Trains are great. Cars are dicks.

Todays blog is from a train. This is brilliant because of lots of reasons. 1) Because its like an action blog. Normally I write in the comfort of somewhere nice and you know that apart from one of my cats trying to eat my socks I am generally left undisturbed to mind spew some typings for ya'll. However, in this rogue train environment who knows what could happen? I mean, right now, a man who was sitting next to me just got up and went elsewhere. Who know why? Perhaps it was my odor? Or the slight nudging I was giving him with my elbow? Maybe even the fact that I was doing little coughs with very unsubtle shouts of 'fuck I wish this guy would just piss off so I get my own little section of seats instead of cramping myself against some dickwad.' The error in the last section is that it was pretty impossible to cover up all of that in a single cough. Anyway, he has now gone and the seat will be empty until York. I will use this time until then to stare at the seat with different levels of distaste so that when the unwitting seat passenger arrives they will feel uneasy but won't really know why. That'll teach them for buying a seat next to me. Lots of other things could happen on this train. At the moment on the tannoy, a man is describing a large number of sandwiches, all of which sound disgusting and will be overpriced. And then just as I typed that, I nearly knocked my laptop off the little seat table because its ridiculously undersized and made at an angle that means to watch or see anything I have to hold my neck in a way that it will cramp and I'll look like I'm pretending to be sympathic but I'm actually being hugely condescending. See? Trains are fun. I'm going to continue writing this blog in real time so you can feel like you're right here with me. Not next to me though, that would make me angry and I'd type about you like you had a lot of things wrong with your face.


Reason numero duo) Its not a car. I know this is obvious by the fact that lots of other people are on it, it looks like a train and more importantly no one is letting me drive. Right now though, I'm pretty happy because as of yesterday I've decided I hate cars. Not the Pixar film, even though it was one of their weaker efforts. Just all the others ones. With their stupid wheels and engine and stupidness. Don't worry, I will give reason. I'm not just being unnecessarily harsh to them. And in terms of reason its not because one killed my parents when I was just a boy and now I seek revenge by dressing up as a scrapyard car crusher and roam the streets looking for justice/ illegally parked vehicles. Nor is it because I suffer from some sort of car based phobia, because I don't. If however, a car snuck up on me in a dark alley, I would be pretty scared. Mainly because cars cant sneak or fit in alleys. This would mean it was likely to be an evil transformer. So no to all of those things. I hate cars because yesterday I spent over 7 hours in them. This would not be unusual if it wasn't for the fact that over 4 of those were spent completely motionless due to the shitty car I described in yesterday's blog, completely breaking down. Thats right, after my poor efforts at clutch control were scorned by Layla, it turns out the reason such things happened, where because the clutch properly broke. I don't understand car things as I have previously stated in my blogs, or blogated if you will but basically it all stopped going brruuum brrrrummm and instead did a kind of grrrrrrrr and then lurched forward and stopped moving and one of the pedals, the most lefty one - thats in terms of spacing not political standings - didn't work. This all conveniently happened just as I'd turned in to get some petrol 15 minutes into my journey and so the car, knowing full well I was not a fan of its work, got me stuck right in the entrance of Shell Services Holloway Road, thus making 4 other cars beep at me. A nice man in a truck thing helped me push it to the side and then ....


REALTIME UPDATE - I had a 17 minute snooze then woke up, eat a yoghurt and now the train is delayed by 15 minutes. Thats the last time I eat a yoghurt on the train. I bet it was the few bits of non-friendly bacteria that did it just to annoy the friendly bits.


...I got stuck there for four hours waiting for the repair van to tow the car away. Four hours. Sitting in a car in a petrol station fifteen minutes into my journey. I'd aimed to set off at 1.30 to see my friend Louise in Canterbury before my gig and instead my day was spent with the Shell Services staff who I could now probably consider as chums. I saw them several times, popping in and out for a coffee, to use the loo and once to buy a single Kit Kat chunky. Although the latter point was when I felt they jeapordised what relationship we had by telling me it was three for £1 and therefore either insinuating that I was the sort of fatty that would eat three in one go or that they wanted me to have a diabetic attack. Either way I decided that what could have been a beautiful friendship was over and I hid in the car for hours and hours. There's not a lot to do in a car thats not moving. I often wonder how dogs cope. I think thats why, sometimes, they just die in the back seat. People say its the heat, but I'd say think again Buster, its probably also to do with sheer shutdown of the brain out of nothing else to do. I listened to some podcasts, phoned some people and kept staring out of the window expectantly, like a child waiting for Santa Claus, if that child lived in a cold shit broken car and Santa was a grubby man with a tow truck and some rather odd beliefs about meteorological catastrophes. Yes when the man finally arrived, like a really really late saviour, he started to tell me long tales about the coming apocalypse in 2012 and how the new film thats coming out is all about truth. As though my day hadn't been pointless and wasted enough. I've now got less than three years before the whole world explodes into flames and tidal waves and probably monsters, and I spent one whole day sitting in a car being angry at a clutch. I mean, to be fair, he wasn't the most reliable of sources to believe in. He insisted that the Mayan calendar is the one the Jewish people use. I didn't have the heart to tell him how massively wrong he was. He'd saved me from living in the petrol station courtyard for the rest of my life hoping that one day the Arts Council would just pay for me to be a piece of installation art. Eventually I made it to the gig at 9pm after having left my flat at 1.30pm in the afternoon. Then also the gig was not great. Not mega shit, but not brilliant in any way. I would say that is the day was a large cup of crapuchino, then the gig was a little bit of shit cream on the top. Not the most offending part of it all but definitely a contributer to my thoughts when returning home, that perhaps a meteor strike would be partly welcomed. As long as it feel right on shit car and some of the inhabitants of Canterbury.


Some good points that made things better:

- My friend Lou had made me an amazing spicy carrot soup and brought it to the gig with some bread and everything in a little Tupperware like a domestic goddess. I sat at the back slurping like a homeless man eating his first good meal in ages. Thats merely one of the many reasons Lou is awesome. Then when I got home Layla had also made an amazing veggie soup. Double soup day. Take that shit car!


- The day is now over and unless some terrible situation with a Groudhog or time rift occurs, it won't happen again. Those are really the only good things that happened. And now, as I've previously established, I'm trainwards. A man has just walked past me and so then has another man who has a coffee. See its all crazy here? I bet you wish you were having a training day too.