Woke up early to glorious weather, and burnt off calories I’d yet to consume at the gym before work. Full of good intentions, I restricted myself to fruit for breakfast, then more this afternoon when I was craving chocolate.

Now I feel ill. Sick, headache. Quite cold. So much for the health kick. I even walked right across London to a briefing just after lunch when it would have been easier (and quicker) to take the tube.

I was fine fifteen minutes ago. I ate a full dinner, and sipped tea as I watched the rather strange opening episode of Six Feet Under, taped off Channel 4 late last night. Let’s hope I can sleep it off.

Worked late and had a nasty journey home. The train stopped twice, abruptly, between Romford and Shenfield. The second time we sat waiting for several minutes, and I could tell something was up. It was no surprise when we arrived at Shenfield to hear the train was broken. ‘He’s pulled up the APS,’ shouted a uniformed guy on the platform, which I think means he’s tripped the safety device, so although the train can theoretically still run it’s probably not covered by insurance.

A guy with a rail company badge clipped to his tie was sitting in the seats behind me. I didn’t notice him until he ejected a stream of swear words and profanities when we were told to leave the train and wait on platform three.

Standing there in the cold brought back a lot of memories of school. I changed trains there twice a day every day for seven years, and we pretty much owned the benches that look down the platform from beneath the canopy that kept away the rain.

I got in trouble twice on that station in my seven years of school. The first was early on, perhaps in the second year, when John Lynch, Jason Gallagher, Ben Wiseman and I had been sitting in one of those compartments you used to get in slam-door trains years ago. Six seats on each side facing each other. They finally abandoned them after a woman was raped in one traveling home late one night.

The night we got in trouble was the middle of the summer term. The windows of the whole carriage seemed to be open, we had our blazers off, and were passing around a large bottle of lemonade. As I was drinking from it someone, John Lynch, I think, claimed that there was spit in it. Whether there was or not, I don’t know, but it was enough to make us pour it out of the window as the train rattled past the houses just outside Brentwood. It was still going quite fast at the time, and the lemonade, caught in the wind, was carried along the length of the carriage, splattering passengers in every compartment as it was blown through the windows.

Someone complained, of course.

They said we were urinating out of the windows.

Big, BIG trouble at school the next day. We had to write letters of apology to the train people.

The other time was when I left my bag on the platform because I couldn’t be bothered to carry it with me as I went to buy sweets at the shops across the road.

No prizes for guessing the effect that had.

Waiting for a replacement train this evening, though, having already patrolled the platforms that had once been so familiar, I resorted to reading an Evening Standard that someone had left behind. There was a quite shocking story about Rupert Murdoch’s attitude towards the euro on page 19. Considering how much his companies have done to produce homogeneity within global culture (think Sky, Fox, etc) I certainly wasn’t expecting him to be so anti:

Rupert Murdoch will marshall the combined forces of his newspaper empire in a campaign against the euro if Tony Blair calls a referendum … In an interview with today’s Financial Times, Mr Murdoch said: ‘Europe is made up of so many diverse cultures and histories that to slam it together with a government of French bureaucrats answerable to nobody … I cannot see anything but benefit by waiting.’

Quite apart from the fact that I thought he would have been all for the euro and the benefits it could being to a multi-national corporation such as his own, you have to wonder why an American citizen (took citizenship so that he would be allowed to buy an American television network) would feel the need to intervene in British (and European) politics.

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