A Time Travellers Tale (I might have just dozed off for a minute)

Faithful  Lums, remember me?  No?   A blight  on you I tells you, I'm after the Brexit crowd anyway, you can tell them any old shite and they'll believe it.  Read on, for  tales  of such in-consequence that even I feel I'm plumbing new depths.

The cossetting shoogle of the carriage, the rhythmic clickety-clacks of the rolling stock, 8 pints of Stella

or maybe the gypsy curse, all ingredients for a great sleep.  But the drowsy awakening, the horror and panic brought on by the yawning realisation that your destination of choice is disappearing out the window at a gentle but accelerating pace.  This depth of despair can only be matched if you happen to wake up as an unexpected towns name slowly fills your view and growing consciousness. 

Wake up you bastard, we cant both be asleep! 

I've fallen asleep on public transport.  In an ideal world, it would be a bit like those sci-movies where the crew of the ship all retire to sleepy pods to enter blissful suspended hibernation for 18 years while they scoot through outer space, woken up by a friendly robot, with a cup of tea as they approach Mars orbit,  its not though is it?  Its me lurching for the last train home, sprawling across the nearest seat like a collapsing clothes horse, then travelling, unconscious, through time and space to a generally random place.

Harrow, Hainault, Perth, Tunbridge, Greenwich, Larbert, Orpington, that sounds like the stops on my triumphant and inevitable book tour, but its actually some of the places I've woken up after falling asleep somewhere else.

I was woken by a cleaner on the DLR  one night,  "Where am I" I inquired, Bank Station was the reply, a surprise for me, as I'd gotten on at Bank Station an hour and a half before,  " I got on at Fucking Bank" I exclaimed, to no real audience, the cleaner had already swept himself away.  Unless I'd discovered a time hole, I had trundled all the way to Lewisham, and all the way back, maybe more than once for all I know.  One aside from this sad story, was it was the night someone stole my hat, off my head, while I slept.  Imagine that! A more wretched hive of scum and villainy you will never find.

That's right, you've all got your hats, rub it in. . 

This scenario also played out while returning from visiting pals in Tunbridge Wells.  Catching the 2230 to Victoria, plenty time to jump on the last tube back to Stratford.  A fine plan, well considered and easily achievable, not well executed however. 4 hours later, shaken awake at Tonbridge, 5 minutes up the road from Tunbridge Wells.  I'd slept all the way to London, the hour and half to get the train emptied, cleaned and turned around, and all the way back.  It was half 2 in the morning, about minus 6 degrees with another 4 hours to wait for the first train to London, what do you do?.  I'll tell you what I thought I'd do, I'll just walk about for 4 hours, its not hard, one foot in front of the other for a half a shift.  Thing is, Tonbridge is about a quarter of a mile long, so once I'd done that 4 times, I felt a bit of a fanny, as well as  being convinced I was going to sit down somewhere and drift off into a hypothermic doze that I wouldn't wake up from.  They used to show adverts about that when I was wee, some fella, lost in the snowy woods telling himself not to fall asleep. 

Don't worry,  a Travelodge is up the road, £60 a night. 

I don't know if he did or not, but that bit stayed with me.  As did the ad about climbing inside old fridges in rubbish dumps and walking on icy ponds, The 70s were full of hazards, odd how they never mentioned the pervy DJs and the Molesters of Parliament though.   So, that made my mind up, with my remaining 3% phone battery I located a Premier Inn and parted with £60 for 3 hours shelter and a worry that I'd miss the first train home.  

£60 incidentally seems to be the rate applied to me for either a late night room booking, or a taxi home.  This suggests two things to me, either hotels and taxis are part of some great price fixing cartel, or my Truman Show producers are lazy bastards and need to get some creativity. 

This result was repeated some months later on the last train from Glasgow Queen St  to home camp at Lenzie Station.  That journey takes approximately 12 minutes, with a stop in between, so really, you would think there would be enough going on to keep me occupied for 12 minutes.  No, half past two I yawn and stretch and blink open my eyes, in Perth, the end of the line.  That's an impressive 55 miles, my most wayward snooze yet.   There are not many options at this point, fair city as it is,  so it was emergency accommodation again, I had to knock on a few doors but finally found an Inn with some room, I remember thinking if they offer me the stable out the back I'm ordering new business cards on Monday.

The Orpington episode is worth a mention.  This was the evening I had to try my luck at night bus roulette, often the last chance saloon if you want a dignified return home, at least without having to phone the World Bank for an emergency relief loan that would get a taxi driver interested.  Night buses aren't like day buses,  the routes seem random with unfamiliar terminus's.   Still I jumped on one I thought was going in the rough direction of Lewisham.  You have to treat night bus routes like driving a golf ball down a fairway, you have an idea of the direction you should be pointing, you might zig-zag a bit, but you'll end up nearer home than you are at the moment, so its all good.  

Next thing that dawns on me, is actually the dawn, dawning on me.  Looking out the window of the bus, now empty of punters, are trees, and fields with animals in them, cows and farms that look like the one in The Darling Buds of May.  Now I hadn't lived in London very long but my keen eye, even with my naivety, I realised  I'm not in London anymore.  I guessed correctly as it happens, I was in Kent.   The driver was helpful, just get off here he said, cross the road and you'll get a bus going back into town.  Great advice, thanks very much, very helpful,  I wasn't to bothered, an old hand now at these impromptu city tours.  An hour I waited as the sun came up, then the bus arrived , it was the same one, I could have just stayed on it, in the warm, I might even had gotten another 40 winks. 

I could go on, but you might be reading this on public transport and be nodding off with the sheer banality of it all, if so, well done for getting this far and my tip, just stand up, I've only fallen asleep standing up once, and generally speaking the bang on the face you get is quite effective at bringing you round.

Lang may yer lum reek.

Burns, Buses and Backpacks

Reeking Lums,

Its not highlighted in my googlecalendar, but it is obviously National Stupid Injury In The Home Week. First I sustain a head injury from our Artexed ceiling that made me look like I had just exited a car through the windscreen and now I have received horrendous napalm like burns to my left hand.

Let me build a picture, as if we were in some horror end of season Holby City, of the terrible sequence of events.

The Reeking Lum, faced with the challenge of making tea for himself and a fussy 12 year old and not being blessed with the talent or charm of Nigella Lawson, sneaks into M&S and procures some vital dinner in a jiffy ingredients. 2 steak pies (20 mins at 180) , 1 tub of M&S ultimate mashed potatoes (20 mins at 180) see what I did there, its all in the preparation, and finally, I microwaveable tub of carrots and peas (3 mins at full power in an 850W microwave). So, following the fool proof instructions on the back all the elements of the plan start to come together. Until that is I chose a totally implausible and unsuitable implement to remove the tub of mashed potato from the oven. I almost had it over to the touchdown zone, when my eyes were drawn to the black sooty pastry on the steak pies, and the inevitable happened. The tub of near molten potato toppled off the flimsy fish slice and I, some would say foolishly, I say instinctively, moved my hand to catch it, which, unfortunately, I did. I caught it all over my palm, and for a moment, i had a clear and unobstructed view of what hell is like. There is a lot of swearing in Hell.

But that was yesterday, today requires a trip into the metropolis for the Reeking Lum.

Part of my severance package includes some coaching on the finery's of getting a job and today's sessions included "Advanced LinkedIn" which is like Facebook that you don't have to hide from your boss, and " Surviving Psychometric Testing and Assessment Centres".

It got me thinking about a presentation I made at an assessment centre years ago. It had Latin in it, a bit of Sun Tzu, a folksy tale about a bus on the way to the seaside and how some of the people on board wanted to drive, others to read the map and direct and some just wanted to sit up the back, smoking and flashing there backside out the window, and of course a liberal sprinkling of fib, and a soupcon of shameless self promotion.

I remember a pal telling me that a guy he was interviewing for a role, when asked to give an example of an inspirational leader and why said Hitler, cos he got things done. Well, he certainly got that right.

The journey to town, on one of the promised 21st Century mass transit carriers felt just like the journeys I remember the last time I was on a bus in the 1980s. A little less shoogly perhaps. I would have had confidence that Mr MacMillan would have had no idea my homework was completed on the journey to school. One curious aside and a consequence of the buses all carrying a pile of Metros at the front is that on one occasion a little old man, though I've got to say, sprightly, sprang aboard the bus, lifted a copy out the box, and sprang back off again. He probably does it every day, its like a paper shop that goes right past your window. Great that, I want one.

It was refreshing to be in Glasgow after a week and a half in Indian Country. Its always nice to see people that don't obviously come from a very concentrated gene pool and of course an opportunity to have my regular 6 syllable Starbucks.

Though come on Starbucks, when are you, and everyone else for that matter, bus companies, The London Tube, Oxford Street, going to ban people wearing huge and unwieldy backpacks that require rear view mirrors and reversing beeps to manoeuvre safely and without incident around other things. Honestly, they may be great for hands free grappling up the North face of The Matterhorn with the knowledge that your lunch box is safely stowed inside, and they are also great for banging you in the face on tubes, taking up two peoples space in lifts, and as today, very nearly knocking my Tai Chai Latte all over me. Only my lightening reactions and the fact that, after the week I've had, I had predicted that very thing happening as soon as I saw him come in, avoided a disaster. But it didn't really matter in the end, because I dropped it outside as I tried to get my brolly up without putting my bag down in the puddles. Brilliant.

Lang may yer lum reek