Clueless in Crewe
Inwardly I took a solemn vow never again to use the 08:20 Glasgow train. Too many reserved seats and too much dining accomodation. I had been standing since Birmingham. At Crewe, as I stood in the vestibule, next to the toilet door, and transferred my weight from my right to my left foot, a pretty girl came headlong around the corner from the corridor. In the one-second once-over known to all men I took in the hair, eyes, uh ..bust, hips and legs. Oh-My-Ghod. Absolute A-grade stuff. Jeeezus K Reist.
"Doos this train stop at Warrington?" she asked, in an attractive northern accent.
"Yes", I replied, in my elephantine way.
Thank goodness, she said. She'd been asking the whole length of the train and I was the only person who knew.
For once nerd-knowledge placed me in a position of advantage with a bird. Had she enquired I could have told her that the train divided at Carstairs into separate portions for Glasgow and Edinburgh. I was two days short of my 24th birthday and, well, not a bad-looking sort of chap according to the standards of the time. But already I could see the lovely eyes turn down to the floor of the Mark II corridor first. Her sexual antennae had already detected that I was not a "fun" person. She turned to find a seat.
The incident, occupying perhaps fifteen seconds of my life, has always remained with me as significant ...the significance being that I was a prat.
The photograph was taken at the start of the day, as I waited for that 08:20 Glasgow train. D1008 WESTERN HARRIER waits at signals with a freight. One of the handful of surviving "Hymeks" approaches Bristol Temple Meads from the east with a train of loose-coupled vans. Its embossed number had lately been replaced with BR standard stick-on "numerals". I think it was the only Hymek thus corrupted. It was Monday 22nd July 1974 and the gasholders over at Day's Road would last for another seven years. The flats, over towards Lawrence Hill and Easton, were the highest outside London when built some fifteen years earlier. And isn't that Berkeley House, head office of my employers, the Bristol Omnibus Co., and source of the fivers in my back pocket, above the Hymek's cab?
Clueless in Crewe
Inwardly I took a solemn vow never again to use the 08:20 Glasgow train. Too many reserved seats and too much dining accomodation. I had been standing since Birmingham. At Crewe, as I stood in the vestibule, next to the toilet door, and transferred my weight from my right to my left foot, a pretty girl came headlong around the corner from the corridor. In the one-second once-over known to all men I took in the hair, eyes, uh ..bust, hips and legs. Oh-My-Ghod. Absolute A-grade stuff. Jeeezus K Reist.
"Doos this train stop at Warrington?" she asked, in an attractive northern accent.
"Yes", I replied, in my elephantine way.
Thank goodness, she said. She'd been asking the whole length of the train and I was the only person who knew.
For once nerd-knowledge placed me in a position of advantage with a bird. Had she enquired I could have told her that the train divided at Carstairs into separate portions for Glasgow and Edinburgh. I was two days short of my 24th birthday and, well, not a bad-looking sort of chap according to the standards of the time. But already I could see the lovely eyes turn down to the floor of the Mark II corridor first. Her sexual antennae had already detected that I was not a "fun" person. She turned to find a seat.
The incident, occupying perhaps fifteen seconds of my life, has always remained with me as significant ...the significance being that I was a prat.
The photograph was taken at the start of the day, as I waited for that 08:20 Glasgow train. D1008 WESTERN HARRIER waits at signals with a freight. One of the handful of surviving "Hymeks" approaches Bristol Temple Meads from the east with a train of loose-coupled vans. Its embossed number had lately been replaced with BR standard stick-on "numerals". I think it was the only Hymek thus corrupted. It was Monday 22nd July 1974 and the gasholders over at Day's Road would last for another seven years. The flats, over towards Lawrence Hill and Easton, were the highest outside London when built some fifteen years earlier. And isn't that Berkeley House, head office of my employers, the Bristol Omnibus Co., and source of the fivers in my back pocket, above the Hymek's cab?