金曜日 Crapfest

金曜日 already.

Another seven crappy days to stick in the box marked "USED WEEKS" and kick under the bed.
Friday in Japanese (yes, I had Japanese class last night; can't you tell?) is 金曜日(きんようび - "gold" day).

Let's hope this Friday is slightly more "gold" than last week's somewhat browner attempt.
Last Friday, the Safety Officer for Essex Fire Brigade was driving up the A12 beside the mainline railway when his van caught fire (yup; that's a hee hee).
Being the Safety Officer, he pulled over, got out and legged it.
Unfortunately, his van contained some gas bottles and the latest Health and Safety Executive guidelines specify that once the fire is put out, nobody can approach the van within a ludicrously large radius for twenty-four hours.
This meant that both the A12 (the only major road into the area) and the mainline railway running alongside it were effectively shut down for a day and a night.

Through long and bitter experience, Old Dive always checks the real-time rail website from lunchtime onwards every day. Which meant that I wasn't one of the tens of thousands of angry commuters at Liverpool Street Station in the evening rush hour being informed that they must find accommodation in London for the night (HA! Yeah, right! Form a queue for the cardboard boxes) …

As soon as the bad news hit the website I immediately emailed the gang (the bolshie and extremely litigious Radical Wing of the Norwich to London Commuter Club … We took the bastards to the European Court last year and won compensation and improved conditions and we're itching to do it again).
Then I jogged the five miles to the station (the quickest way across London), leaping aboard the last train out to Cambridge (on the face of it, completely the wrong way) with thirty seconds to go before the whole lot shut down, and dragging with me a little old lady from my village who I found staring in horror and confusion at the big board with all the "CANCELLED" signs on it.

Fourteen crawling stops and an hour-and-a-half later, having been stood, jammed against the doors all the way, we reached Cambridge. Only to find the platforms so full we couldn't get off the train.
There was a virtual riot going on there and after much tactical use of both the elbow and brandishing an old lady at people, I managed to get us two seats on a train heading in what would appear to those with less bitter experience to be yet another wrong direction.

Another fifty minutes brought us to a little used intersection with the Central Line, somewhere in the midlands.
This is the "last resort" route home. Kinda like going from Noo Yawk to Chicago via Miami, but not many people know about it.
There stood most of the gang; sweat-drenched, clothes awry, but grinning that we had made it out. Dive, Wiggy, Spike, A Woman Called Horse, Underbite and Backspace, Monkey-boy, Scab-head, Breakfast Boy and Mary Hopkin (Witchfinder General); all the regulars, plus my little old lady and her miraculously unscathed shopping bags.
We picked up a stopper coming from Liverpool to Norwich and spent another hour-and-a-half dawdling our way home.
Having grabbed my car and dropped the old lady at her house in the village I actually pulled in to my driveway at exactly the same time I usually do. The entire trip took seven hours instead of my usual three-and-a-half, but I was home in time to watch the chaos on the news.

Then on Monday we broke down …

I love commuting.
It's a constant stream of unfettered joy and great training for when I descend into the lower circles of Hell.