Train strain

Bank holiday Saturday afternoon and I’m standing in a jam-packed railway carriage bound for Cardiff in Wales. If I lift my head, my face is in my nearest neighbour’s face, so I’m contemplating my feet. A Welsh woman somewhere is holding a long and intimate telephone conversation in a voice loud enough for all in the carriage to follow it. ‘My little one-stop shop? Is that what he called me? I’ll kill him. If I’m his little one-stop shop, then he’s Kwik Fit — and you can tell him I said that.’

I’m going to Cardiff to look at a Citroën Picasso. I’ve just looked over one at Southampton, but it wasn’t any good. The advert had more or less said that the car had been previously driven by a nervous nun and was as good as new, if not better. But it was a shed. There were fag burns on the seats, the electric mirrors weren’t working, the driver’s electric window ditto, and the odometer had obviously been tampered with.