Caboose

After dropping off my bike at my Grandparents’ in Norfolk this weekend I had to make my way back to Cambridge by public transport. Even if you don’t share Mrs Thatcher’s hatred of sharing a vehicle with other people this tends to be an experience that just gradually grinds you down.

I got to the bus stop in Wroxham at 1630, five minutes before the bus was due to start its run outside Roys just up the road.

By five past five I was about to start walking back to the house when I saw the bus going past in the opposite direction. It then took twenty minutes to go a mile up the road and turn round. No apology from the driver, no explanation of why he was almost an hour late.

So I missed my train and had to hang around Norwich station for three quarters of an hour. The Anglia Railways service through to Cambridge was good though, the train was clean and on time. It was also mostly empty so I could stretch out and read (Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm).

In fact it was so quiet the guy sitting on the other side of the train seemed to feel quite happy to finish doing his homework (or whatever it was), pull out his packet of king-size Rizlas and sit producing one joint after another for the next ten minutes or so. He got off at Ely, he probably needed some chemical assistance with facing the flat, desolate horrors of The Fens.