will replace trains on at least some part of the journey between Norwich and London. When I lived in Colchester you could be forgiven for thinking it was a bus station at weekends, not a train station.

I’m dimly aware that travel on a train direct from Norwich to London on a weekend is still an impossibility, due in part to the signs at Norwich station, the special announcement screens on the monitors but mostly due to the fact I’ve spent two very cold Sunday mornings in various parts of Essex having been dumped there by a bus. That they seemed to have started at the London end again makes me think maintaining that line is a bit like painting the Forth Road Bridge.

The board in London was one of those maps of the rail routes with the ones that would be messed about with over the coming month (most of them) picked out in red. The dates of your misery were next to the lines. Mercifully these were mostly weekends. Little footnotes then expanded on if your line or station was picked out for some extended torture.

The equivalent board in Norwich shows exactly the same thing. It’s location means I can avoid it 5 times out of 6, but it’s there. There’s also ‘special notices’ screens detailing, in the main, just exactly how difficult they’re making travel to London this weekend so I tend to ignore them.

In Colchester the sign would be at the bottom of the steps in the subway and would announce, in large letters, just exactly what was being messed about and when. These would be displayed up to a month in advance. They knew their target audience and didn’t mess about. It worked well.

I’m guessing theres a sign at Cromer. There’s a board with the timetable which I’ve not looked at since 2008 that probably houses something. It’s entirely possible to enter the station (which is little more than a platform with a terminating line either side) without even noticing it’s there which isn’t helpful.

You’ll forgive me, therefore, for not noticing, in the seething morass of red that is the NXEA December ‘service alterations’ map, that my line was picked out. And not just for weekends, oooh no. This is for at least a week. A fact that I discovered due to some fortuitous earwigging on Friday. Busses replace trains between Sheringham and North Walsham for 9 days. I haven’t checked yet, but I’m guessing that once that’s done they’re going to pick on the line from North Walsham to Norwich. Going to be a fun month.

Had I not overheard that things were going to be completely pear shaped this morning I would have pitched up at the station to discover the bus left without me 20 minutes ago and that I would be an hour late into work. Annoying to say the least. As it was I was prepared and waiting patiently when the bus arrived. Thankfully I’m also only in the office for 6 more days (including today) this year. I need to get up 20 minutes earlier for 3 days this week, and I get home 15 minutes later but the disruption isn’t overly hideous. That said, I may see if I can’t drive in tomorrow and Wednesday.

So the saga¹ of the glove continues. While not 100% certain, the abject failure of Morissons to locate my glove so I could retrieve it from them could, in part, be related to the fact that I may not have lost it there. The other possibility is that it was lost on the train and/or Cromer station². This, unfortunately involves dealing with NXEA more directly than perhaps I would otherwise like.

My first attempt at retrieval was a farce in and of itself. The customer services people were able to inform me that there was a lost property department on Norwich station. It, like the transport police station, is on platform 5, requiring the use of a ticket to get there so good fun if you’re not traveling that day and don’t have a season ticket. I was also told that it wasn’t open yet. Further enquiry established that it was open from 9, or possibly 9:30 which, at 8:15, wasn’t going to help me. Still further enquiry established that it closed at 4, or maybe 3. They weren’t sure, but it would certainly be open from 9:30 until 3. Again, not overly useful. I thanked them for being singularly unhelpful with the plan of returning one lunch break.

Yesterday I discovered that one could enquire about lost property via the telephone or, even better, via email. Since it would allow me to deal with NXEA at a remove I chose the electronic option and promptly filled in the enquiry form providing much more detail than actually asked for in all of the mandatory fields. Form submitted I returned to work.

Two hours later I received an email in reply. Apparently to open a lost property claim they require more detail and could I please call. One would have thought that if they required any more information they would have indicated it on the enquiry form but one is best not to get too hung up on the vagaries of NXEA and their inner workings. Work, unfortunately, got in the way of mr calling back in time so I have that special joy today. In the interim I am gloveless which is annoying as I need my hands out of my pockets to steady myself on the slide to and from the station over the skating rink that is the pavements in Norwich. I’ve slipped many a time now and it’s more a matter of when, not if I fall on my arse. Not something I’m looking forward to.

¹Such that this could be classified as a saga, rather than just an incredibly long winded way of spinning out the fact I’ve lost a glove.

²The topology of Cromer being such that one exits the station into Morissons carpark.

I lost a glove yesterday. This is probably a deep and meaningful metaphor for something which, hopefully, will have a profound twist when I locate it tonight in the Lost Property at Morissons. I’m not interested in whatever fable not finding my glove has to say.

No doubt today’s single carriage train is also an allegory for something, although I suspect it’s simply trying to say that, no matter where you live, or how much you pay, the train companies will stiff you. They’ve made up for it though with two conductors¹. No idea why, they’re going to give up checking tickets in two stations time due to an inability to walk down the carriage as it’s having to hold enough people to fill a train with twice as many seats. The fact that I would usually have my ticket checked already by a single conductor working a two carriage train tells you something about ease of movement at the moment. At least I’m not stood up, or worse, sat on the floor in the vestibule like I had to do from Colchester. At six times the cost of my current season ticket for only an extra 10 minutes travel time (albeit on much longer, faster and more frequent trains) there was a definite lesson to be learned there.

So what does all this mean? Well for me it means I get to bitch at you lot. If you want anything more deep, meaningful or profound then you’re looking in the wrong place. I could suggest turning to the lyrics² of songs which, currently, are informing me that “No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world” and that “Even the smallest person can change the course of the future”, however, be warned, they could have just have easily informed you that “I am not your dad! I am: Electric Man!”. You makes your choice and you takes your chances.

Footnote

I’m not even sure where to begin with just receiving an email saying @diabetesfacts³ is now following me on Twitter and what that is trying to say. Dealing with lifes troubles by consuming vast quantities of refined sugar is, as far as I’m concerned, a key tenant in my life philosophy and not something that should be questioned. To them I would counter with one of musics most profound statements: I’m a firestarter, twisted firestarter⁴.

¹ I think one may be in training. There seems to be a lot more in the way of detailed announcements which serve little point and I’ve never seen the second conductor before. I suspect today’s lesson is “how to deal with a rammed train full of annoyed people wanting to know where the extra carriage is”. You kind of have to feel sorry for him.

² So technically samples in this case rather than lyrics, but that’s just the nature of the particular genre of music I like. The point, such that there is one, remains valid. If we were going to wait for actual sung lyrics (bearing in mind we’re on random here) I’d be advocating “Just one fix” which is probably not a good life strategy.

³ Link withheld because, deep down, if we search our souls, we know said person is just fishing for follows, a spammer, phishing, trying to peddle something or all of the above.

⁴ Still on random, what can I say? Although if we’d waited 30 seconds or so it could have been something very profound⁵

⁵ Suicide Commando, God Is In The Rain. Google it if you’re interested but be warned it’s not quite as pro religion as the title might at first suggest. We are, after all, talking about a man that wrote the album Bind Torture and Kill which is inspired by Dennis Rader (also see the film BTK), to which we can only ask: Annie, are you OK? Are you OK? Are you OK Annie? (Alien Ant Farm version)

So once again the country is gripped in the maw of an ice age. Weather forecasters have started talking about feet of snow. Various organisations and government officials are telling us not to travel. Airports are closed. Trains aren’t running. The country is impassible.

This does not hold true for the entire country though. Guess which part had only a few mm of snow last night, most of which melted? Go on, guess! NXEA, a train company who has problems running trains if a cockroach so much as farts at the wrong time seem annoyingly able to keep my train running, and running on time.

To make matters worse The Zozo has a day off today. I could have so easily fired off an email claiming inability to get into the office and that I would “work from home” before rolling over and going back to sleep again. But no, I have a train. And a cold one at that. If I may borrow a turn of phrase from Goron: arsebiscuits.

The Zozo has her work Christmas do tonight which involves a meal at the zoo followed by heading out and getting raucous in Cromer, in so far as it’s possible to get raucous in Cromer. I understand karaoke may be involved. Knowing the people involved there will be much giggling and laughing involved too. I’d be willing to put money on the phrase “fwiend” being used once a few drinks are had. I will not be going. Instead The Zozo suggested I head into London for a night out there. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love my wife very much and I love spending as much time as possible with her but she’s going out tonight, is working tomorrow and has handed me a late pass for free. Not something I, or indeed any sane man, is going to turn down

So I’m going to London. Train to Norwich, train to London, tube to destination, dance, tube to Liverpool Street, train to Norwich, train home. Simple, right? Wrong. This is England. At the weekend. On NXEA trains. No, we have to do the following:

Get the train an hour early to Norwich. Change at Norwich for a train to Ingatestone. Get off the train at Ingatestone where I get on a bus that takes me to Newbury Park where I then ‘transfer’ to London Liverpool Street. Transfer in this context means getting a central line tube which gets me to Liverpool Street, according to the TFL website, 1 minute later that NXEA said it would. Personally I trust (for a given value of trust) TFL more than I do NXEA so I’m going to go with thier estimate. What time I arrive, give or take a few minutes, isn’t so much of an issue as it’s a walk to Moorgate, tube to Angel and done and it doesn’t really matter what time I arrive.

Getting home, on the other hand, is going to be a laugh. It’s going to be early on a Sunday and NXEA tell me that I need to ‘transfer’ from Liverpool Street Station at 07:23 to arrive at 07:55 whereupon I get a bus that leaves at… 07:55. I’m thinking giving myself 0 minutes to get out of a tube station, find a bus, get on bus and head onwards is not exactly a sensible proposition.

So what time do I need to leave Liverpool Street? According to the TFL website I need to depart at 07:20 to get to Newbury Park at 07:44. So either NXEA are lying about the departure time, journey time or arrival time. Or all three. So I realistically need to arrive at Liverpool Street at 07:15 so I can get to the Central Line platform. This isn’t going to happen on a tube, there being no Northern Line trains at this time in the morning. It could happen by bus, but I tend to avoid those where possible in London given, historically, the timetable has been more of a serving suggestion than anything they’ve stuck to. No, I’m going to take the only form of transport that’s reliable, available to me and cheap. I’m walking. Leave at 06:45, should get to Liverpool Street for before 07:15 allowing me to get the tube to arrive at Newbury Park in time to get my bus.

The bus then arrives at Ingatestone with a good 11 minutes to spare so I’m hoping that, this time, I won’t be getting to the station to watch the train pull off and strand me there for an hour making me late and buggering up my connections. Spending an hour at Colchester station last time was dull enough. An hour at Ingatestone will be torture.

Assuming all is well I get on the train to Norwich which has to arrive on time as I have 7 minutes to transfer to my train to Cromer. NXEA do not have a good track record of making tight connections to Cromer, although my experience is generally on a Friday evening with the train having come all the way from London not further down the line and a Sunday morning. It’s this bit that is causing me the most stress. If I miss that train I am stuck in Norwich for two (2) hours. Bearing in mind that, at this stage, I will have been awake for well over 24 hours my mood will not be such that I will accept this with good grace, or indeed any grace at all. I will be using those two hours to prize whatever compensation I can out NXEA for the grief and inconvenience caused.

So there you go. A simple 6 hour round trip is going to take over 8 hours, involve many transfers and much stress and could take over 10 hours and much shouting. It should be so simple and yet it isn’t. And this, this is why I hate the trains. Still going though

The 17:45 to Sheringham usually departs from platform 4. On occasion it goes from platform 5 and, rarely, it goes from 6. Yesterday initially claimed to be a normal day. The departure screen said 4, the usual suspects were stood at 4, so I went and stood in my usual spot.

At this juncture it helps to understand that I have the type of headphone you screw into your ears. It means I can play my music at half the volume and hear it well as it blocks out the outside world. It also means I can’t hear a thing except my music so I’m oblivious to announcements. This in itself is not a huge problem, I just keep an eye on others.

Yesterday I noted people suddenly looking confused, a little bit of wondering about and some checking of the departure screens. Sensing trouble I pulled one earphone out and went to go investigate the departure boards myself. They said 4. A man walking up the platform said 6a. He looked like a rail employee (or more likely subcontractor) so I figured he may know. I headed to platform 6.

As I wondered round a ruddy great big intercity parked at platform 4. This confirmed that we wouldn’t be leaving from there and the presence of a train on platform 6 made me think I’d been told correctly. The indicator board still said 4, but what did it know?

I, and many others piled on the train with much “Is this the Sheringham train?”. This was met with answers ranging from the positive “yes”, the worried “I hope so” and the contradictory “No, this is the Yarmouth train”. Oh.

Given more than one person believed it was the Yarmouth train we adopted the commuter trait of standing in the door. This allows us to see the boards (Sheringham platform 4, Yarmouth platform 6) and listen to announcements, which took that moment to proclaim that the 17:45 Sheringham service was now leaving from platform 6.

Yarmouth people off, Sheringham people on, Yarmouth people now looking very confused.

Finally the train driver piped up, this wasn’t the Sheringham train, it was the Yarmouth train, the Sheringham train would leave from platform 6a. He also helpfully pointed out that despite the fact that we were next to platform 5a this was platform 6b and we should get on the train that would pull up in front of this one.

Right, Sheringham people off, Yarmouth people on, Sheringham people up the the further extremities of platform 6. Given we were beyond the roofed area of the platform there were no more indicator screens to look at, but we were regularly told over the tannoy that the 17:45 train for Sheringham would leave from platform 6. Not 6a, 6. No mention of the Yarmouth train.

In the end it fell to the train drivers who, when both trains were in, clearly stated which train the one you were on was and directed wayward and lost people to the other train. If it weren’t for them I suspect there would be a lot of angry people heading back into Norwich to start their journey again, this time on the correct train.

So the good news is I can still make it out, club all night and get back to Colchester without passing out.

The bad news is I no loner live in Colchester, I live a further 2 hours down the track.

The worse news is that there are engineering works (sorry, “Route Improvement Works”) today and I had to get a bus from Ingatestone to here.

But the absolute best news, and this is a doozy, is that the buses haven’t been given enough time to get from one station to the next so I watched my train to Norwich pull out without me and a whole bus load of other people. So I get to spend an hour sitting at Colchester station. Somewhere that I thought I was done with in terms of waiting for trains.

It’s unfortunate for the customer service guys that their office is right by where our train was 30 seconds before. Some ire may have been vented by some passengers. I stuck with resigned dejectedness. It’s not their fault, there’s bugger all they can do and they’re probably going to have a day of this.

Funnily enough a combination of 8 hours of thumping music and the slight auditory hallucinations I get when very tired means that the rumble of the rail replacement bus engines is hitting my brain as a banging, if a little monotonous, tune. That, blogging and incessant Facebook updates are passing the time and stopping me from falling asleep on this bench.

So after a fun day shopping and a rather top notch steak at Gouchos a tired Zozo and I headed home. We arrived on platform 11 at 18:55 and about 45 seconds for the 19:00 train, got as far as the rear engine car and had people blowing ‘the train is about to leave’ whistles. That’s right, if you’re 2 minutes early for a train you’re late and they won’t let you on, whereas they can be 10 minutes late and that still counts as on time.

Not to worry, we had reserved seats and it’s not like it’s a rush hour train from London on a weekday with no seat reservations printed… OK, so maybe it was. Not wishing to have them shut the doors on us and declare us not early enough not to be late we hoped on in the first class section, walked through a packed train to the carriage where are seats were supposed to be, sighed and sat on the floor in the vestibule outside the toilets. I’d forgotten how miserable my old commute could be.

We pulled into Colchester 4 minutes late (on time), allowed a bunch of people off and nabbed their seats. Since NXEA are running rolling stock from the dawn of rail travel (window down, lean out, open door) there are no plugs so my phone, which was already on low power mode and down to 10% battery (my iPhone is my life, running out of battery is not an option), couldn’t be charged which reduced me to reading The Zozos celebrity magazines over her shoulder for the first half of the journey. Seat secured I was able to pull out the laptop and sacrifice it’s battery to charge the phone, a job that it’s performing admirably.

This whole lack of plugs thing is going to be a big issue over the weekend. Bringing my laptop just to serve as a spare battery and mobile charging station seems a bit extreme (I was kind of hoping to just shove smalls and travel toiletries into a pocket and not bother with a bag at all). NXEA trains don’t even offer power in first class (or free tea and coffee, or indeed anything other than a wider seat that’s broken so it won’t move from the fully reclined position making it uncomfortable to use the table) so stumping up for weekend first isn’t going to help. I may see how much a battery pack for the phone will cost me, or maybe try and get a trip down in a cattle truck. I bet they’ve got plugs. I’m just glad I didn’t pay full whack for these tickets.