In which R has some transport fun

R was in London for a conference over the past few days – due to get home about 8pm.  During the course of the afternoon he started to get those text messages from the airline, which to all experience travellers are a “this flight is going to be cancelled” – you know the ones.  They start off with a delay of half an hour and then this builds up bit by bit – generally when you get the third one it is pretty much a shoo in that the flight is not happening.  When flight A then gets cancelled, everybody and his granny starts jumping on to the last available seats on the other flights going there.  If you are in London trying to get to Edinburgh, then not only all the Edinburgh flights but Glasgow (and even Aberdeen and Newcastle) rapidly fill up as well.

So being a very experienced traveller, R thought he would forestall this, and rather than go to Gatwick for his EasyJet flight,  use his BA airmiles to get an alternative flight from City.  So mid afternoon he went to City airport for an earlier take off.  Unfortunately, by the time he got to City, it became apparent that the problem with not with either Gatwick or EasyJet, it was an air traffic control problem over the whole south east of England.

So R now immediately thought “Choo, Choo!!”, turned round and went back into central London to catch the LNER train back to Cupar.  He got a nice first class ticket (courtesy of his employer) and got on his Azuma.  Personally I think this is the way to travel but R obviously does not agree as he slept the whole way and missed seeing Newcastle and York all lit up (he missed all the other sights on the way as well but that was not his fault as it was dark).  Anyway, all was well to catch the last train from Waverley to Cupar with 20 minutes in hand.

That was until some idiot wandered on to the train line in York.  I don’t want to seem brutal here, but if you really want to end it all, investigate other methods that do not damage other people (I am not just talking inconvenience to passengers, but trauma to the poor train driver and the people who have to scrape you off the tracks).  Anyway – R was then due to miss his train for Dundee by five minutes.  I must admit that I would have expected ScotRail to hold the last train of the day for the incoming London Express (they always used to do this) but for whatever reason, they didn’t.  So I had my SatNav all programmed to drive into Waverley to pick him up – I have never driven into Edinburgh before, and I was getting quite excited at the prospect, but then we realized that there was another train going to Perth that stopped in Ladybank (a village about 5 miles from here).

So by dint of a large cup of coffee – I managed to stay alert and drive over to pick him up just after midnight.  It was quite a novelty driving through an almost empty Cupar without loads of people honking at each other, and being on a dark, silent A91.

I didn’t get to bed until after 1am, and even then I had difficulty getting to sleep because of all the coffee.  So I am tired today.  The picture is of the two crocs and Amber guarding the door against our return.