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Of all the nights I could have done with a good journey home, this was the one. I have to be up at 4am tomorrow to catch the Eurostar to Brussels, so arriving at Liverpool Street this evening to find a red strip of delayed signs across the departures board, and not a single train allocated a platform wasn’t really what I was after.

I walked around in the cold for a while, and then sat in McDonalds drinking coffee for an hour until two screaming kids came in with their poor harassed mother and forced me out.

In the end I managed to get on a Southend train, and jumped off at Shenfield where Paul waited to pick me up and drive me the rest of the way home.

It’s strange, but you can tell when you’re not on your own home line. Somehow the people are different. Maybe it’s because, in years of travelling down the same stretch of track day after day (21 years with a year’s break for me now), you get to recognise some of the faces. Even if you don’t know them you could probably nod a hello in their direction if we didn’t all suffer from a cripling British reserve that forbids us to even make eye contact.

It’s silly. I know the man who sits with the PowerBook on his lap doing technical drawings. I know the man with the mad hair who looks like Einstein. I know the man with the bulging head who seems to be reading a new book every day.

Except of course I only know them by sight. None of us would ever speak. Tutting and raising our eyebrows in mutual frustration when the driver announced another delay would be about as far as any of us would ever dare go.

I wonder how they got home tonight.

Without me.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 24th, 2005 at 11:45 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.