My journey to Cornwall Saturday morning began at 6:35 at the bus stop just outside my front door.
It's the nearest stop and serviced only by a 'cracker box cum ghetto' bus: one of those London buses that is indeed red, but missing the upper storey in order to clear dodgy railway overpasses in dodgy neighbourhoods. Not that my neighbourhood is dodgy - unless I cross over the road. My side of the street: lovely Edwardian blocks designed by architects back when architects still cared. The other side: brown brick, broken security doors, pit bull terriers, children who literally kill other children.
In short, typical London demi-socialist idyll. But back to the bus.
I hadn't planned to take the 360 bus until about five minutes before I left home to begin my journey. I reckoned I'd drag my slitty-eyed carcass down to Vauxhall station on foot, grab the fleet-wheeled Victoria line to Oxford Circus and change to the Bakerloo to Paddington. Simples. But the weekend bag (full of, among too many other things, the computer I'm typing on) was wearing me down, so I locked the door, set the alarm and grunted the 20 metres or so to the bus stop.
Now, I'm no optimist when it comes to London buses. They're frequently shit, but, like shit, also a necessity. I read the schedule, which is about as reliable as pulp fiction if it's reality you're after, and noted that the buses came to this stop every 10 to 12 minutes.
What I failed to notice until 15 frustrating minutes later was that I was reading the weekday schedule and applying it to a Saturday. And because I love to salt a self-inflicted wound, I realised I'd been referring to the schedule not only for the wrong day, but also for the wrong part of the morning. The buses only come every 10 to 12 minutes, I now know extremely well, after about 8am, Monday to Friday.
On Saturday, they come at 12, 32 and 50 past the hour until late morning. Doh. (And what's most shocking is that this bus stop is literally within spitting distance of my bedroom window, and I've lived next to it for three years. So much for pathos.)
I'll be fine, I thought. If I'm picked up at 6:50, that still leaves 40 minutes from the moment I step on the imminent 360 until my train leaves Paddington. Surely, I thought in an optimistic burst of holiday euphoria, the gods will smile on me, and this will come to pass.
It didn't, of course. The bus was seven minutes late. The Nationwide cash point at Vauxhall station - and I swear to you this is true AND certainly some sort of conspiracy of the deities - took nearly five minutes to complete my transaction from the time I slipped my card in. It took in the card and held it - nay, cradled and perhaps suckled it for all I know - for a good 40 panicky seconds before asking me if I wouldn't mind please entering my PIN, as though nothing out of the ordinary was happening. I said 'hello' to 7:10am before I set foot on the Victoria line.
Leaving out other minor annoyances - except for not understanding at Oxford Circus that the northbound Bakerloo platform is literally adjacent the northbound Victoria, and letting a standing train pull away in a colossal schoolboy error that cost me another four minutes - I eventually bounded up the escalator onto the main floor at Paddington just in time to see my train sleepily drifting away from platform one.
My next mistake was telling anyone about it.
"You'll need to buy another ticket, I'm afraid," said the man with the heavy west-Midlands accent behind the bullet-proof glass (and now you know why it's bullet-proof). I said I wasn't going to go to stupid Penzance after all. "Fair enough," he said.
It is about here that the mind really fucking boggles. Those of us who, by dint of whatever insanity we entertain, continue to live in Britain know how Kafka-esque making a train journey can be. I'm always surprised when I leave a station at the other end of the line that I'm not played off by a quartet of singing dwarfs, thanking me for traveling with Southwest or Whatever Trains and handing me a chocolate. Even so, you miss your train, you could usually just grab the next one, no harm done.
Not if you've booked with, in this case, First Great Western several weeks in advance and are, it turns out, tied to a specific, scheduled return journey under penalty of financial ruin. This means you have to be perfect twice in one week, and I just don't know how to do that.
I staggered about for a bit, allowing the reality to slowly, painfully settle in. I had paid £44 for my entire journey. I missed the outbound leg of that journey by about a minute. And if I really wanted to go to Cornwall and stay in the lovely hotel with the sea-view room I'd also booked several weeks ago, I'd have to cough up another - sit down and hold tight - £83. I threw my bag, computer and all, to the floor of Paddington railway station and shouted "fuck."
I'm smarter than this, I thought. Surely the internet is the answer. I bought a coffee and sat in a wi-fi zone. I next bought a voucher for 90 minutes worth of BT wi-fi and went back to the drawing board.
£83 again, now with an additional £5.88 tacked on for internet use. (See what I mean about salt and wounds?)
I'd had enough, and there was only one thing to do. Eat the £83, pay for it with what little 'emergency savings' I had left and never think of it again.
This would have been an extremely successful strategy - one deeply rooted, for a change, in adult-mindedness and born of essential wisdom - had someone checked that I had the correct ticket at any point during the shitting five and a half hour journey to Penzance.
And so it came down to this: Do I sit there for five and a half hours with the wrong ticket on the wrong train, essentially a fugitive, and stress myself with the various arrest and police record scenarios that would inevitably roll one into the other in my over-active Protestant-guilty imagination? Or do I console myself with the knowledge that I've done the right thing, regardless of whether or not anyone clacked a hole in my ticket?
Of course, I felt a total mug when I got off the train. The only thing that made me feel any better was being here in the sunshine, amongst the rolling hills in verdant, wild Cornwall. My next stop was the Penzance bus station (boy, do I know how to travel or WHAT?) to catch a hedgerow-dodging, tree-branch-snapping double decker bus to the picturesque village of Sennen near Land's End.
When I finally got there, I felt safe, for it is the part of Cornwall that no railway can touch. Those last 12 miles of Britain are like a green lunar surface: remote, unspoiled, oddly beautiful - and seemingly far, far away from the surreality of the British railway system. I wandered down to a restaurant on the beach at Sennen Cove, ate grilled scallops and monkfish on skewers and left the railway pirates at the end of their line of influence in happy - albeit slightly cursed - Penzance.
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