mystery in bicester
.JPG "bicester station as it looks today")
Recently I was playing cricket in a place called Bicester.
Bicester is a word that has been designed for people not from the UK to pronounce badly.
The train was reasonably full on the way there, but coming into Bicester station there seemed to be no real town to speak of. Just a station, and some roads.
I fully expected to get off with 3 or 4 other people and just wait for my lift. I was the only person on my carriage that was even getting off at Bicester.
When I did get off, the station suddenly turned into the busiest in the UK.
Most of the other carriages had hundreds of people getting off, mostly Asian (Asian Asian, not subbie Asian).
While I was trying to work out where I needed to go, they all just filed into a line at the bus stop, and then were ushered onto the bus one by one. When one bus was full, another would pull up like some Army drill and the people would continue to get on.
Eventually all the buses were full, and yet the people still stayed in the line, waiting to be taken to who knows where.
Then after 5 or 10 minutes more buses turned up and the whole thing started up again. Another train arrived, and they all still automatically knew what to do.
I was baffled. Other than a handful of locals, which is all I expected, I couldn’t see why all these people knew what to do, and where the hell they were being bussed.
Immediately I came up with the most logical explanation, this was a cult. There was no other explanation, these people were too well organised and behaved, what else would they be doing out here.
I got closer to them, and tried to listen to any conversations that would help me. Unfortunately few of them spoke in English, so that helped me very little.
Then I checked out the bus, and that is when I lost interest, it wasn’t a cult, it was for some super outlet shopping centre or something. Boring.
But, think about it, if you were running a cult, what would be a better cover than having a shopping mall in the middle of nowhere in some place that most people pronounce incorrectly.
Genius.
platform bingo
I had to catch the train out to Canterbury recently.
This means that I had to go to Victoria station.
That bit I managed with ease.
Once at the station, I did what I assumed would be the tricky part, getting the tickets and working out which train to catch.
That was piss easy.
The hard part was working out which platform to get on.
It wasn’t hard, so much as it involved standing at the front of the station, with a couple of hundred other people and waiting for your train to be allocated a platform.
It was like standing in a corn field looking up at an alien ship.
All these wide eyed people daring to not look away for a second incase they miss their platform, get to their train late and either miss it, or worse, get a bad seat.
There are false starts too.
The boards refresh and your train moves along to the next slot, you have that 2 seconds of supreme happiness that only someone standing for a train platform can have, before it is taken away from you.
My train was delayed.
Technical reasons, by this time I had already been standing for 15 minutes, who knows how long I could be standing.
34 minutes was the answer.
Then the platform came up, people were in too much of a rush to even be excited, they all ran, so I ran with them, the doors to the train were opened, I got in, they closed and the train was gone.
Anyone going to the toilet, or getting a cup of coffee would have to find their new train, and then wait for its platform.
The poor bastards.
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