Thameslink – the Third World railway company giving a second rate service

The Thameslink phone app today

If you have a blog, you can whine. Yippee!

Occasionally, this has meant I write a blog whining about the disaster that is Thameslink – franchise-holders for the Bedford-Brighton railway line on which I live. Though I have not burdened blog-readers with the daily chaos.

Suffice it to say that, in the evening at West Hampstead station, those in the know do not go to the platform the indicators say the train will be arriving at. Because it is often – or even usually – changed to another platform about 30-60 seconds before the train arrives. One evening, there were 31 people on the bridge, ready to run to whichever platform the train actually arrived on. A Dunkirk spirit of camaraderie broke out.

Which brings me to today’s whine.

So, today I went to see comic Martin Soan at home in Nunhead, South London. No problem there, you might think, because it is on a direct line from my home in Borehamwood and, although today is Boxing Day, the trains are running. I checked on the Thameslink app yesterday. And this morning.

So there could be no problem except a late or cancelled train. This is Thameslink we are talking about.

Last night, I checked on the Thameslink app and chose which train to get. And double checked this morning.

I arrived at my local Elstree station which, of course, was open. Well, the main ticket office was closed but that is not uncommon and the side entrance was open. The platform indicators just displayed a generic notice, but I knew there was a train at 11.12am because I had double-checked the Thameslink app yesterday AND this morning.

Although the platform indicators showed no train times, they did say: For train information please listen to Announcement. And, reassuringly, an occasional loudspeaker announcement usefully told us the Overground was not running; the Waterloo & City Line was not running; and there were some sections of the Underground were closed.

The Thameslink indicator said Listen. I listened. First mistake.

I say We. I had got there early, as had about eight other people, all reassured that the 11.12 was going to arrive. That included two Italians who could speak no English and a Bulgarian who lived in Borehamwood.

My Thameslink app reassured me there was definitely at train due at 11.12 – although another app (presumably using information supplied by Thameslink) said the train was due at 11.38 and yet another app said the train was at 11.48.

It was the Bulgarian who spotted the poster in among other posters halfway along the platform at Elstree which said, about halfway down in among other details that there were no trains running today. No information about this, of course, at the entrance to the station.

The platform indicators remained on. Occasionally, there was the reassuring tannoy announcement that the Overground and Waterloo and City Line were closed – plus helpful details about the Underground, A useful announcement by Thameslink which made no mention of the fact that, in fact, Thameslink itself was not running any trains.

It was the Bulgarian who realised that a scheduled bus (totally unconnected to the Thameslink situation) left Elstree station for Edgware tube station at 11.13.

So we waited (there were about ten of us) until the train did not arrive but the bus did and off we went to Edgware tube station. Well, not all of us.

The Italians who could not speak English had no Oyster travel card and there was nowhere to buy one and the bus driver refused to let them on because, apparently, buses will not accept cash (all they had) any more.

A traditionally Peckham Rye totem pole

As the rest of us left, six more people were arriving at the station.

The day went on like that.

I won’t burden you with the details.

I just had to get it off my chest.

Eventually, I got to Martin Soan’s home in Nunhead/Peckham Rye by bus and tube and bus.

He has a nearby totem pole.

No surprise there.

 

A talk with a man in a rumpled grey suit which looked slightly too big for him

A comb

I went to the Leicester Square Theatre last night to see a very good Burns Night comedy show.

Though it was not Burns night.

Before the show, comedian Simon Munnery got out a tape measure and, unseen by most of the audience, was very carefully noting in a book the dimensions of a seat towards the very back of the auditorium. When he performed his act on stage, he never referred to this.

I texted him after his performance: Why were you measuring the seats before the show?

Aye; ah have ma reasons, he texted back.

Afterwards, I was on a train back home to Borehamwood.

At Mill Hill Broadway station, a middle-aged man got into the carriage and sat opposite me. I had to get off at Elstree station, the next stop.

“I know you, don’t I?” he said.

“I don’t think so,” I told him.

I think I may have a common face. Occasionally I get mistaken for other people. Though never for Brad Pitt or Justin Bieber.

“It was about twenty years ago,” the man persisted.

I have a terrible memory for names but a good memory for faces.

He talked a lot about the rain. He tried telling me the names of various people we might know in common but nothing specific about companies or towns we might have met in. Mostly, he talked a lot about Margaret Thatcher (he was not a fan) and the television programmes he watched when he was a child growing up in St Albans. It was a monologue rather than a conversation. Then he talked about the rain again.

We reached Elstree station. I got up to leave.

“We’ve never met,” he told me.

“I didn’t think so,” I said.

“I just wanted someone to talk to,” he said, smiling slightly.

I went home.

He stayed on the train.

One man talks to his sad-looking dog

Not the sad-looking Alsatian dog on the train

I was travelling in a train yesterday.

There was a man sitting at the other side of the carriage with a sad-looking Alsatian dog.

The man wore a dark, neat, very expensive business suit. He had short black curly hair and was clean. Very neat and clean. He was perhaps in his mid-thirties.

After we had gone one station, the man said to the dog:

“They’re all good and bad at the same time.”

The dog looked at him, as if the man were telling him there was no more dog food left in the world.

“Politicians,” the man explained to the dog. “They’re all brown. A warm brown.”

The dog looked at the man, then looked at me. His eyes were very sad.

The man looked at me with no expression in his eyes.

I looked at the dog.

“They are,” the man told me.

The dog looked at the man.

The man looked at the dog.

I looked at the empty seat opposite me.

The man and the dog left the train at the next station.

I have no explanation.

The Twitter fight that may become a one-night Edinburgh Fringe event

(A version of this piece was published in the Huffington Post and on the Indian website We Speak News)

Janey Godley before her first play opened in New York, 2007

Here in Milan, mosquito bite mania has spiralled out-of control with searches on the internet turning up vinegar and banana skins as possible remedies for my multifarious sores.

Meanwhile, back in the UK, Janey Godley Twitter mania seems to be spiralling.

The real Tim leaves the Virgin train at the saga’s end

Three weeks ago, my Scottish comedian chum was on a train and heard an argument between a couple called Tim and Freya (their real names) which started even before the Virgin train had left the station and continued pretty much throughout the journey.

Knowing I am not an everyday Twitter follower, she tweeted me from the train carriage to take a look at her ongoing live commentary #traintales on the relationship disaster happening before her very eyes/ears. I was agog as the saga unfolded and I was not alone.

Janey got an enormous number of people following the soap opera as she Twitter reported it live and many re-Tweeted her tale to their own followers as it unfolded. That was three weeks ago.

Then, last Friday, both the Guardian and the Independent newspapers ran pieces about the saga and the thing went viral with people suddenly blogging and Tweeting about it and, between them, Janey’s blog and Tumblr and Storify got over one million hits between them in three days.

“I think it’s the first time a Twitter fight went viral,” Janey told me, “and I got lots of interest from the big agencies and news folk and it opened a debate about personal privacy because I had used the couple’s real names.

“I am planning to dramatise it into a 40 minute play and perform it for one night only at the Edinburgh Fringe next month. Anthony Alderson at the Pleasance venue wants to stage it. Ricky Wilson, the lead singer of the Kaiser Chiefs wanted to play Tim but can’t and Alan Carr wants a cameo but probably won’t make it – he and I are still hoping he can, though.

“I want to do it as one night work in progress event and I know how to adapt the tweets into a dramatic stage play. My daughter Ashley Storrie will be the ticket collector who makes the asides which I made in my original tweets and there are other watchers and the audience will be invited to tweet throughout the play.

“It will be the first time a Twitter fight has been made into a play…”

Chinese Communism and how it overlaps British Rail bureaucracy

Last night, I went to the Empire cinema in Leicester Square for the opening ceremony of this week’s China Image Film Festival in London – the biggest Chinese film festival in Europe.

The ceremonial side involved lengthy bouts of people explaining that everyone had worked very hard and how culturally important film was and encouraging rounds of applause for officials who stood up and waved to the audience. After 40 minutes, I whispered to the friend who was with me:

“This is like living under communism.”

There were the distinguished guests from various organising committees and some officials had flown in specially from Beijing but also present, inexplicably, were the former mayor of Redbridge in suburban London and the Chairman of South Cambridgeshire District Council, who gave a speech in which he said he had visited China, but never seen any Chinese films there, so he was grateful for this opportunity. The man standing by him who translated his speech into Chinese looked a bit surprised, as if he could not understand who this man was or why he was giving a speech.

I had some sympathy with the translator.

The former mayor of Redbridge gave no speech, which I thought was a pity, as I would have been interested to hear what he said.

The opening film of the Festival was Apart Together, which won the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay at last year’s Berlin Film Festival.

In one scene a couple, married for almost 50 years, decide to get divorced but discover that they cannot get divorced without first having a marriage certificate which they do not have because they got married shortly after the chaotic civil war between Mao Tse-tung’s Communists and Sun Yat-sen’s Kuomintang nationalists when official marriage certificates were the last thing on people’s minds.

So they have to get officially married in order to be officially divorced on the same day.

Communist bureaucracy, eh?

Phoaw!

How the almost entirely Chinese audience laughed!

No wonder they love Yes, Minister on TV in China!

After the ceremony and screening, I got a tube up to St Pancras station and leapt into the front carriage of a Capital Connect Thameslink train, just before it was due to set off.

On the seat opposite me was a small but expensive-looking pack of 15 computer CDs left behind by someone.

As I was sitting at the very front of the train, I jumped off and tried to give them to the train driver.

“I’m not allowed to accept any lost property,” he said apologetically. “You have to give it to the station staff – that bloke down there the other side of the barrier.”

It was an eight-carriage train. I looked at my watch. It was two minutes before the train was due to leave.

“I won’t have time to do it and get back on the train,” I told the driver. “And the station I am going to is unmanned at this time of night.”

“What you could do,” he told me, sympathetically, “is leave it on the seat and, if it’s still there at the end of the journey, I can collect it when I check the carriages.”

So I did that.

Whether anyone nicked the discs or whether they were still there when he checked the carriage I do not know.

I am a lover of the surreal but not of bureaucracy.

But rules is rules, eh? They’re there for a reason.