Escort on a train
I’m going to have a prolonged mardy about trains, is there a more British activity?
I’m taking a wheeled tuna tin to Cardiff from Manchester, my gargantuan case packed with an unnecessarily large quantity of silk, condoms, and cocoa butter. My over-enthusiastic preparedness is being transported by an inadequate vessel for what is, I believe, a fairly long journey. I’m still awaiting the progress of economic, cultural, gastronomical & technological innovation to hit local transportation. I’m not really asking for a lot. For my £100 return ticket I want a comfortable seat, a roomy flip desk, a clean toilet with coconut, rather than ammonia, scented toilet paper, and an actual buffet car. Not a little plastic cul-de-sac, pilfering astronaut food for re-mortgaging prices, stocked with stodgy paninis with viscera that manage to be both piping hot, and curiously devoid of any texture or flavour, save for the faint taint of sour mayonnaise. And diet colas, which are, in all senses, the putridity of evil boiled down to its liquid essence.
I should be a restaurant critic, the dream ticket.
British Rail sell me some actual recognisable nosh, please, for the love of Wicca. We live in an era when technophiles are discussing the possibility of nanobots being injected into the neurological structure to create a simulation that is three dimensionally life like, and proponents of biosphere living used to protect against the gaseousness of industrial pollution* and you can’t even get a table-cloth waiter service to serve me a reasonably priced, organic chicken salad or lobster ravioli with a real cappuccino or Chablis. Where is the progress, I ask you? Hell, the utilitarianism of modern Yankified city connection & consumption must be a regression, I’m certain. Oh, for the days (I imagine once existed) when some top-heavy Tilly, salt-buttered a piece of tiger loaf, wedged it with real cheddar and served it with a medicinal tot of brandy! Hay, if you were born in 1900 and thus were nicely middle aged around the period of Brief Encounter (the cosiest bit of cuckolding that exists anywhere to my knowledge), can you let me know if this dream of ye old England I have is anything close to reality…? No pedantic responses please, just dreamy ones.
I’m getting from A to B though, right? And I have a seat. I could be on my feet in a vestibule from Kings Cross to Exeter, loitering next to some pleasingly garrulous pink cheeked Foxton’s employees, trying to work out what a space the size and shape of a train toilet would fetch for in different area codes of the Capital, “That piss box is prime real estate, you know”. I did indeed once overhear this very assertion, and smell aside, considered how I’d fit into said train toilet, a stylish Japanese style capsule furniture set.
Ahhh, memorable British rail experiences! What about the time I was caught in carriage with some guerrilla football fans, dancing with their fists? I had to wedge myself as far into my seat as I could go, the safer option than those fools who tried to make for some kind of exit. I got some chubby man arse in my face that day, but that is infinitely better than being the unintended landing strip for dozens of troglodyte punches fired up on Fosters. The air that day was rife. That’s all I can call it. Rife.**
British trains are not just an emblem of bad food, overcrowding and thuggishness, but nihilism. I was once on the train when some anguished soul - vanquished by desperation or disappointment - threw himself at its eviscerating mercy. I weeped for him, behind my copy of The Guardian’s Saturday supplement, and peered over to see the captain of the vessel, having assessed the damage, moving solemnly through the carriage. His cheeks were blue, the rims to his eyes salmon pink and his focus absorbed in existential crisis. He, one hopes, had just had the worst experience of his life, but was greeted by two harumphing Veras in the seat front of me, complaining about their missed hair appointments. What was the hold up? they lamented. The curl and sets just wouldn’t last another day, much like that poor fellow. Across the carriage a young Keats, a man after my own sentiment, composed an elegy on a sepia paged paper back, and read it to a generally inpatient carriage.
This ditty was not supposed to be about trains, it was going to be some romantic ode to the pleasure of touring. But in a fashion, the grey, musky swamp that is British Rail is a good pinpoint for what pleasure isn’t. Its inverse, its antithesis, its natural predator. We all ferment within its bowls semi regularly, patiently resenting the profligacy of its indifference to daily misery. And the temerity of its shareholders for daring to charge us the same price it would cost us to get from Bristol to Bordeux than from, I dunno, Bath to Stroud (the colonic entry point of hell***). How to do they live with themselves? I’m someone who tries to take pride in the things I put out into the world, and if doing a better job takes me longer and costs me more, that usually seems worth it. I don’t know who any of the shareholders of the major train companies are (and I can’t search engine it because the train WIFI is much too paltry) but they roll about in their inflating profits whilst spewing out into the universe a product that I would challenge them to find but one enthusiastic, green smiley faced customer of. Aren’t you embarrassed guys? Just a little? To be just so crap at your job?
I write this in a vestibule among concentrated mass, confronting the inadequacy of their journey with an amused disappointment. Shared shoulder shrugging, gentle guffaws, “oh dear” we all say in unison, as the trolly dolly, selling £4 stale bara brith and when-did-they-get-so-small? Mars bars, barges through, taking out shins as it goes. Someone says; “Hay, remember when Parisian police officers lost their lunchtime beer rights and they just fucked the place up? They take no shit. Why are we living like this”. It wasn’t a question, but a resignation. Then something about interest rates and energy prices and politicians being all the same. I, and others nod, absent minded. Police officers rioting you say? There is something seductive about that thought. Here I am, lusting after testosterone fuelled chaos, whilst quietly sipping Styrofoam tea, miraculous in its insipidity, surrounded by the light stink of social dilapidation. It’s the British way.
I love touring I just don’t like moving; when will the teleportation come into common practice? Before I hang up my handcuffs, one hopes. But I’ll be in Cardiff soon. I’ll get into my apartment and fill a bath with water and rose oil and put on some Portishead and sink myself in. I’ll lurk at the bottom of the bath like a stingray slithered on the soft rocks of the ocean floor. Then I’ll dry off, slather myself in some Sanctuary cream and peridot coloured silk, and then lounge, until someone else comes to lounge with me. I shall be cleansed.
CORA LEIGH INDEPENDENT CURVY KINKY ESCORT & COMPANION, WEST YORKSHIRE LEEDS YORK MANCHESTER LONDON
*That second one I have actually made up on a whim, but it sounds about right, and if it isn’t happening, let me know, and I’ll quickly draft the proposal for a solid dystopia for all interested publishers.
** This is also all pure fabrication, but it sounded plausible. And isn’t that the real problem with Britain today?
*** I’ve not been there but I know this to be true because I have seen The Office. At least 4 times. That’s reconnaissance.
