How Not to Travel

I haven’t written anything here for a while. Sorry. I’ve been travelling. They say it broadens the mind. It seems more to broaden the arse. This is a small portion of what happened:

I went to Liverpool. To pretend to be intellectual. At a conference. I took the train. It was raining. Hard.

I should really have guessed when my very first of a long line of illustrious trains was held up by flooding on the line. Flooding, as we now know, can be a more serious business than a brief puddle.

But I persevered with my journey. I was determined, against all odds, to arrive and pretend to be intellectual. Nothing, not rain, nor flood, nor the hen party partying behind me, nor the lack of movement, nor the lack of air, nor the lack of any comfortable way to sit on an overcrowded overheated train was going to stop me. The hen party continued to party. I accepted the offer of a vodka and coke and a natty headband with two small pink plastic erect penises (or is the plural of penis peni?) on the end of wobbly springs. I began to feel better. I think I probably looked great and very intellectual.

I got there. I pretended. I think they were fooled. But I didn’t get home. I got stuck in Crewe. No trains were running to Cardiff. No cars, buses, bicycles, rickshaws or fake-intellectual carrying creatures or any sort. Not even a handy woodlouse with a golden carriage attached volunteered to carry me homewards. In fact the woodlouse was quite rude and told me that the golden carriage was only for people without plastic peni on their heads. Snob.

I stood outside Crewe station and rang the beloved. ‘I’m stuck in Crewe.’ He told me about Crewe’s great railway heritage and what a wonderful place it must be to be stuck in. ‘But I want to go home.’ He advised that the Crewe railway museum would be a good way to keep my mind off my homesickness. He also said that I might amuse myself by watching trainspotters. I was briefly amused by wondering if by watching people do something immensely boring one might somehow transcend boredom itself and reach a higher level of consciousness. Then I went to find a hotel.

So there I was. Alone. In the only room in the hotel that didn’t exist. The room didn’t exist. The hotel was very existing and solid and British. It was called the Crewe Railway Hotel. The beloved would have approved. Mine was room number 320. Dotted conveniently around the maze of corridors and stairs were handy signs pointing the lost trainspotters to their rooms. 320 was never mentioned. At all. There was plenty of arrows announcing the delights of 120-150, or 212-222, and climbing a narrow winding staircase announcing 310-319 I discovered those very rooms. Or at least their locked doors. By this time I was definitely in the attic. Amongst the broken furniture and store rooms. I spied the fire-escape and was on the verge of throwing myself down it in the hope of being caught by a well-upholstered trainspotter when miraculously there was a door. 320.

Upon entering the room I was delighted by the view of the railway tracks, the single bed whose headboard consisted of a small hatch leading to the underworld, and the TV which showed nothing but snow. But snow was a nice change from rain. So I watched that for a while. Then I fixed it by plugging the aerial in. And was further delighted to discover that I had eight channels. Two of which were free porn of a very amateurish and charming nature in an icky kind of way.

And thus I spent the evening. Wasting a perfectly good hotel room by being on my own. Sitting in bed, drinking Newcastle Brown (Crewe Brown being unavailable at the bar), eating minty aero balls by carefully biting them in half along the green-brown divide and licking out the bubbly bit in the middle and watching lesbian porn. The girls on the TV mostly just said ‘fuck’. I mostly just said ‘fuck’.