Wednesday, August 10, 2005

I go to London.

This has become a bit of a regular occurrence for me recently, and is disrupting my life greatly. It means I need to get a train at about 8.30 in the morning in order to see people for a meeting, then return in the afternoon with all the tourists. Honestly, if you all had to work as hard as I did then you would appreciate your idle lives more.

My train has been renamed 'The Cambridge Cruiser'. Aside from my doubts about using any form of transport that sounds like a minor serial sex offender, the small fact that it ends up in King's Lynn rather than Cambridge seems to have passed the railway marketing people by.

But presumably the 'King's Lynn Lunger' had too many characters for the departure board.

Working in railway marketing must be an unrewarding job. Years ago you could put up beautiful big posters 'Scarborough!!! By LNER!!!' and everybody would have got very excited about these new travel opportunities opening up to the working classes. A few years later and you would have got to meet Jimmy Saville. But now? 'The Cambridge Cruiser' smacks of a sad desperation to come up with something - anything - to put in the 'achievements' section of your quarterly appraisal.

This constant commercial travelling is becoming a bit of a burden for me, as it means I have been spending less time in the village, where lots of things happen that I can document for history. Normal service will, I promise, be resumed at some point.