7th March 2007
No chance of flying any of my helis indoors tonight due to problems with the train getting home.
The back garden is still presenting a striking impression of a swamp, ah, the water table of the Thames Valley!
Back to the travel home from work tonight:
By some stroke of luck, I managed enter Southwark tube station and rapidly nip along the Jubilee line to baker street to change to the Bakerloo line for the home run to Paddington, yay! No more sweaty armpits and people of questionable personal hygiene for another day! The transition from Jubilee to Bakerloo went as expected, with the normal grunting of the denizens of Baker street coupled with the people not used to the tube stopping dead in their tracks with those annoying suitcases - You know the ones, with the 20.5 yard long handles which are purposely designed to hang low and trip anyone over 6ft up - I am a frequent victim of this, I see some mad person stop, try to divert, but fail to look the 6+ ft down to the floor to see their little tiny tiny tiny tiny suitcase which a mouse could carry two of while on crutches tangled around my feet, attached by a micro filament luggage handle 2 ft long! Grah!!
Anyway, I escaped the plane of pandemonium known as the tube system and surfaced at paddington. Hmmm, things looked a bit bleak, the concourse was chock a block full of people - either something nasty had happened or there was a sudden rise in the popularity of the Go Sushi bar in Paddington station, having commuted for 10 years I chose the former, though I do like sushi, I do not overestimate it’s drawing power.
Ding..Dong…Wah wah.
Okay, for those of you not used to the London Paddington announcement system, a Ding..Dong Wah wah that you can hear is normally not good. This particular one was followed by:
“Due to an incident at Burnham [http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/stations/BNM.html] station all trains that are going to Reading and beyond are delayed in leaving Paddington, and passengers are advised to travel to Waterloo”
Hmm, well, I work in Southwark - 10 mins from Waterloo and I am not going back there!
A few minutes later, to my joy as I had decided to wait it out, while contemplating the possability of nipping to the sushi bar - experience has shown this can be a long wait (Bound to miss the bathtime for the kids and upper management will have eaten by the time I get in anyway) the tannoy announcer said “Due to overcrowding..” — I know what is coming next and stifle my laugh “the entrance to the underground has been closed..lalalalala” Teehee, those in the know will know that Paddington to Waterloo by foot takes a long time, and to take the bus…Well…the tube is as public transport as I will get!
By now I had hooked up with some other commuters - familiar faces and we only wished one of us had remembered to bring the travel scrabble. And we saw a train..Not just any train, but a train with lights on and a destination card! (Hanging around platform 8 like one does!) Hmmm, some trains must be leaving soon, so we wound our way to the front of the train, and overheard a ticket inspector’s radio squawk about platform 2 getting ready for Reading…I go to the stop past Reading and get off at Didcot Parkway, so we made out way to platform 2, in stealth mode in case anyone else cottoned on that we had an inkling about a train….RATS! Our friend My tannoy announced the train…picture the scene - umpteen trainloads of people trying to get on one train! They were hurtling down the platform like lemmings! (Mind you, lemmings don’t hurtle, hmm but you get the idea). We spotted platform 1 with yet another Reading type sticker - Hey, Reading is good, once there trains are more frequent (well if you are lucky) to Didcot Parkway, so a quick diversion and we were on board the delayed blah blah to lala on platform 1, in a little niche between carriages - known as the crumple zone, not a place to be is the train crashes or jumps the points.
Now the fun began, “Move inside please”, “Move up, some people want to get home tonight!” etc etc. I and my fellow group of commuters briefly considered the possibility that we mere mortals could perhaps change the characteristics and attributes of the space time continuum and become purely 2 dimensional while retaining our 3 dimensional qualities that allow us to breath, but this a quickly dismissed though replaced by the wish that someone had brought the travel scrabble again. Meanwhile, the air was getting blue with the people who insisted that if everyone moved another millimeter then they could get on the train - If you make these commuter journeys into London, you know the ‘type’ of person, if it is you then shame on you! Relax, chill out, read a book about sand castles 
The train manager eventually mentioned that the whole chaos was due to a rain on fire at Burnham, hoho, and that is why all seven lines were shut for a while, ho hum!
Anyway, the story thins out now, I got home, it’s 21:43, children asleep time for dinner and bed ready to repeat all at 6:30 am tomorrow morning
Oh, by the way, it was a bit amusing that there was a train on fire in Burnham, real hot spot for that ..Get it ?
Well, that is the incident quota forMarch, on to April soon - I could write a book about the years commuting, incidents really are a monthly (or bi monthly) event, but noone would believe me, unless you did the London commute too, in which case you wouldn’t buy the book!
Nighty night!
– Andy