Am in Henley. Where ought I to be?

[desperance]

Am typing this on autopope's old Vaio, while staying with m'friends Helen & Mark. Helen has a very new Vaio. Much smugness ensues. But! I have wifi! When m'Linux guru and I get onto it, I will have Xubuntu and TextMaker and wifi, and I will be fit to rock & roll. (Only trouble so far is that my touch is too light for the spacebar, so I keep running m'words together and having to go back to correct. We will adjust.)

Meanwhile, obligatory moaning about journey: I came down on Friday. Midday train, London by 3pm, Henley by 5pm, sit in pub till Helen & Mark turn up. Meanwhile, read 'The Poison Master' by mevennen. Lovely. Except that the train ground to a halt at Peterborough, 2pm. Trouble with the power lines ahead; we would be delayed. Half an hour later, the message was that we would be severely delayed, and if anyone decided to abort their journey, the train on platform 3 was going back north...

Then they said that we'd be taken on to Stevenage by bus, if we'd like to go and queue at the front of the station; but actually the guy said the buses would be another hour coming, and it was cold and raining out there, so we might as well stay on the train. So we did that, while other trains disgorged their passengers, so by the time the buses started coming there were already a couple of thousand people in the queue. You think I'm exaggerating. Friday, half-term week: I'm not exaggerating.

So we queued, in the bitter rain. For two and a half hours. And then we were put on a bus that didn't go to Stevenage at all, it went to Sandy; and we were assured that journey time was shorter and there would be a train waiting to take us directly to London. Both of these were lies, of course; the bus went to Huntingdon and St Neot's before it got to Sandy, which took an hour and a half, and then we had to wait for the regular service, which stopped everywhere, and we didn't get to King's Cross till 8pm. So I didn't get to Henley till 10pm, eleven hours after I'd left home. Aaargh!

Still. Here now. Off for Sunday lunch. More later...

Comments

[mevennen.livejournal.com]

I'm so sorry I missed you! FP turned out to be 1-2 pm, and I was in the store for a bit, then went down to Picocon to find that you'd left for FP. Arrgh! I'd left a message on Farah's phone to find out what was happening...but she's lost her phone.
Mercury is supposed to be retrograde this week, betokening communicative chaos...I'll say!

[devonellington.livejournal.com]

Typical story of traveling during a Mercury Retrograde -- delays, delays, delays. I'm glad you got where you're going. sorry it took 11 hours. Hope you're having a lovely time.

[martyn44.livejournal.com]

Sitting in Costas on the Central on Friday listening to horror stories over the Tannoy about overhead line problems in the Peterborough/Huntingdon area, never imagining you were caught up in it. I hope you have recovered.