Training part 2: Coaching.

The companion return leg of my massively productive outward journey was far less smooth than its blog-post-inspiring sibling. Having neglected to check the existence of trains running the reverse route on the day I wished to return home, I was thrust into the sticky arms of the National Express coach service.

The combination of no leg room, a bumpy journey and a headrest made for someone either two inches taller or two inches shorter than me was exactly what I'd expect to get from everyone's second-choice method of long-distance transport. I've always wanted to be one of those people who can easily make conversation with the stranger sitting next to them in these kinds of situations - with the lights off and little chance of sleep, I imagine it would allow the time to pass much more easily. With my particular brand of insecurities and social anxieties, I've never been able to quite pull this off. It generally takes me longer than a single journey to get a comfortable rapport going with a stranger, so unlike those people who can end up with a real bond after a few minutes of conversation, I rarely get past the small talk stage.

On this occasion, I was sitting next to Ana, a Brazilian woman living in Portugal and working in Manchester. Her English wasn't particularly good, and my Portuguese is non-existent, but we manage to get across that she was a cook in a grill-based restaurant serving Mexican, Portuguese and Brazilian food. She likes cooking, and likes it when people enjoy her food. She finds Mexican food boring and too hot ("too piri-piri, too piri-piri") for her, but loves Portuguese food. She explained that no matter how much she showered (which she constantly referred to as "douching"), her hands still smelled of spices, and she was right - the smell of onion and some sort of chilli was ingrained in her skin. She agreed that my hands in turn smelled of nothing at all.

She was travelling to London to stay with a friend of hers, and when she initially instigated conversation with me, it was to ask whether the coach went to "Golden Green", and if not, whether the driver could be persuaded to stop there. I suggested that he wouldn't make an extra stop there, but that she could maybe travel to there by train from Victoria station once we arrived. She did ask the driver a couple of times whether he could stop anywhere other than Victoria, but he was unsurprisingly reluctant.

She said that she found England too cold, and I agreed that it was very a chilly weekend in Manchester. I said I didn't like it when it got too hot, and she laughed at me. She said her hands hurt from the cold, and that she needed a bigger, warmer hat. I tried to explain that I'd bought a new coat that weekend because of the cold, but I don't think she understood.

For large portions of the journey, I tried to sleep, only catching a few moments here and there, while she craned her neck at the motorway signs out of the window, shouted down the phone in Portuguese and occasionally pulled her hat down over her eyes, crossed her hands over her handbag and appeared to sleep for a few minutes, until her phone rang again.

By the time we got to London, the result of her phone conversations was revealed, as her friend had in fact gone to work already, and so was not available to meet her. This meant she now needed to get to Heathrow. From Victoria. At midnight. On a Sunday. As we walked into the station through the bitter cold, she told me about what she was looking forward to: a hot shower ("ver' hot. ver' hot douche. fifty C douche."), a good meal and a good night's sleep ("by this time tomorrow, I be at home in my bed").

We had a look at the boards, and couldn't see any trains heading to Heathrow, so I took her over to the ticket office. No trains to Heathrow, they said, try the underground. We ran down to the underground entrance but the men there said she wouldn't make it to Heathrow by train before the tubes shut down for the night. They suggested she try to get to Paddington and get a train from there, so we ran back upstairs to the front of the station. We wandered over to the taxi rank and I asked a taxi driver how much to Heathrow. £60. "Too much!" she said, aghast. And to Paddington? £12. I tried to explain that she could go to Paddington and then hopefully get a train to Heathrow, and she seemed happy with that.

"Thank you!" she said, "You come to Portugal. You and girlfriend come to Portugal. I help you. You stay with me there." Then she gave me a hug and got into the taxi. I instantly felt guilty that I didn't run to a cashpoint and get out the £60 to get her to Heathrow, rather than subjecting her to another unfamiliar station, and without a guide this time. I really hope she made it to Heathrow, and I really hope she's in Portugal now, enjoying her food and her hot shower and her bed.

Training

Part of the reason I convinced myself two months ago to buy a laptop which I clearly didn't need was in order to take advantage of long and otherwise unproductive journeys. I keep complaining that I have no time to blog, so what about harnessing the untold hours spent sitting alone, staring out of the window while being shuttled to and fro by the nation's public transport system? It's difficult to blog on a bus, it has to be said. Journeys tend not to be long enough for effective introspection, and people tend to look at you strangely, or read over your shoulder and laugh, or read over your shoulder and point out when you've spelled embarrassing words wrong. Words like gonorrhoea, or cunnilingus. So not the bus, then. And similarly not on the plane, given my tendency to holiday either in the cold, wet confines of this country, or even, perhaps preferably, simply in my own home and more specifically my own bed. Little to no airline travel involved there, then, and thus no excuse for an extravagant laptop purchase.

But, I thought to myself, what about all those long train journeys to far flung parts of this windy isle? I remembered as a child being entertained by my parents for the three-and-a-half hour slog up to Newcastle: playing chess with my dad; doing (easy) crosswords or reading comics; eating sandwiches out of a bag; cherishing the one tube of sweets that had to last the whole journey. And, speaking of sweets, anyone who has had a sibling must surely have had those unspoken competitions when treats were limited and ruthlessly equal. One tube of sweets would have to last the whole trip, and so clearly there was some self-rationing involved. But there was more to it than that, there was strategy. With a sibling eating their own tube of sweets, it became a game of cat and mouse. You simply couldn't be the first to finish. Were you to make this schoolboy error, and was your companion in consumption to notice, you would, for the remainder of the journey, be subjected to the pure enjoyment experienced by He Who Saved His Sweets. Little moans of pleasure, audible mastication, and the slowest possible consumption of each delicacy, while staring innocently across the table at you, driving home the message that He Had Something You Didn't, a true achievement in the tightly regulated world of similarly-aged siblings. The complex tactics developed for this sugary underground warfare might need a post of their own, but suffice it to say that they were not limited to pre-dividing sweets into tiny fragments, sorting and resorting them to buy time, and even pretending to eat them, whilst palming them away into a lint-filled pocket for future enjoyment.

Hm. Where was I? Ah: train journeys. Yes. So, I thought to myself, train journeys as an adult will be just as long and uninteresting. A laptop will provide the perfect solution to this, giving me a creative outlet. With no distractions in the immediate vicinity, and no internet connection, I'll only have to contend with reading, listening to music and staring into space. Surely this will lead to the occasional flow of creative juices, and the associated gob of blog-worthy phlegm. And so, armed with this suitably flimsy argument, I went out and bought a little Eee PC. Not a powerful machine by any standards, but pretty, portable, and certainly novel enough to stave off boredom for the occasional train journey. If, of course, such journeys were undertaken. For, of course, in my haste to convince myself that a shiny new piece of hardware was necessary, I had conveniently managed to forget the miniscule amount of time I actually spend on trains. And so the first three months of the laptop's existence were marked by its presence on top of my chest of drawers. Pristine, but rarely touched. Attractive, but unused. Enticing but redundant.

After that first barren period, however, fate, as she sometimes does, gave me an opportunity to take more regular train journeys, and I leapt at the opportunity by dusting off my little technological wonder and preparing for the creative explosion that would come with so much uninterrupted keyboard time. I also bought a little external hard drive to ensure that any actual keyboard time would in fact be spent watching films and downloaded TV shows, thereby at a single stroke, effectively nullifying any potential productivity (a skill I honed during my time at university).

And so we come to the present day, and the reason for such an uncharacteristically long and flowery post. I am, as you may have guessed, writing on a train, having spurned the distractions of films or television shows through somehow losing my external hard drive. And I have to say, it's everything I had hoped for. This was going to be a relatively simple post, but the lack of distraction has turned it into an overly personal, irrelevant ramble, filled with inappropriately extravagant language, pretentious airs, and wandering asides. And I'm thoroughly enjoying it. Were I to be writing at home, I'd have got up to get a drink, or turned on something to watch, or listen to, or started to tidy my room, or browse facebook, or checked my email, but here there is none of that. I can finally reach the true horrifying lows of my unfettered blogging potential. And don't think you'll get off lightly, I'm only 50 minutes into a three hour journey, here, so there's plenty more to come.

A final aside: Ever since I saw the BBC series "The Last Train" as a child, (in which the various strangers in a train carriage have to work together in a harsh and unforgiving environment after a meteor wipes out civilisation while they were in a tunnel), I have found myself imaging how I would fare with my companions on any given journey, should this, or something similarly far-fetched, arise. I have to say I'm feeling reasonably confident with the current situation. Should the worst happen, I plan to stay close to the huge black guy sitting across the aisle from me. Should it come down to a difference of opinions in a post-apocalyptic landscape, always try to side with the person who could rip someone's head clean off. The teenager to my left, playing with the music on his mobile, seems fairly annoying, but is probably wily. He'd learn some harsh life lessons, but come out a better person. The old man at the table in front of me would help provide wisdom to the team, and the slightly annoying middle-aged guy, who expressed displeasure at his reserved seat and went to find another, could come along, but would probably get eaten by jackals at some point, to keep the rest of us mindful of our own mortality. Should such a situation turn out less like a seven-part BBC drama, an unlikely but possible outcome, I'm fairly sure we'd all just wander around for a few days, run out of food and starve to death. I don't think I'll share this bleak outlook with my fellow passengers, however. They might find it a little odd, and there's nothing worse than finding yourself in a carriage with some weirdo rambling on about post-apocalyptic landscapes and laptops. Assuming it's out loud at least. I'm sure I'm quite bearable when I'm simply typing it.