The Tuesday Tantrum

Good evening one and all, may I welcome you into the haven of all that is to be despised, spat at and generally moaned about. For today is the day of the tantrum, the day to let your hair down, and the day to poke someone in the eye, if that will help (which sometimes it does, but only if you can run really fast, and if it doesn't hurt them very much). If I can just make one small comment before I start, this is a weekly malarkey, but that doesn't mean I only have a tantrum once a week, it's just that I like to, well, focus.

When I read the comments to my last tantrum I was literally stabbing my finger on my desk and going 'Yes! You're right! That gets me too!' and I had a whole thing planned for the way that people can't even seem to speak properly now, and have a language of their own, and don't even get me started on the spelling, and even a topic as dear to my heart as that has been superseded by today's tantrum.

Public transport.

Now first of all, because some of the readers here aren't from the UK, I'm going to need to do a bit of an explanation. First of all, I have to catch something called a bus. You'll note the use of the word 'catch'. That implies that it is something elusive, something you have to work hard to get, something not always within reach.

That is a bus.

It's quite a big vehicle, which seats quite a lot of people, you can stand up on them too, and sometimes they have an upstairs as well, but there are stairs, not an elevator, to the top bit. It generally smells a little bit like a public toilet and so do some of the people on it. It travels on roads.

The other one is called a train. It is made up of a number of carriages, the people tend to smell a bit better, and it does not have an upstairs. It does however have a First Class, which you do not go in unless you are travelling on business and someone is paying for your ticket, or you are frightfully posh, in which case you have probably got your chauffeur to drive you instead of having to mix with those ghastly people. Some of them also have something called a Quiet Zone, which means you cannot use a mobile phone, talk loudly, play music or generally disturb your fellow commuters. And if you sneeze at more than a moderate range of decibels, you are instantly shot. It travels on tracks.

I should mention that where I live, there is technically a third option, called a tram, or the Metro. This is a sort of cross between a bus and a train. It goes on tracks, but the tracks are on the road. It is slower than a train. It is slower than a bus. If you are a brisk walker, it is slower than you.

Today's tantrum was inspired by my little jaunt yesterday, which turned out to be not so little after all. I caught the bus (on time-ish, not too smelly, no spitting), and then went to catch the train. I arrived at the station 15 minutes early - when you are a commuter, you find that you will leave your home approximately 5 hours before you need to, which allows for delays. So I built in a buffer for the bus being late, it wasn't, got to the railway station in plenty of time. The train was late. 30 minutes late, so I had 45 minutes to kill at the station. Apparently the driver hadn't turned up in Manchester, where the train started. Oh well, that's all right then. It's not as if we were depending on him. Oh, we were?

So of course I arrived late for the meeting, had the meeting, no lunch (oh that is SO another blog post) and got on the train to come back. It was on time. In fact I even had to do a little woman commuter jog up the platform. This is instantly recognisable as being the jog that a woman in a suit and high heels does to catch a train, and ultimately means that it is slower than actually walking, but you pinwheel your arms a bit more. Marvellous. On the train, train pulls away, no smelly people, buy a sandwich that is approximately equal in price to the National Debt, and settle in. Train pulls in at the first station, stops to let people off, let people on, and then pulls away. Except it doesn't. The pulling away bit. Because someone, further up the line, has thrown themselves in front of the train in front of mine. This is disturbingly more frequent of an event than you would imagine. We are made to get off the train. The line is closed. Nothing to be done. No offers of alternative transport, the swell of commuters ever increasing until we are packed like sardines on the platform, with nowhere to sit.

For two and a half hours. TWO AND A HALF HOURS.

When the line re-opens, I find that my train, my lovely train, has disappeared off the face of the earth. No train to Wolverhampton. I could go to Glasgow. Or Manchester. I expect if I set my mind on it I could go to Venus. But not where I live.

And that's why this week that my tantrum is about public transport. Because it's late, it makes me stand in the cold, and it doesn't drop me off at my house.

It's like being married again.

However on a much brighter note - the lovely David at Authorblog has awarded me a Post of the Day for Work is the Curse of the Drinking Classes. How lovely! So get yourselves over to see him, and see what other blogs he's mentioned too, they're fab.

If I were you though, I'd get a taxi.