Gordon is off to San Francisco at the end of the week, so we had made plans to record Thurdsay’s show at noon today. That meant it coincided rather inconveniently with the deadline for the reviews section for this month’s issue, so I set the alarm early and was at the station in good time to catch the 0736 train.

All things going well, I should be at my desk by half eight.

All things, though, did not go well.

We stopped briefly at Shenfield to make a pick up and then continued again, pausing for what we assumed would be a brief moment just outside Harold Wood, a further two stops down the line. After ten minutes, a female voice - the guard or the driver, I’m not sure which, announced that there would be a slight delay because of problems with the signals.

Twenty minutes later we still had not moved. She was back, though, this time to tell us that the delay was continuing but that we should be moving at any moment. That was the last thing she said for another whole hour.

And so we sat there.

I read and edited the whole of a pcwexpert, and then moved on to my book. Jon, who I had spotted further down the carriage, sent me a text message to warn me that the trains were delayed. Clearly he had not seen me. I sent him one back, and then another later, but by then he had turned off his phone so didn’t receive them.

Chris the midnight weatherman called me from Chelmsford station. They had closed the platform due to overcrowding. There had not been a train for an hour and a half by that point, and they weren’t expecting any more for at least another two hours. In the end it turned out the be much longer and the line was closed for most of the day as repair workers walked up and down it trying to find the problem.

Eventually, after we had been sitting there for almost two hours, with the sun streaming in through the windows, making everyone hot and tired, we moved. Just a little, just past the next station. And then we stopped again.

The female voice came back to warn us that our next stop would be Liverpool Street. It wasn’t, though. Until we had moved three of four more stops up the line it was a jumpy, hesitant, tedious process.

Fortunately I had my little radio with me, so I listened to it as we crawled along, but every news bulletin just made me more annoyed. The lead story was the government’s decision to spend

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