A NICE RELAXING EVENING MEAL

June 16, 2010


I said I wanted a nice relaxed evening meal before catching the 6.29pm to London – none of this running around like a twat last minute fucking nonsense as usual.

I’d start the curry before 5pm and we’d eat around 5.30. Need to leave just before 6.15pm, as it takes around seven or eight minutes to drive to the station.

Well, as usual, I was late starting, but with the chicken balti underway and left it simmering while went off and fucked around some more on the computer. Suddenly, it’s 5.40pm and I haven’t even put the sodding rice on. Anyway, we sits down to eat at six o’clock.

Bolting my balti in the hope of having time for the ice cream and strawberries I had picked from the garden earlier, the wife sorts out the dessert while I whiz upstairs to get changed.

Fucking hell – it’s now 6.20 and the bastard train leaves in nine minutes! The journey takes seven or eight. So we jump in the car – me with a bowl of strawberries and ice cream in my hand. I’m trying to enjoy my nice relaxing meal while sitting in a car as the wife blats through the village, steaming round bends to get me there. I’m trying not to chuck chocolate ice cream all over my clean white shirt – or her leather upholstery. And then of course, the inevitable – we get stuck behind a fucking great tractor. Fuck shit fuck.

Legging it up over the platform bridge, I see the bastard train pulling out of the bastard station. Oh, what a fucking muppet. It’s an hour to wait for the next one, but the real problem is I have a ‘cheap bastard’ ticket that is only valid on the 6.29. so I’m faced with the prospect of having to buy another full price ticket, or hope they take pity on me.

The nice lady in the ticket office said she would ask the guard on the next train for me, but it depends on his mood. Well, I thought, I hope it’s a lighter mood than mine.
Fucking tosspot – if I’d only not pissed about thinking I had loads of time. But that’s the story of my whole bloody life.

Anyway, the guard on the 7.29pm was in a good mood, bought the story and let me on with my invalid cheap bastard ticket. I asked, “what happens when you change shift at Salisbury?”

He said he’d let the replacement guard know about me.

Well, we are standing at Salisbury now, as I write this shit in my little journal. I’ve just seen my friendly guard leave the train and walk away down the platform. I hope he did have a word with his colleague when they changed over. I took the precaution of making a note of his name – it always sounds more convincing if you can offer a name when trying to explain why you are traveling on a train without a valid ticket.

His name is Anthony Hancock. He is a very nice bloke.

So, I’m now wondering how the next guard is going to react when I tell him that Tony Hancock said it would be OK for me to travel.

I have a scene playing out in my head: “Yeah? Well I’m Arthur Askey, so get the fuck off my train.”

We’ll see what happens – just pulling away now. I’ll take a break and report back.

…….. a while later.

Well, no problem. The nice new lady guard knows all about me. She is trying to explain to two Brazilian women sitting across the aisle from me that they are on the wrong train. They have cheapo tickets also – for the next train. They got on too early at Salisbury.

I reassured her it wasn’t a conspiracy.

These Brazilian bints can’t speak a word of English and the guard is getting nowhere. Finally, she says to me she might as well let them travel, rather than boot them off at Grateley and leave them standing there for another hour on that desolate platform, wondering what the fuck they did wrong. So, I looked at them and said, “it’s OK”, gesturing with my hands to stay.

“Well, they understood that perfectly well” said the guard. of course they understood - I don’t think there is anyone in the world who does not understand the meaning of ‘OK’.

Turns out that apart from Potugese, one of them speaks French. My French is crap. But I get by on a few words still lodged in my mushy brain from my first year at school, some forty years ago. I really tried hard when I moved up to the ‘big school’ and actually enjoyed the subject. Partly because my old man had bought a Linguaphone ‘teach yourself French' record set.

I was keen to learn – like father, like son, I suppose. By the end of the first year the novelty began to wear off, and the 100% marks I was getting for the weekly dictation test began to wane. In no small part due to a newly forged friendship with someone who has become a life-long mate. We sat together in the second year, and that’s when my education got fucked up. We spent French lessons dropping a straightened out compass into a plasticine man lying on the wooden classroom floor.

I went from conscienscious swot to ‘must try harder’ fuck up in one term. Thanks Andy. Bad influence. What I had not realized was that after four years of fucking about in class, he, being the more intelligent one, was able to knuckle down and get through the O levels at the last minute. He had one ear cocked all the time, while we were both drawing cartoons in our jotters of blokes with ridiculously huge nobs, and caricatures of teachers and some of the weirder kids.

I failed French miserably. I didn’t even want to take it as a subject in the fourth year, but was told I had to. So much for being able to make choices like they said. I wanted to drop French and take Economics, but the cunts wouldn’t let me.

So anyway (I digress) the only French I have is what stuck in my head during that swotty first year at Grammar school. Kind of wish I had continued to learn – it would have come in useful, even enjoyable, on a few occasions over the years, to hold a conversation in another language.

The only other language I’m fluent in is bad language.

So there we have it. Tonight I got on a train I didn’t have a ticket for, and met two Brazilian grannies, also on a train they were not supposed to be on, and we had a nice chat (sort of) all the way from Salisbury to Waterloo.

It’s a funny old world. And I still got me strawberries and ice cream.

Yours
Bill Turnip