Why Britain sucks

Okay, firstly a couple of reasons why Britain doesn't suck. Namley: Jo, Matt and their fantastic bouncy castle wedding. Hurrah to them and may they go on to have many happy years and, hopefully, bouncy castle funerals.


If your wedding isn't this much fun, you're doing something wrong

Bristol to Aldershot (location of the bouncy castle wedding) isn't really all that far. It's a large town served by a train and bus station. Really, getting to it and away should have been easy. This was my first mistake: assuming things. My second was deciding to go by train.

JOURNEY 1: AKA THE WIDOWMAKER

Before I describe this hellish trip, note that I forsaw problems with attempting train travel in this country and, therefore, alloted an ENTIRE HOUR for delays, lateness and whatnot. Not ten minutes. Not one train's leeway. An ENTIRE HOUR. Got that? Good.

The trip to Aldershot involved four different trains. Yes: four. Bristol is served by two train stations but, apparently, having both running trains along the main line to London is too difficult a concept for British Rail to manage on a Saturday morning (I can see their point, those Saturday papers take ages to get through. Must use a lot of manpower) so the first, uneventful, trip was between Bristol's two stations.

The second leg was along the mainline to Reading. This should have been fairly straightforward and, indeed, aside from a staring contest with the bizzarely eyepatched woman opposite me it seemed to be going swimmingly. Unforutnatley, unbeknowst to me, strange things were going on in the bowels of the train. Station stops were taking slightly longer than necessary. All those ratlling windows were creating imperceptable drag on the surface area of the train itself... Basically, we were getting delayed. Just a few minutes, mind, but it just happened to be the few minutes which the ever helpful (read: hopeless) Qjump ticket booking service had allotted me to cross the platform at Reading and catch my next train.

So, that train was missed. And, it being a saturday and therefore a day when nobody (read: everybody) in Britain can surely want to go anywhere, there wasn't due to be another train for an hour. However, the very helpful ticket counter person was able to direct me to a different route and two completley different trains to get me into Aldershot only half an hour later than planned. Hurrah!...

... Sadly, what this minion of British Rail didn't feel they needed to inform me of was that the connection between these trains (at North Camp and Ash Vale stations, fact fans) was to be done on foot. Now, I'm not complaining about the walk. It was five minutes worth. However, it is one of those things which you wouldn't really assume to do unless you lived in the local area and (A) Realised the tiny North Camp station had another, equally tiny, Ash Vale station down the road and (B) Had any idea where that station would be since British Rail, in all their great reasoning, didn't feel the need to put up any directions of any kind in North Camp to illustrate this point... There was one solitary sign pointing the way to Ash Vale station. Pointing the wrong way. To a busy roundabout.

Long story short is that my lesuilly hour stroll through Aldershot became a ten minute dash to the church, arriving seconds after the bride (but, hilariously, some minutes before other friends of mine who had driven)

Queue bouncy castle wedding and eight hours of Britain not sucking. And then...

JOURNEY 2: AKA SLEEPLESS IN GOODNESS KNOWS WHERE

Taking train journeys at night in this country is a mug's game. In a country where you can't get a drink after eleven or find a meal after ten it's frankly dangerous to expect the rail infastructure to be able to handle (A) Lateness (B) Decreased numbers of passangers and (C) The dark without some sort of huge problem.

I waited at Aldershot station for a train to Ascot (never been there. Nice racecourse, I'm told)

Fifteen minutes before it was due to leave some other people joined me on the platform.

Ten minutes before it was due to leave, we got an annoucenment to change platforms.

Eight minutes before it was due to leave we all noticed that neither the new platform or the old one carried any evidence of the imminent arrival of this, the last train for the night to Ascot. To all intents in purposes, it had dissapeared (as, bizzarely enough, had any station staff who might have been around) Nethertheless. Being tired, cold and British we all sincrecely believed that the timetables and accouncements wouldn't lie and that our train would be delivered as promised.

Five minutes before the train was due to leave, someone on the opposite platform shouted over to us that there was a bus on the station forecourt which we might want to check out. We all dully trooped over.

It transpired that the Aldershot to Ascot train had been cancelled and replaced with a bus service. And nobody had told us, the station or, indeed, anyone else of the fact. Had it not been for that particulalry nice shouty passanger, we all would have missed the bus. (Which, incidentally, was completlety unmarked. So much so that some poor drunk types actually thought they *were* on a bus and were a little peturbed to find that they had landed forty five minutes away in Ascot rather than being tucked up in bed ten minutes down the road)

One of the interesting characteristics of buses is that they are, generally, slightly slower than trains. You can test this yourself by racing them. This is a generally accepted fact by most people with even the most rudimentry intelligences.

Not, however, by British Rail.

Despite clear roads and a driver devoid of the most basic parameters regarding road safety, the half hour train ride to Ascot took forty five minutes by road. Thankfully for this blogger, I had forseen British Rail's ineptitude (remember that ENTIRE HOUR I dedicated to getting to Aldershot that morning?) and so was still five minutes early for my train to Reading. Not so lucky for those poor sods who got to Ascot only to find that all their final trains for the night had gone.

British Rail, in their considerable wisdom, had decided that there was no need to hold those last few trains for all those poor sods who'd put their late night travel plans in their hands. And, of course, this is the same British Rail who knew full well about the charter bus en route for the station.

Not that my adventure was over, however. After getting to Reading and managing to, this time, successfully cross the platform and catch the final train to Bristol (learning from previous experience when five minutes was not enough for this activity, I dedicated half an hour to it this time) A journey which, on any other day would take seventy minutes. But because of British Rail being scared of the dark, and having less station stops to make, that same journey took a grand total of a hundred and five minutes.

I did eventually get back to Bristol sometime around 2am. The rest is a little hazy after that.

There have been moments over the past couple of months or so when I've been wondering about leaving the country for so long and thinking that maybe it's all a bit of a mistake. That, actually, I'll miss the way things work here and the insight of the people and whatever... Thankfully, there are then six hour train journeys of stunning ineptitude when I can dispense with any such worries.

I can't wait to leave on the 14th. And anyone who lives in this country who doesn't have the consolation of knowing you'll be flying out of it next week? I don't know how you manage, I really don't.

(ADDENDUM: I was reminded tonight that British Rail doesn't actually exist anymore. This is true. However, I think it's still a perfectly suitable shorthand for a system of trains which are British and don't work propely.)