The plan today was to go and collect some stations. It didn't happen.
You know the drill by now. Points failure between Stafford and Wolverhampton. Held outside the station. Held on the platform. Turfed off - this train is no longer in service. Befuddlement, confusion, anxiety about what happens next. Birmingham New Street on the destination board: TBC. Apps unhelpful. Onward connection in Birmingham lost. Connection after that lost. Train back to Liverpool manages to get through the scrum. Head for that. Arrive back at Lime Street three hours after I left. Delay Repay completed on the train. Nothing was achieved.
We all know the score because we've all been there. I get it: stuff happens. I've been very lucky on my travels around the UK. I rarely get cancelled or delayed, and if I do, it's often resolvable. Irritating but I can cope.
The thing is though, should I? Should you? Can't we have a railway that, you know, works? It occurred to me that we have, over the decades, simply been informed that running a railway is dead hard and you're lucky to get one at all. And we've all accepted that things are a bit shit and that's how it goes. What are you going to do about it?
I sat on that train thinking about how everything is a bit shit now. How Britain is tired and weary. How British people are worn down. We're being told, over and over, that yes, everything is a bit shit, but what can you do? It's never enough to start a revolution, it's not enough to cause people to rise up; it's not runs on the pound and empty shelves and curfews and police states. It's just a bit crap. Yeah, alright, you can have a railway, but it'll be a little bit dirty and rattly and busy. If we build a new one, it'll not go where we said it'll go, or we won't electrify it, or your new station will be concrete platforms and a bus shelter and that's it. You can beg for new lines or stops or perhaps a tram line but you can't have one. That's far too ambitious. You can settle. You can have a road, but it'll have some potholes in it and one lane coned off for some reason and it probably should've had a flyover instead of that hamburger roundabout that'll cause problems for thirty years. You can have a bus, and it'll be a hybrid, but the fare will be too much, and it won't get cleaned often enough so the new livery will look permanently grubby. You can have an aeroplane, but you need to get here three hours in advance because half the scanners aren't working and they're not the new ones so you've got to take your toiletries and your laptop out and nobody knows the rules and everyone behind the desk is tired and ratty and everyone in the queue is tired and ratty and that's before you get to passport control and have to queue for another eight hours while all those smug Schengen bastards wander by laughing and joking.
You can have a library but it'll only open two mornings a week. You can have a park but it won't have flower beds because maintenance is expensive. You can have a leisure centre but the swimming pool is closed indefinitely. You can have litter bins but you can't have people collecting the litter so they'll get full and overflow.
You can have new houses but they'll be small and they won't have big gardens and you can't afford it anyway. You can have a job but it'll be in an office because if you worked from home you'd only slope off, you workshy layabout. You can have a benefit because you're disabled but first you need to be prodded and poked and analysed and quizzed and asked if you're really sure you've got Downs Syndrome and aren't just putting it on because you fancy buying dinner from the real supermarket and not the "oops!" aisle at Asda.
You can have a government but they'll be varying degrees of awful. You could vote for a smaller party but they won't get in and anyway they're all varying degrees of racist or mad. You'll have to pay for anything you actually want, but also, we're not going to provide what you want. You could come up with suggestions for how to sort this - progressive taxation and redistribution of wealth and spending money on infrastructure and redevelopment and regeneration and making life actually better for the citizens - but that's not going to happen.
You see, everything's a bit shit. That's your life now as a British citizen. Huddle down, wrap your coat round you, get through the day. And the next one. And the next one. Because it's never getting better and you're an idiot for wanting better. Everything's a bit shit.
