Ticket to ride. Or Yarmouth. Probably.

Went to London yesterday. Despite the meeting not kicking off till 12.30, it felt like a ridiculously long day.

It doesn't help that it's a 3 hour trip, door to door. I left home at about 9 in the morning, and got back at about 8 in the evening. How people manage that kind of thing every day is beyond me. It must be killing.

As is traditional, there was some rail-related fuckwittery. There was a huge queue at the ticket office so the chap in there told us all to "hop on the train and let the conductor sort you out". Abdication of responsibility or what?

On we duly hopped, but by the time the conductor got to me we were almost at Salisbury. He said "I don't have time to sort your ticket out, you'll have to get it on the next train." Gah.

No sign of any ticket seller on the next train until Basingstoke, 40 minutes into the trip, by which time I was having visions of arriving at Waterloo ticketless and being carted off to prison.

She was very chatty and helpful, and I thought everything was sorted until I checked the price on the tickets she'd given me. £168, to be exact. About double what it normally is. Of course by this time she'd vanished back down the train, so I had to wait till she reappeared (about Woking).

I showed her the tickets and she said "Oh! I see what happened there!"

What "happened"? As if it was just a freak of nature or something. What had "happened" was that she'd pressed the wrong code in for the start of my trip and was trying to charge me for travelling from somewhere near Exeter. Tch.

Anyway, once this was sorted out, the rest of the day was pretty uneventful, thankfully. Was cruelly barracked by the rest of the meeting attendees for eating a cake with Smarties on it from the lunch they provided.

Bastards.

It was very nice, in case you were wondering. Disgracefully, I neglected to take a photo for you.

Other news: I know I'm years late with it, but I found the lolcats site the other weekend. And despite my long-held view that there's something a bit wrong with people who look at photos of cats, have been laughing my head off at it ever since.