Sauntering Vaguely Downward

I could not have made this day up.

We got up extra early because the bloke had to get the first train in to New Street so he could get to London.

I had a day full of meetings and producing documents for stressed-out academics trying to meet deadlines.

I got on the train home. The train got stuck at a station (but not on a platform) behind another train that broke down because the high winds had damaged the overhead lines. My train was a diesel so it could continue to Home Station, but it had to wait for the broken train to be removed.

We waited for two hours. My childrens' nursery and school shut, and I had to activate my emergency network to have them rescued, separately.

I was standing up. I never get a seat on this service anyway because it's rammed. I was standing with a fellow parent whose children attend my childrens' school/nursery, at least, and we kept each other's spirits up for a while. It was a long enough wait that nearby passengers joined the conversation and people started sharing food, which in British terms means that everyone was convinced the end times were at hand.

I got in, picked up the children, and came home to find...

...the boiler is broken again! Same fault. I suspect we are looking at a New Boiler Situation. :/

Pokémon Go: Week 25 + Abyssrium

I haven’t posted about PokéGo in a while, which probably reflects my waning interest. I have, however, reached Level 28, thanks in part to the quadruple points bonus from the Lucky Egg evolves during the Thanksgiving event. I didn’t benefit much from the Winter Holiday event due to being entirely occupied by family in rural Norfolk. It was pretty irritating not to see a single Pokémon within a kilometre of the house. On a couple of brief visits to town, I got a few free incubators. I also caught a large quantity of Santachus in London during December, which were sufficient for me to evolve a Raiclaus. \o/

New to my Pokédex since my last update on Week 18 (!) were: Blastoise, Dodrio, Exeggcutor, Arcanine, Magneton, Raichu (and Raiclaus), Nidoqueen,Ivysaur, Charmeleon, Vileplume (which is a lot cuter than it sounds), Victreebel (which isn’t), Dragonite and Weezing.

I’ve caught a few Dittos, and one was even in Worcestershire and not London. I’m 30 candies from my fourth Gyarados. I am frustrated that I’ve been playing for nearly half a year now and not managed to catch, hatch or even see in the wild a Snorlax, a Lapras or an Aerodactyl.

OTOH, I hatched a Pikachu from a 2km egg recently, which was pretty satisfying! I’ve walked my Sandshrew to sufficient candies to evolve it, and my Nidorino is ready to go at my next Lucky Egg too. I have sufficient Voltorb, Kabuto and Vulpix candies to make walking them to evolution a reasonable undertaking. After that, though, I won’t have many left to evolve, and for those, I have so few candies out of the 100 required that walking them is pointless until there’s another event where the distance required is quartered. I suspect this game is coming to the end of its natural cycle for me.

Abyssrium has been making up for the petering out of PokéGo with its Winter Holiday event. I collected all the Christmas fish in their Santa outfits and enjoyed adorning my Coralite with Rudolph antlers. I also still faithfully feed my Neko Atsume kitties and water my Viridi plants every day. At some point I’ll have to look into acquiring a new adorable phone game.

Gratuitous Abyssrium & Neko Atsume images below.



Featuring the elusive Whiteshadow in the Sugary Style garden. Looking at this, I can’t feel too sad that my first public post of 2017 is about frivolous games.

My plan is to finish off the December Days photo prompts in January. I also have a set of Throwback Thursday photos I shall be posting over the course of the next year. Let it not be said that I don’t have goals.

My message to Virgin Trains Customer Relations:

Hello,
I was on the [HH:MM] on Thursday, 7 July 2016, from London Euston to Birmingham New Street. I had booked Seat [XX] in Quiet Coach [Y]. Just above my seat on the Quiet Coach sign, someone had written "BNP". Someone else had tried unsuccessfully to scratch it out, but the graffiti, as shown in the attached photo, was still clearly visible.

As a mixed-race British citizen, I found this unsettling. I did not particularly enjoy sitting underneath a blatant piece of unimaginative racist propaganda for the entirety of my journey. Would it be possible for the sign in the coach of that train to be replaced? I presume there is a way of identifying which train was running that route at that time?
Thank you,
[nanila]

Most of the time when confronted with casual sexism or racism, I find myself responding in a manner that leaves me dissatisfied. I'm left instead to contemplate the host of scathing, incisive replies that come to me in the middle of the night, long after they could possibly be useful. L'esprit de l'escalier and that. So I feel the need to record yesterday's cab journey, it being a rare occasion when exactly the right retort leapt to mind and flew off my tongue unchecked by the desire to placate or smooth over.

I hailed the cab from the corner of Prince Consort Road. The driver assumed I was a student from Royal College of Music. I corrected him, being neither a student nor a musician. He spent some time exclaiming over how I must be very intelligent and looked so young to be a member of staff at a university. Suddenly, a woman driving an SUV cut him up. He launched into a tirade about how women are very poor drivers who never pay attention because they're always talking to their passengers or are on the phone.

An awkward pause ensued.

"Do you drive?" he asked me.
"No," I sighed mournfully and untruthfully, "my husband won't let me."

[Image: My feet in some very silly cat booties.]

This photo and the donation I made to the charity Mind today are linked, I promise you.

I bought these slippers a few weeks ago on a Wednesday. I was traveling down to London from Birmingham by train as I do every week for work. I'd walked to the station along my usual path next to the rail tracks. My sartorial choices on this day turned out to be misguided. I'd glanced out the window at 5:30 AM, observed sunshine and put on a dress and trainers. I'd failed to notice that it had rained during the night and that the ground and long grasses were drenched.

I arrived at the station with feet so wet that I had to remove my shoes and walk around in the spare socks I'd brought for the following day. As it was 7:30 AM, there were no shops in the vicinity of New Street or Moor Street stations selling shoes. Even the fashion magazines that come with freebies attached had opted for sunglasses instead of cheap plastic flip-flops. It seemed I was destined to make my journey shoeless until I got to London, so I bought a coffee and went to sit on the train.

On this particular Wednesday, I sat alone at a four-person table in the third carriage from the front with my legs stretched out, sipping my coffee and indulging in some Twitter chatter about my shoeless condition. I'd just managed to convince myself that I would be able to purchase shoes in Marylebone station when the train braked sharply.

And then I felt the bumps.

I squeezed my eyes shut and hoped that they were branches from a fallen tree. We sat motionless on the tracks. A minute passed. I exchanged glances with the woman on the opposite side of the aisle. "I really hope that wasn't what I thought it was," I said. She looked puzzled. "Didn't you feel the bumps?" I asked. "Oh," she said, "Yes."

We waited. The driver came on the tannoy. "I apologise for the delay. There's been a - technical fault."

"What, have the wheels fallen off?" quipped a man behind me. There were a few nervous giggles, but mostly people looked a little sick.

Several minutes passed. The driver returned to the tannoy. "I'm sorry to say that we may be here for some time. A person has fallen under the train and we can't move until the transport police and the ambulance crew have done their jobs. As soon as I know when we can move to the next station, I'll let you know. My apologies for the delay."

The next hour and a half passed mercifully quickly. We watched the stony-faced crews march back and forth past the windows with eyes that had seen too much of this sort of thing. We went to the buffet carriage to stand in a long queue and talk in subdued voices whilst waiting for complimentary cups of tea. We listened to a man who walked up and down the carriages to give us comforting updates, hoping it wasn't the driver. (It was.) Eventually, the train was permitted to continue to the next station, Princes Risborough, where we disembarked to await the arrival of another train to take us to Marylebone. All had been handled in as dignified a fashion as possible - right up until they pulled the train off the platform in reverse. (It hadn't been cleaned yet.)

I participated in a meeting that I was missing by telephone and pretended to be relatively unperturbed by anything other than the inconvenience.

When I arrived in Marylebone station, I discovered that what I'd thought was an Accessorize was, in fact, a card shop. The only shoes they sold were novelty slippers. I had a choice between frogs, monkeys holding bananas and kitties. I chose the kitties, put them on my feet and walked casually down the Tube escalator. No one batted an eyelash until I boarded a train, where a woman across from me with an amused light in her eyes raised an eyebrow as if to say, "Did you forget something before you left the house today?" I felt a lightness inside me, amusement that my biggest personal problem today would be explaining why I was turning up at the office in a pair of fluffy kitten booties. It pushed gently but firmly at the darkness of the day's events.

I don't know why that person jumped in front of that train. I wish that, for her, there had been someone or something who could have made facing that day a prospect that wasn't a step too far. For her sake and for the train driver's, I wore those stupid kitten booties all that day and the next. For her sake and her family's, I made that donation to Mind today. For her sake and for all of us who presently suffer or have suffered from depression, I make this journal entry.