Epsom

The other day I accompanied Nicola to Epsom for an interview. It involved another early morning and some bad luck.

We went to catch the bus round the corner but when we got there there was a very long queue. The first bus was already pretty full so only let about 6 people on. After waiting a bit longer another bus came and it was much emptier. So we got on. But when I went to scan my oyster card into the reader it gave me the red light (again, as you may remember from a blog entry a couple of weeks ago). This didn't make sense as I knew money had just been put on the card the day before. But I was holding up a queue so I had to get off.

I went to check that there was money on it (and it had £13 on it) so we went back to the bus stop to queue. Eventually another bus came and we made it on this time. We got to the tube station and the tube journey was fine.

Once at the train station we went to buy the tickets. Having bought the tickets we went to see which platform the train was going from and, in rushing to do so, I accidentally stepped in some red sticky liquid on the floor (no it wasn't blood). Luckily I only stepped in a bit of it so my shoes weren't covered in it and I think it came off my shoes quite easily as I noticed there was no longer any trace of it when I checked my shoes later on the train.

When we made it to the train time board our train didn't yet have a platform. In fact, even when there was only 3 minutes till it was meant to depart there was no platform. Then all of a sudden it disappeared from the board. We quickly went to ask one of the staff standing around what had happened to it and what platform we should go to. She didn't have a clue, she just kept telling us we should catch another train. We kept telling her we couldn't because firstly the tickets were train specific and secondly the other trains were going much later and we wanted to get to Epsom as early as possible for my sister's interview. She didn't seem to understand this so we just went back to looking for the train time on the board. Luckily it then re-appeared. However it contained the dreaded words delayed.

We waited for a while until a platform was eventually displayed and then we ran over to the ticket barriers for the platform (because the board also said we had a minute before the train departed, aren't they nice). However for some reason our tickets didn't work with the ticket machines. So we went over to the side of the machines where a member of staff let us through.

We ran towards the train. The doors were all shut with an 'open door' button accompanying them. We pressed the first button but the door didn't open. We ran to the second door and pressed the button. The door again didn't open. This continued for a couple of doors until eventually we reached one that opened and, not long after making it onto the train, the train left the station.

The rest of the day went fine. We got to the university half an hour early and while my sister had her interview I went to explore the town. Then we returned to London (with no travel problems whatsoever).