© Always Worth Saying 2025, Going Postal
Many years ago, during my previous, more interesting life and while still in possession of hair, teeth, ears that could hear and twenty-twenty vision, not only had a bamboo curtain been thrown around China by a rotter called Chairman Mao, but Mrs Thatcher – yes, Mrs Thatcher – insisted myself upon the other side of it.
Tall tales of derring-do ensued. Long-suffering readers will recall bags of pearls, babies smuggled across frontiers in the bottom of rice sacks, and the Cretsa Run escapes from Hong Kong’s town-centre Kai Tak International Airport.
Times have changed, and, let’s face it, threaten to change back again. But between the cracks in the present-day hardening of Anglo-Chinese relationships, one or two nouveau riche injection-moulded-plastic trillionaires remember their own previous lives and occasionally ask by name for this humble teller of slightly embellished and mildly exaggerated Oriental tales.
If a chap last seen in small trousers in the dust in a one-horse settlement near the border with Mongolia goes on to do rather well from supplying the middle aisle of sophisticated European bargain-variety retail chains, surely we are obliged to congratulate him? One in the eye for Mao and the Red Guards, no less. If the local smiling golden dragon of good fortune provides him with red envelopes stuffed with folding luck, why not?
If that aforementioned entrepreneur has a granddaughter doing the Grand Tour and needs a chaperone from the Lake District to London, and he remembers me by name to the bods who organise such things, can a semi-retired travelling gentleman be anything other than flattered and eager to trouser a considerable remuneration plus two sets of expenses? Yes, two – when chaperoning a female, Mrs AWS must also be in attendance. Game on!
Cynics amongst you may wonder if my cherubic client might have filled her Hello Kitty Huawei phone with encrypted data sucked from Sellafield while pretending to take an interest in Beatrix Potter, before a mad dash to a big house on Portland Place with a red flag flying from the roof. I don’t care. Not my pay grade these days.
The best way to chaperone a VVIP is with discretion; hiding in plain sight is a most effective form of disguise. If an unaccompanied chap with short hair in ordinary clothes drives in the rough direction of the firing range, the boot of his nondescript, unmarked Audi may well be packed with customised machine guns being tested for some sheikh. That anonymous unescorted lorry on the M6 with an extra axle and wider tyres might have bits of an atom bomb within it. Taps nose.
The bad news is that, to avoid suspicion, our VVIP had to travel Standard Class from the Debatable Lands to Londonistan. Boo. However, the fee and two sets of expenses would allow for myself and Mrs AWS to return from the Smoke in First. If the gods of indiscretion dictate my darling wife is kidnapped somewhere near Crewe in some terrible misunderstanding, so be it. I shall put my feet up on her empty seat and move on. It’s what she would have wanted.
As ever regarding daily subsistence, one feels obliged to cut as many corners as possible and keep the difference. The timings were tight. My young client’s schedule was not fixed until close to the departure, thus not allowing for mega-advance discounted travel. Not to worry – a ticket-splitting website came in handy and directed us to singles to Coventry, followed by singles to London – the services via Birmingham being cheaper (and taking an extra hour) than those direct.
However, with everything booked and sorted and run through and rehearsed to the point that nothing could go wrong, everything went wrong at the hands of that most formidable of enemies. Not the Taiwanese Secret Service or the Shenzen Snakeheads – worse than that – an unholy alliance between the wet stuff and the blowy stuff, personified as Storm Floris. A Dutch name meaning flowering, used because of the Met Office’s unholy collaboration with the Dutch and Irish.
Yes, the weather, or at least the forecast, was against us. Dire predictions emerged, and an amber warning was issued. I’m a great believer that these things are exaggerated because of climate change claptrap, but, having said that, if a warning was issued and nobody took any notice of it and something terrible happened, it would be inexcusable.
A landslide near Stonehaven resulted in the Carmont derailment five years ago this coming Tuesday. Three died.
Therefore, last Sunday night, bureaucrats at various points of the complicated privatised railway network moved their fingers along process lines and turned the pages of flick books to follow the appropriate procedures – one of which involved instructing passengers they should not travel north of, or if north of, Preston. As services were being truncated with that in mind, my phone pinged to let me know our train out had been cancelled. Moments later, another ping cancelled the journey back.
Not to worry. Let’s get busy.
Real Time Trains do individual service schedules and station departure boards. The Avanti West Coast Trains website does cancellations and alterations. A mass of contradictory information spread across my screens. Emailing Avanti resulted in an automated response promising to ‘aim’ to reply to me within 28 working days. Oh.
Amazingly, phoning Network Rail saw me talking to an actual person right away. A helpful gentleman read out the travel advice – or rather the ‘do not travel’ advice – before suggesting logging on and phoning up again first thing tomorrow morning to see how the land lies. I assured him I’d have early boots on a daybreak platform to see for myself.
Persevering with the screens, by about 11:30 p.m., Real Time Trains and the Avanti cancellations list (done in a funny way whereby you have to drop-list them one at a time and check for yourself) began to match.
Everything from Glasgow and Edinburgh was cancelled. For the uninitiated, the London trains originate in Glasgow or Edinburgh, then pass through Carlisle, where we’d be getting on. An hour and five minutes later-ish, they call at Preston before heading for London, either by Birmingham or by the more direct route not via Brum.
With the Glasgow and Edinburgh sections cancelled, all were starting from Preston – except two: the 07:36 and 10:36 from Glasgow, which instead would start from Carlisle at their usual departure times of 08:48 and 10:49. Good news, since our original, now cancelled, train was the 07:04, meaning we got a lie-in. But would we be able to get on it?
As every Puffin knows, the number of people travelling between two places is the population of both multiplied together and divided by the distance between them squared – then timesed by a constant. What’s the constant? Well, it depends. Is this commuter land or a seaside resort? Is there an airport?
Suffice it to say, there’ll be no Glasgow people on the 08:48, and there is a ‘don’t travel’ instruction in place for everyone else. On the other hand, Glaswegians are notoriously good at improvising a way from A to B, and those hailing from my own Debatable Lands are known to take no notice of what they are told.
Only one way to find out – turn up early and be prepared to deploy those sharp elbows!
To be continued…
© Always Worth Saying 2025
