Notes From the Hard Shoulder - James May [14]
Not any more. A little dot-matrix display above my place read 'Reserved, Mr May' so there was no argument about that.
There was still a chance that a zealous vicar or malodorous railway enthusiast would sit next to me but, again, I was lucky. For two of the journeys I had two seats to myself, and on the third I was joined by a woman who not only smelled rather nice but didn't speak to me at all, which was marvellous.
Crikey, even the buffet has improved. Once there was a slimy carriage offering the following range of sandwich fillings: cheese. Now there is a trolley piled high with fruit cake and pies and a big samovar thing for making hot drinks, a sort of wheeled five-star-hotel tea-and-coffee-making-facilities facility. Any more wine at all with your meal for yourself, sir? Why, yes.
What a pleasant and, as widely claimed, efficient way to travel up the sceptered isle. London to Manchester takes just two and a quarter hours, during which one may of course work on a laptop, read important documents or hold an impromptu meeting with colleagues. Obviously I did none of these things. I looked out of the window for a bit and then fell asleep with my head resting on the seat in front, dribbling on my trousers. But if you did work in IT or a customer relations role, you could annoy everyone else on the train by talking in a loud voice about managing expectations or tapping noisily on your strawberry personal organiser. You can't do that in the car.
However.
I said London to Manchester takes two and a half hours. Unfortunately, it's a place in London where I don't live to a place in Manchester where I don't want to be. And here we arrive at the crux of the public transport conundrum.
Obviously, long-distance communal travel makes sense. You wouldn't fly yourself to America in your own Cessna – you'd get on a big aeroplane with lots of other people and complete the bulk of the journey very rapidly. You wouldn't sail your own dinghy across the North Sea to Norway. You'd get on a ferry and stand around a bar with a load of lorry drivers and pimps. Lots of people seem to want to go from London to Manchester at any time, so they can all go together.
It's the little bits at either end of the journey that cause a problem, yet it's in the towns and cities that public transport is presented as the solution to all our woes. It's rubbish. If I'd had to find my way from Manchester Station to whichever hotel I was staying in using the local buses, I'd have given up and gone home again.
You can bang on all you like about trams, light rail, bendy buses and maglev, but until such things stop outside my front door in the space where I keep my car, they're not really any good. My local underground station – and the estate agent told me I was buying a property ideally situated for local transport facilities – is still 10 minutes' walk away, and with a big suitcase it's just too much trouble. No matter how comprehensive the public transport network becomes, there's always going to be a little bit of the journey requiring something personal.
And let's be honest here. Posh InterCity trains are generally full of respectable people, but local public transport isn't. I'm sure London tube commuters are largely upstanding pillars of society, but there are still enough of them that smell of old pants to make the journey unsavoury.
I have the solution. In my vision I step outside to find something like a Fiat Panda or Smart Car that doesn't belong to me but is open and starts with a simple button. There are no keys. I drive it to the station and leave it. Someone coming from Manchester then uses it to get to the offices around the corner from my house. Then someone else uses it to go to the shops. Occasionally they might pile up in one place or another, but in that case the people who we currently employ as traffic wardens are used to redistribute them a bit. It