“CROSS TRAINRY C**TS” – A Play in One Act

Posted on October 11, 2018 by Nigel Hurll

Dramatis Personae

A rocket scientist and his wife – Erucae scientiae et uxor eius
A man of powerful voice – Stentor irritatum
A small oriental lady – Muliercula chinki
A raucous group of sport followers – Ebrius imitatores de Villa Astona
Several other travellers who appear to have lost their capacity to reason – Multis amisisse videntur facultas cogitandi
Our hero – Heros nostrum
Narrator – Narrator

Scene: Coach D – 11.27 Cross Country Trains service from Manchester Piccadilly to Bournemouth

Narrator: Our hero is in the aisle seat of the pair of seats 17 and 18, which numbers are clearly marked on the grab-handle of the left-hand seat of the two, facing forward. Both seat numbers are also shown on the electronic reservation indicator screen below the edge of the luggage rack centrally located immediately above the seats.

A man and his wife, who have joined the train at the same station as our hero, enter the coach and start to walk up and down, peering at various seats, muttering numbers under their breath.

Man: I don’t understand this odd numbering system, it’s very confusing.

Our hero: So the numbering system is odd, is it? Being that it starts at 1 and the further you venture along the carriage, it increases in ones, finishing at the maximum number of seats accommodated in the carriage? These mysteriously calculated seat numbers are clearly marked on the grab-handle of the left-hand seat of each pair of seats (viewed from behind). Both seat numbers are also shown on the electronic reservation indicator screen below the edge of the luggage rack centrally located immediately above the seats. It’s not fucking rocket science!

Man: Ah! So it’s not rocket science, then?! That is clearly why I don’t comprehend the system, for, you see, I am a rocket scientist!

Our hero: Well, what are the chances of that?

Narrator: Our hero realised his mistake too late for he was then forced to spend the next 25 minutes listening to the man pontificating on the laws of probability.

Our hero: Well, that is extraordinarily riveting stuff, I’m sure, and I’m obliged for your lucid, if lengthy, explanation. However, I haven’t any more time to waste on your good self because there will be a lot more c**ts on this train in respect of whom it will be necessary to record varying levels of exasperating fuckwittery for posterity.

Narrator: As if to demonstrate the veracity of our hero’s assertions, a diminutive oriental lady makes her way along the carriage, muttering nervously, myopically scrutinising the seats and the seated. This in itself may not appear particularly extraordinary except for the fact that she repeats the action five more times over the course of the ensuing half-an-hour.

Throughout this journey, our hero witnesses several instances – extraordinarily common in his extensive experience of rail travel – where passengers are occupying seats reserved for others and, one of the reservee’s attempts to claim their seat, finding it occupied, agrees, after consultation with the trespasser, to sit elsewhere. Our hero is justifiably aggrieved by this and is buggered if he would go and sit elsewhere, particularly when, in one case, it is a little old lady who tells a perfectly able young man to stay where he is while she struggles along the aisles to try and find another seat. Our hero is tempted to explain to the young man the extent of his eponymity in terms of the title of this play, but concludes that, however justified, it is likely to prove pointless since, at this stage, literary devices and words of more than one syllable are likely to be beyond the grasp of the little turd. Also, having been confronted and rigorously criticised for his repulsive selfishness, he might have punched our hero in the face.

Several seats away from our hero, a man with an extremely loud voice was holding a conversation with every passenger in the carriage, well, not intentionally, of course, he was only talking to (actually, at) the man in the adjoining seat, and his proficiency in enabling his monotonous and self-centred dissertation to be audible to the driver of the train about three carriages away without the use of a megaphone would have been an admirable trait had he not been another of the c**ts in the title.

This journey, like many others endured by our hero, was disappointingly typical, with manifestations of the worst kinds of human behaviour, such as that exhibited by a nauseating mob of Aston Villa (it needn’t have been Aston Villa, it just was) supporters who spent the entire time that they were contaminating the train in the vestibule area between Coaches D and E (and spilling into D) loudly singing (in the loosest possible sense of the word) puerile songs containing more than a liberal smattering of base epithets, mostly four letters in length. Oh, and also blocking all the toilets with empty beer cans.

To confirm the veracity of the Dramatis Personae above, several other travellers who appear to have lost their capacity to reason mainly warranted that description by totally failing to get to grips with the ludicrously simple seat numbering and reservation system, which befuddled the rocket scientist described earlier, and, clearly, the diminutive Chinese lady. The behaviour of this group was admittedly more a minor irritant as opposed to the obnoxious disruptive knobheadery of the football supporters.

Our hero was seriously considering dashing off an e-mail to Cross Trainry to suggest that the Company carry a stock of sleep-inducing medication, which the guard could either: (i) supply to heroes of the journey so they can become blessedly oblivious to the constant c*ntishness of travellers like the football yobs, or, preferably, (ii) administer forcibly to the latter, so that heroes and their decent fellow passengers can enjoy the scenery without having to endure their existence – albeit for a short period compared to the average human life span. Frankly, though, in our hero’s view, their presence on the planet amounted to little more than oxygen thievery.

It has to be said that whilst our hero could never be considered a naturally vindictive person, he is not a particularly patient one. This is by no means a failing on his part.

Right on queue

Posted on March 16, 2015 by Nigel Hurll

As Manchester City season ticket holders, we drive north-westwards from the town in the New Forest where we live for every home game. We have experienced more than our fair share of adverse traffic conditions during the last four years or so of these sojourns and I have penned previous accounts of them elsewhere, most of them shamelessly – but deservedly, in my opinion – vitriolic. Recently, we have availed ourselves of the services of Virgin Trains and/or CrossCountry depending on the cost, and this is fast becoming a preferred means of travel, barring further landslides.

I don’t think the despair, frustration and, yes, hatred, engendered by some of the journeys comes close to that suffered on one Saturday just after Christmas. The traffic queue stretched from the A31 in Ringwood – less than a mile from our house – to Junction 19 (Knutsford) of the M6 – approximately 223.5 miles from our house. Naturally, this was unexpected and contrary to the – as it turned out, somewhat naïve and pitifully unfounded – theory that most people would have been at home languishing in a kind of sedentary post-Boxing Day haze.

Normally, it should take just over 4 hours, which includes a half-hour stop for food and coffee at Warwick Services; well, there was even a bastard great queue to get in there. As a consequence of all the vehicular challenges we encountered, it took a little longer this time: we had left home at noon and arrived at the Premier Inn at Bucklow Hill on the A556 at Mere, near Knutsford (a regular resting place of ours), at 8.00pm.

Needless to say, even with the obligatory halt at Cherwell Valley Services on the way back – Gregg’s: two regular lattes, steak bake, ham and cheese baguette, cream scone and a yum-yum, oh, don’t forget stamps on the coffee reward card – it took just under 4 hours on eerily deserted roads.

I can’t see it getting any better. *sigh*

Reading things out of proportion

Posted on December 18, 2014 by Nigel Hurll

One of the bewildering twists and turns of my 37-year local government career actually resulted in my going berserk at Reading (Berks) – as opposed to Reading (Books). It was a simple chain of events. Oh, and the Books thing was just a cheap joke.

I worked at Rochdale MBC for six years in the seventies then went back to Bournemouth, where I was born and had begun an illustrious local government career in October 1966! Upon my return, there was a recession in the North West and thousands of workers were suffering a three-day week. The property market was therefore pretty stagnant in that area and I spent the next two years (the time it took to sell our house) travelling backwards and forwards on trains. The one I mostly caught (on every other Friday) was the daily 09.26 service (or was it the 09.24? it seemed to matter in them days) from Bournemouth Central to Manchester Piccadilly, which took a cross-country route (thus involving no changes in London) and took six hours or thereabouts.

One of the scheduled stops was Reading and, if my memory serves me right (it very often does on more than one level!), it was not long after the introduction of the whizzo Inter-City 125 service (so-called because the trains actually went 125 mph – well, when there wasn’t dust or jam on the tracks), one of which passed through Reading (without stopping) on the way from London to Exeter. It was quite impressive to see one of these new machines thundering through the station!

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, going berserk. On my first journey on the jolly old 09.26, we duly arrived at Reading (forwards). Can you see where this is going? I thought I was going to be able to at the time. After some rather unnerving joltings, the train began to leave – backwards. Coupled with the need (entirely whimsical, I accept) to sit facing the direction of travel and the resumption of the journey in a direction completely opposite to that which had been hitherto prevalent, my senses took a turn for the berserkness. I could not understand why we were going in the opposite direction – obviously I was on the wrong train and goodness knows where I would end up, or how much more it would cost me (times were hard). For a short time, I ran amok with a mental machete, chopping the heads off passengers and an assortment of British Rail (remember them?) employees for not telling me I was on a train that was going anywhere other than my desired destination.

After I found out that Reading was where the diesel engine was replaced with an electric one and, via a system of intricate points and other nifty railway-type devices, we ended up going in a north-westerly direction as planned, my running amokness subsided and I returned to my seat, mentally apologising to all the people I had hacked to death in my information vacuum.

When all’s said and done, it had been an unnerving experience. Funny how the mind plays tricks.

Travelling Companion

Posted on December 18, 2014 by Nigel Hurll

On the sad occasion of Sheila’s stepfather’s funeral a few years ago, I had to drive up to my mother-in-law’s in Manchester; Sheila had already been there for a week, keeping her mother company. I thought it would be a good idea if Matt came with me, instead of going in the evening with his brother, his brother’s girl-friend and his cousin, so he could be company for me on the 250-mile journey.

Well, he was company in the sense that he was in the car. For the first two and a half hours, he watched ’24’ on his portable DVD player, then, when the battery failed, he made me stop at Warwick Services so he could get his CDs from his bag in the boot. My heart sank, for I knew then that Blink 182 were about to rattle my head, thus rendering all conversation impossible.

The next incident of note was his descent into a fairly deep sleep, to wake up only when we were five minutes away from my mother-in-law’s house.

So that was nice.

Voyages Around the Leicestershire Countryside

Posted on December 17, 2014 by Nigel Hurll

I recall a weekend visit a few years ago to a friend who lived at the time in Houghton‑on-the-Hill, Leicestershire. I shall call him Simon (it is his name, after all) and I had driven up with another friend, Pete, who lives in Romsey. Far be it from me to rubbish anyone but, with my hand on my heart, I could not swear that Simon is an incredibly competent driver with an unerring sense of direction.

When we arrived, we found he had arranged an evening rendezvous with another couple of friends at an establishment he insisted was called “The Ewes”. Knowing Simon, acting upon an educated hunch, and having confirmed my doubts as to the likelihood of the owners of “The Yews” naming their premises after some sheep, its location at nearby Great Glen was established. Or, as we subsequently discovered on our sojourns round the Leicestershire countryside (some being duplicated, to the extent that we began to recognise cows as old friends), it wasn’t.

The trip was not entirely without incident (well, we were with Simon): a man with no legs (driving an elaborate go-kart device with hand-operated pedals) was just one of three near misses, the other two being a man on a bicycle with all of his legs (only narrowly managing to retain them, no thanks to Simon) and a car, all of which, whilst on the face of it negotiating the highway in a perfectly legitimate manner, thoughtlessly arrived at a particular point a fraction of a second before they were about to negotiate a blind corner, and a fraction of a second after we had arrived at the same corner travelling in the opposite direction – still with me? Thank goodness for the open fields abutting the roadway. It’s all right, we didn’t frighten the cows, they knew us.

At one of several places where Simon decided that we may have been travelling in the wrong direction, he endeavoured to execute a rapid three-point turn, which probably ought to have been more correctly called a two-point-one-kerb-collision-point turn. It was a fairly high, robust kerb and I had seen it coming. Pete, in the back seat, however, had not, and was entirely unprepared for the not insignificant jolt. Only the layers of sandwich cases, pizza boxes, food bags and chocolate wrappers saved him from being severely injured.

However, after sheer perseverance, a soupçon of panic, and a fair amount of clever guesswork, we found The Yews. Life’s never boring.

Driving me mad

Posted on December 10, 2014 by Nigel Hurll

After due deliberation, I have come to the conclusion that I am a jam magnet. Before you run away with the idea that, in some strange way, I attract fruit spread, let me disavow you of this misapprehension with the following relevant definitions for ‘jam’ from Dictionary.com: to fill or block up by crowding; pack or obstruct; to make (something) unworkable by causing parts to become stuck, blocked, caught, displaced; and – probably the most relevant – a mass of objects, vehicles, etc., packed together or otherwise unable to move except slowly.

You may or may not have read the sad account of one of my many journeys north-westward when the M6 jumped out from behind a clear road and blocked itself to buggery, forcing us to take four hours to travel 20 miles. Well, I am now proud to announce that I was once a participant in the greatest M60 Manchester Ring Road snarl-up in living memory. According to the traffic lady on a local radio station, the whole circular route had been a massive car park for most of the afternoon. I would therefore dispute the ‘move slowly’ bit of the last part of the dictionary entry above as it engenders an entirely false impression that movement was a regular feature of the affair.

I had driven from Manchester (where we were spending a few days away from Hants with relatives) to Merseyside for a meeting with a work colleague, and this vehicular melée was the culmination of a wonderful day on rain-sodden roads (one stretch of the M56 was far better suited for water-skiing) that included a stop-start excursion through the centre of Liverpool (where, incidentally, I had never been before) and a surreal episode with my satnav in the Wallasey Tunnel. I was understandably surprised to see my journey under the River Mersey depicted on its screen all the way through (quite often it goes blank when I drive under a tree) and I assumed that there must have been some sort of signal boosting equipment installed in it (see? – more damned electrickery, you can’t get away from it). I did wonder why, though, as soon as I emerged into the open from the tunnel towards the toll booths, it lost the satellite signal.

Pretty much par for the course that day.

Ferry ‘cross to Jersey

Posted on December 2, 2014 by Nigel Hurll

See what I did there? Anyway, something has awakened nostalgia in me and reminded me of my first (and, as I have just realised, my only) visit to the lovely island of Jersey (if I remember rightly, it was in 1972). It would be remiss of me not to inform you that my companions were my very good friends Andy, Bob, Colin and Dave. I won’t bore the pants off you with a full account but there are salient features of that holiday which are indelibly imprinted in my memory.

We arrive at Weymouth by train to catch a Sealink ferry. Never having been on any kind of ship before, I am apprehensive about the ability of my stomach to retain its contents for any appreciable period. I am even more apprehensive when we encounter a bloke who paints a black picture of Jersey following the recent murder of a young nurse in St Helier, condemning all aspects of life on the island as “bad noos”.

Having consumed a good deal of beer both prior to arriving at the ferry port and on the ferry itself, my earlier apprehension proves not to have been groundless and I am sick at about midnight, amid jeers from my companions (including Bad Noos, of whom we were unable to rid ourselves). However, this has been a groundbreaking (seabreaking, surely?) voyage for me and one which appears to have given me sea legs, because I have never been seasick since, and, at about 7 a.m. as we approach St Helier, one by one, all my friends disappear on vomiting duties while I consume a hearty breakfast of tomato juice, kippers and toast!

We hire an “Economy 5” (Austin 1100) from a Lancashire immigrant, Tug Wilson, and wonder how that dilapidated excuse for a vehicle could have engendered such enthusiasm in him (“Eeh, lads! This caaar…”).

We had arranged for the tent and all associated equipment – consigned to a large wooden crate – to be transported to the Rose Farm Campsite in St Brelade to coincide with our arrival. Amazingly, it worked!

We had been spending a lot of time on one of Bournemouth’s beaches prior to the trip. The tent (and a lot of the equipment) was Colin’s and, as he was the only one who knew how to erect the tent, it was unfortunate that Dave had to take him to hospital, suffering from sunstroke. It was dark (and late) when we eventually put it up.

During our stay, an Irishman called Dennis arrived at the site, carrying a suitcase. Much amusement ensued when he opened it and extracted a small one-man tent. An awful lot more amusement ensued when he slept in it: most of his legs protruded from one end. When I say most of his legs, I don’t mean he had loads of legs, but that a fair proportion of the two he had at the time were sticking out.

We visited St Aubin, Gorey, La Corbière, the German Underground Hospital, Portelet Bay, Grouville, Mont Orgeuil Castle, spent a lot of time in St Helier and on the beach at St Brelade and marvelled at the ability to drink during the afternoon, yes, the afternoon! They used to chuck us out at about half-past four for half an hour while they swept up. We also marvelled at the prices! It’s a shame I can’t remember the name of the bar overlooking St Brelade Bay where we spent many a happy hour. It’ll come to me.

None of us was romantically challenged at that time except Dave, who was engaged. I remember he used to sit in the *wiggles two sets of two fingers next to ears* car, while we were in the club roistering the night away.

Whatever triggered those memories – thanks!

The road goes ever on and on

Posted on November 29, 2014 by Nigel Hurll

Apologies to J R R Tolkein. In The Lord of the Rings (one of my favourite books), there is a song with the above title that sums up a section of the utterly wretched A34 (actually, that’s how it makes me feel), which I have regularly traversed on my trips to and from the north-west. It’s strange, but the home leg always seems more interminable than the outward.

As many of you may know, there are actually three versions of the song in that great work: one which Bilbo sings as he sets off from the Shire, the second (which only has one word change) is spoken by Frodo as he and his companions pause at the Shire’s borders looking toward lands none of them had ever seen, and the third spoken by Bilbo in Rivendell (the closest version to my own). Anyway, I felt compelled to write it; as I’ve mentioned on a previous occasion, it’s hard to stop me from doing things like this!

The Road goes ever on and on
Out from the M40 where I began;
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
Please let me off, I’m not a fan.

Let others’ journeys yet begin,
But I at last with aching back
Will turn towards the lighted inn;
A glass or two, then hit the sack.

Not quite up to JRRT’s standard, I know, but it kept me quiet for a bit.

There is actually an original version of the song which Bilbo recites at the end of The Hobbit, and which starts “Roads go ever ever on”. Here’s a stab at the opening lines of the first verse of that one:

Roads go ever ever on
Over rock and under tree;
Like this one, too, I drive upon
While pining for the old M3.

I curse the Highways Agency
‘Til all my vicious words are done
But, finally, a sense of glee,
The end is nigh: A31.

Truth to tell, I’ve never actually experienced a sense of glee or any other similar emotion upon encountering the A31, especially when westbound on a Friday afternoon but, after several rewrites of the last two lines, desperation set in.