Waiting for a train

Thursday 16th February

I was far too early, as usual.  Punctuality is a crime I plead guilty to with no prompting; my train was not until 8.15 in the evening, but I was at Paddington way before 7.  How ridiculous is that, but I had bought one of those cheap advance tickets, which are not exchangeable if you miss your allotted train, so I made sure I was there early, ridiculously early.  I really couldn’t face wandering around the shops, if I went into Smiths I would be bound to buy a book, and I had only just started my new one; I was staying with friends in Wales for a couple of days, so Marks food store was pointless too, that left little more than Tie Rack.  Would someone please tell me who actually shops at Tie Rack, who needs a tie, or a scarf or a pashmina that badly, or do they rely on the bored and stupid for their customer base?

I considered settling down in Starbucks, but over an hour with a coffee for company seemed stretching it a bit, in the end I wandered upstairs to a bar which served food, and ordered a glass of dry white wine and a not too filling Ceasar Salad.  I wish I hadn’t, the wine was neither particularly dry, nor even good, it reminded me of those wine boxes which were so popular in the eighties, where the contents invariably tasted of the plastic lining of the cardboard box they had crawled out of.   I am in no way a wine buff, what tastes good is good in my book, and the only thing I do know is a cheap bad wine, I left it practically untouched, a bonus for the staff at least.  The Ceasar Salad was a weak imitation, not cos lettuce but some limp apology for it, possibly iceberg, the most tasteless of salads, the croutons were obviously out of a packet and the ceasar dressing from a bottle, which wouldn’t have mattered had it been Paul Newmans, or a decent make, but it was sharp and bland at the same time if that is at all possible. There was a smidgeon of parmesan, or some hard dry cheese anyway, but so little that one had to almost search for it.  I gave this up as a bad job too, no point in complaining; the staff were all eastern European and probably on minimum wages, I couldn’t see a manager for love nor money.  I know that these places do not rely on return business, and have a captive audience to a degree, but there really is no excuse for such bad fare.

Oh well, my fault for getting there so early I suppose, I wandered down to the Starbucks where I should have come in the first place and continued waiting for my train.