It’s been four o’clock forever here. An almost endless afternoon spinning off into the distance, only concluding when the skies darken, and rain falls like frozen droplets of spite on the bald patch at the crown of my head. If they named this spot “Ennui”, I would not be more surprised than I already am. So complete is its banality, it vies with “a rural bus stop” for the listless black hole Victor ludorum.
André Gide once said, “One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore.” Gide has clearly never set sail for Gowerton.
I’m waiting on the tarmacadam and steel monstrosity of Gowerton railway station for the 16:29 to Cardiff, to meet up with an unlikely crew of rugby fans for pre-match bevvies in the Cross Inn, near that archetype of civil engineering brutalism, the Gabalfa Flyover. The functionally inadequate app on my phone is telling me the train is “On Time”, while the orange and black digital noticeboard, a device with all the charm of an early nineties Unix computer, is saying it is delayed and has an expected arrival time of 16:35.
The appointed time passes with an exhale of sullen breath and a refresh of the noticeboard to “Cancelled due to too few trains”.
“Too few trains” is like too few lottery wins. The explanation is contextually clear without imparting a raison d’etre for my abandonment on this cavernous cathedral to distress. I feel I should kick something, but the steel poles, on which are mounted CCTV cameras, look both too sturdy and too threatening for such satisfaction. Instead, I glower.
That’ll show them, I muse, looking up at the domed camera, hoping some embarrassed clerk is writing his log entry. “This man looks really angry. This is not the level of customer relations I signed up for.”
But he’s probably laughing and supping his six-sugar Gregg’s latte, his office warmed by early millennial CRT screens flickering with digital laughter at my inconvenience and impotent anger. I imagine him nudging his oppo and declaring, “Hey Bill, look at this knob waiting for the 16:29 from Gowerton. He looks like he’s going to have a hernia.”
I spit optical venom at the camera and wait while composing a letter of complaint to the MD of TfW in my head.
“Dear Sir, it is my sorry experience to have availed myself of your organisation’s (and I use the term lightly) services on blah, blah, blah…” My app pings with a cancellation reward of £5.96. My lottery win, at last.
If death and taxes are the only things certain in life, an accurate TfW timetable is the most uncertain, other than the expectation that the safe arrival on time of my train will not occur before the heat death of the multiverse, an Ouroboros of expectation that is as predictable in its unpredictability that it defies normal philosophical discourse. Just like a Wales win in the Six Nations, really. But that’s another story.
