Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Planes, Trains and Automobiles
If there's anything worse than travelling away from your loved ones to be ignored or abused
by Christmas office parties, it's travelling away from your loved ones, getting snowed in and
not being able to get to work to be ignored or abused, and therefore not even earn any money.
I'd been in Crawley staying with Natalie's parents for ten days, but in the last five I had made
it to one gig and had to 'pull' five others. Snow had hit England, it was - 4°C and dropping
fast, taking my spirits with it.
To be fair, I don't go along with this 'why can't we cope with a bit of snow, they manage in
Russia' mantra that gets trotted out every time along with 'Dunkirk spirit', 'mustn't grumble'
and nudge-nudge, wink-wink references to 'having six inches in your back garden'. Normally
I would; I've travelled all over the world and if there's anything certain about the British trans-
port system it's this: it's bollocks. We have a road system that cannot carry the weight it's put
under, the privatised rail network is owned by a different company to those who operate the
trains, and the trains themselves are so phenomenally expensive that it's cheaper to hire a car to
do most short-notice journeys anyway. It's a scandal that goes pretty much unreported because
the politicians who created this mess don't actually have to pay for any tickets themselves. All
of their travel is paid for, all of it. Why would they kick up a fuss about a freebie?
The timetables that most rail companies operate are fragile at best, more often than not a tri-
umph of optimism over reality, where the slightest thing will bring the whole system to its
knees: leaves on the line, tracks melting in the heat, the wrong kind of snow - farcical ex-
amples of a system that's constantly teetering on the brink of chaos. Having said all that, Craw-
ley had been hit by the kind of weather that would have Eskimos re-arranging their plans. A
foot of snow fell almost overnight, temperatures continued to drop and obviously public and
private transport was taking a hammering. To give an indication of just how bad it was in
Southern England, some of the shops were shut.
I'm well aware that there is something romantic about being snowed in, making do with what
food you have, playing old-fashioned games by candlelight, a warming whisky by the fire and
sundry other sepia-tinted winter myths - but I wasn't snowed in, I was snowed out. Natalie was
snowed in at home and I was stuck in Crawley unable to travel anywhere. Not only could I not
get to any gigs, I couldn't get home either. OK, the upside was that I wasn't being injured by
flying marbles, tripped up by Toby, used as a scratching post by the cats, rubbed suggestively
