Friends in Inconvenient Places

Okay, it's not the friends' fault.  It's not that they moved to Cardiff; it's that I moved away from.

Of course, we frequently jump at an opportunity to piggy-back a visit on top of a trip that's being made for some other purpose, but sometimes one or more of us (more often me) will shell out for a train ticket.  They're usually not bad: a quick hop on the local line into Reading, the main body of the journey on a HST on the old Great Western mainline, and then another local trolley at the far end.  Tickets have been known to cost as little as a tenner per direction, with some judicious advance booking.

Well, this time round, I went to buy my tickets at about 3 weeks out from the intended date of travel, and due to work commitments, I was going to head out on an evening train.  Tickets before 7 were in the £50 bracket and wouldn't have left any time for dinner anyway, and anything leaving home after 8 wouldn't have got me into Cardiff until stupid-o'clock at night (and my friends aren't exactly night owls), so all things considered it had to be the 7:07pm train.  £36, and that was only to Cardiff Central, as the local trolleys get very sporadic at night.

The tickets arrived, and the 7:07 didn't actually say 7:07 anywhere on it, but turned out to be a 'Super Offpeak'.  Very helpfully, it offered absolutely no indication whatsoever as to what times of day constituted 'Super Offpeak'.  Initially I wasn't too bothered about this as I only really had one sensible choice of train anyway... but then the work arrangements changed; I was asked to do an extra day the week before last, and I managed to get a day off in lieu this week, meaning that I was no longer limited to travelling to Cardiff after dinner.

So I phoned First Great Western in a bid to figure out what 'Super Offpeak' actually meant: could I travel in the middle of the day, for example?

No I couldn't.  I must admit to not being keen on getting an Accent at the far end of a phone line, but to be fair, this particular one was much more helpful than most of the others I've encountered (and a real person, however their enunciation, is still preferable to an automated system), and got me some definitive answers: un-allocated seating would be in Coach E on the HST, and - here's the rub - 'Super Offpeak' is FGW-speak for 'at night'; in other words, I could delay travelling for as long into the small hours as I fancied, but couldn't pull it any earlier, which is what I was actually interested in.

Just out of idle curiosity, I logged back in to National Rail Enquiries, fully expecting (considering that my departure date was now only 8 days away) that the cheapest tickets would be at least £40 each.  But they weren't - the 11:02 departure, including local trolley at the far end, was still only £15.

I did the maths: I could get the 'Super Offpeak i.e. basically at night' ticket refunded, albeit paying 50p for the stamp to return it, and a £10 fee to get the refund processed - so £25.50 back, out of the initial £36.  But even after paying the postage and the processing fee, and buying the new ticket at £15, I wound up £10.50 better off.  You can do things with £10.50 - including buy a whole ticket from my place to my friends', if you book far enough in advance.  Other advantages included getting another 7 hours at their place, and not having to drag one of them into the middle of the city to collect me from Central, so it seemed a bit of a no-brainer decision.  I'll be on the 11:02.

My parting 'moral of the story': beware evening trains on First Great Western!


- The Colclough

Time And Relative Dimensions In Space

Question 10: "You now have a type 40 TARDIS.  Where and when would your top destinations be?"


Ooh, all of time and space... where do I want to start?  A few of my destinations, in some semblance of chronological order:

• ~4000 BC to watch the beginning of the universe.  No need to skip ahead and watch the end, because one way or another I'll get to see that anyway.  Spoilers...
• ~2400 BC to see what the Ark looked like.
• AD 1011, to see what my local area looked like a millennium ago.
• It's tempting to go to 1605 and give the Gunpowder Plotters a helping hand, just to see what would happen to history if they'd succeeded, but I don't think I'd go through with that one.
• I'd go to Skywalker Ranch circa 1994, pick up George Lucas, bring him to the present and show him how the world has reacted to the Star Wars prequels, and then take him back to 1994 so he could fix the scripts accordingly.
• There was this huge lantern exhibition in the local park when I was living in Hong Kong, and one of my lasting regrets is that I didn't take the time to try and appreciate the quieter, less OTT parts.  I'd take my TARDIS back to Sha Tin Park in autumn 1997 and look at all the bits I missed last time.
• I'd go to 2005 and bribe Russell T Davies to not write Love and Monsters.
• Saturn, just because.

...and that's just if I stick to real-world chronology.  If I was including fictional destinations, then I'd go and see Coruscant, visit Gallifrey in its heyday, and just to really confuse myself I might try and materialise on board Fort Paradox.


My stats, at present:

• Twenty Questions status: 16 down, 4 to go
• Days until Root Hill: 3
• Latest book read: Operation Mincemeat
• Latest film/TV watched: The Simpsons Movie
• Latest music listened to: Doctor Who Series 1 & 2 OST by Murray Gold - I scared myself when I hit 'play' because I'd turned the speakers up way too loud by mistake 8p
• Latest edible item eaten: beef burger
• Predominant colour of clothes: black
• Programs and web pages currently running: Microsoft Office Word and Outlook 2007, Firefox (tabs: Fort Paradox offline archive; A White Horizon; Blogspot Create Post), Windows Media Player 11
• Webcomics posted today: Cylinder and Miserable #1338

- The Colclough

Grab Case, Insert Socks

It seems appropriate that I should answer Question 12: "What is your suitcase packing method?" while half-way through actually packing a suitcase.


I'm a minimalist traveller by nature.  Certain relatives (I shall name no names here) are prone to packing absolutely everything including the kitchen sink, even when they're only going away for two nights.  An entire separate wardrobe must be taken along for each possible weather, no matter whether or not there's any realistic chance of that weather happening, and so on and so forth.  Wellies rub shoulders with bottles of suncream.  But me?  I just grab a case, stuff in the bare minimum of clothes (calculated by a very advanced mathematical formula, which I'll explain below), pencils and related gubbins, the emergency ideas pad which usually lives under my bed in case I have inspiration at two in the morning, a book or two, some cash, and one or two other essentials like cotton buds (you know how they say not to put theose things down your ear?  I never use them for anything else.  How else are you supposed to get rid of itchy earwax?).

So, that formula.  Assuming I'm going away for n nights, the formula requires exactly, and only, the following items of clothing to be packed:

• n+1 pairs each of pants and socks (the +1 is in case of hideous accidents involving unexpected puddles of mud and suchlike)
• n/2 t-shirts
• if n>1, then 1 spare pair of jeans, 2 only if n is fairly large and the trip is expected to be a really messy one
• 1 jumper, or 2 if n>~4 and weather inclement
• pajamas, irrespective of n
• shoes - the one item which can't be reliably extrapolated from n

Exceptions may be permitted if n is a particularly large number (say >7) and the destination is known to have clothes-washing facilities and someone capable of using them properly.

Depending on the destination, my minimalism may be supplemented with some esoteric extras.  For example, as I'm going to Cardiff tomorrow to see Tim and Sarah, we're hoping to shoot a bit more of Alpha One's Winter Wonderland, and I've got two new sets (admittedly small ones) in flat-pack form ready to take with me.  So, bare minimalism plus odd-looking accessories to the business of stopmotion animation.  That's what I call a suitcase packing method.


And to finish off, here's a handy travel-size blob of statistics:

• Twenty Questions status: 9 down, 11 to go
• Days until Root Hill: 12
• Latest book read: I skim-read the introduction to Dianetics by L Ron Hubbard yesterday, and my inner being was deeply amused by the stupidity of it all
• Latest film/TV watched: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
• Latest music listened to: I think I overheard a few minutes of the Tangled OST on little sister's CD player sometime today
• Latest edible item eaten: fish and chips
• Predominant colour of clothes: bluuue, uuuuuee-uuue-uueeeeee-uuu... ahem... *stops singing*
• Programs and web pages currently running: Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, Firefox (tabs: MatNav 6.1; Blogspot Dashboard; Blogspot Create Post)
• Webcomics posted today: Cylinder and Miserable #1330

- The Colclough