domdavis.com

One day I’m going to take my provisional license (yes, I still have it. I’ve not lived at the address listed on it for 14 years, my parents no longer live at that address, but I still have it. Think it might be going out of date soon, but enough of that, back to the rant…) and use it to kill someone by inflicting one million tiny paper cuts. Why? Because I am sick to death of people using the phrase starting sentences with ‘If you could drive…‘. Yes, many things would be possible if I could drive, but I can’t. I don’t think I’m well suited to driving and I’m pretty sure I’d end up killing someone if I did (and it could well be me and I’m pretty attached to being me). Maybe, one day, I will learn to drive, but every time you nag me about it I retreat a little further into my default position of ‘I don’t like driving, I don’t want to drive, driving scares the bejesues our of me‘ and the whole ‘making contact with another vehicle on my driving test‘ thing shook my confidence just a tiny bit. Phew. Not that that’s been pent up for god knows how many years

Anyway, the point is that my brother has gone and busted his leg and can’t drive at the moment. He needs to get from where lives (waaaay, waaaay ooop norf [up north to those who don't speak the lingo]) to where the Southern part of the clan live (unsurprisingly, this is daaan saaaf [down south]) and to where I live which is….well, east a bit, just south of the Suffolk border. In a nutshell this means we live (to borrow the French term for it) fucking miles apart and it involves my little bro’ getting a quantity of train and tubage for to be meeting up with me, to then go on to see our step brother, visit our Dad, then back to mine, then finally back to whereever the hell it is he lives now (I actually know exactly where he lives, I just like to feign indifference).

Now, to give him his due, he did try to book his tickets online but to be honest he’d really only managed to get as far as the ‘please enter a username, email address and password to register bit‘ (the technical among you will recognise this as the ‘first page‘ and the really advanced will recognise this as having ‘got nowhere‘). The small lack of knowing what email address to use threw him. Anyway, it fell to me, Mr IfOnlyYouCouldDrive who, after *mumble* *mumble* years of getting public transport knows a thing or two about tearing about the country  on what we laughingly refer to as ‘a railway‘.  I managed to save him a bit of dosh (50 something quid for the tickets, plus zone 1-2 rail card, all delivered to his house tomorrow instead of 177 quid on the train with free pot of Vaseline) and then terrify him as I pointed out this only gets him into London. There are two other sets of tickets to buy (no real point getting them in advance as they wont be on a GNER train and therefore we wont be royally rogered for wanting to pay on the day of travel rather than 24 years in advance) which will set him back a further 70 odd quid. I’ll be the one getting him off the train in London, getting him from one mainline station to another, getting him on the right trains and telling people when we’re arriving. For the briefest of moments I get to go ‘If only you understood about public transport…‘

Anyway, if you see a short haired bloke with a broken leg and a devastatingly handsome bloke with long hair on the train this weekend…its not us