Spinning Stephenson!

Over the latter part of last week my car started to have a funny turn for itself. Not only did it refuse to turn over but once finally started it began blowing billowing clouds of thick condensation out of the fans obscuring vision. The windows refused to demist unless they were all wound down. This made driving up and down the motorway to work rather difficult. So difficult in fact, I decided it needed to go the car doctors so he could look at its tummy and make it all better again. It turns out that it's nothing to do with the car's tummy (they don't have tummies, apparently...) but it was the air flow matrix. It was as fucked as fucked can be. It would cost as much to buy a new unit and replace it as the car cost in the first place. It was a cheap car but I'm not doubling the cost of it to keep it on the road. So the poor old block of cheese has been assigned to history. I'm not sure what to do with it yet. My choices seem to be, sell it on eBay and hope the buyer doesn't notice the clouds of condensation or the misted windows, sell it for scrap or parts or my personal favourite, set fire to it and roll it down a hill. Time will tell.

Time to claim on the insurance...

So as a consequence of this situation, further confounded by the fact Tim and Cath won't allow me to stay at their place anymore (I am still confused as to why the cat was in my bed, dressed in a pink tutu), I have had to turn to the HILARIOUS VAGARIES of Public Transportation. Since owning a car I have been able to bypass this mode of transport favoured by peasants and the clinically insane, but now I've been thrown back into the circus like a Christian facing down a lion. My story begins as most public transport critiques do, with complete incomprehension as to how the entire system is handled. At my local bus stop there are NO buses in the morning except on a full moon when Scorpio is in the ascent. And only then do they come once every three hours and seventeen minutes. How does First Buses think people are going to get to work every morning? But of course! Public transport isn't for the employed, they can afford their own vehicles. Only the bottom feeders and dole scum use the bus to go and sign on. We don't need buses in the morning, we only need them to start running after Jeremy Kyle's finished.

'Have we finished here yet? I need to go and sign on'

An aside about buses: When I lived for a while in Dublin the bus stops had the timetables written up, so you could see when your bus was about to arrive. Except it wasn't that simple, no, you get nothing for free in this world, the timetable would only tell you what time the bus set off from its origin. I'm sure you can already see the MASSIVE FLAW in this system of operation, what if you had no idea where the place of origin was? I mean where the fuck is Ballickmoyler and how far away is it from this bus stop that I'm standing at? How long will the bus take to get to me, even with a strong tail wind? The timetables were less than useless. Just think about that for a second.

Whilst you're thinking about useless Irish things, think about this; this man is still alive. Where is the justice in the world?

Anyway, as I was saying, as there were hardly any buses before 9.30 I had to choose one that would get me to the train station before the train left that I needed to take to get to York in time to meet Berny for a lift to site. It happens that the only bus that was on offer was one at 5.17am. It got me to the train station about an hour and ten minutes BEFORE the train I needed. Talk about lack of communication between various transportation executives. So I get to the station nice and early, at which point I noticed that the information that I'd gleaned from the National Rail Enquiries site was actually wrong about the trains departure time and kicked my heels until the ticket office opened. When it did I was told that there were no trains running for the first part of my journey to York, between Rotherham and Doncaster. Cursing Thatcher for privatising the rails, I ran like a demon back to the bus station and jumped on a bus to Doncaster instead. I got there just in time for the train to York and endured the quiet carriage surrounded by the Canadian-Asian guy blabbing into his telephone about 'just having to get to London today' and using the word 'so' as punctuation and the girl who talked incessantly for twenty  minutes into her phone and ended the conversation with 'OK, gotta go, call me back when you get this message.' It made me feel like screaming; IT'S THE QUIET CARRIAGE YOU IGNORANT CUNTS!!! But I would have been breaking the carriage rules myself.

The sign is there for a reason you twats!

In other countries, public transport is an exciting way of seeing the world, in European countries you marvel at the double decked trains and the impeccable sticking to timetables, in Japan one can watch in awe as the team of cleaners take a bow to the train before cleaning it spotlessly. In Africa you can wonder if the bus will make it round the next hairpin bend at 200mph whilst weaving around the corpses of the passengers of the last bus that tried it. It's exciting and adventurous, in Britain it's a fucking grind where as many people as possible are packed in to the carriages after paying extortionate prices for the pleasure of smelling someone else's armpits or listening to strangers mobile phone conversations. And that's if the fucking train turns up in the first place. For fuck's sake, Britain invented the train. How can we get it so wrong, so many times? In the end I did make it to work on time, but this was my misfortune as we were forced to work in -12 degrees, breaking rock hard ground. Just like a North Korean labour camp.

You work now!