Yes, this is another of Linda’s now-legendary cack shots from a train……you’d be surprised how good it looked in the flesh as it were! Shame about the piccy.

I’ve been hampered for the second day in a row by late-running trains and am pretty fed-up with it. I may have said before (but maybe only to known-to-me human beings rather than just to my cyberspace friends) that I love travelling by train most of the time. It’s a joy to have a few hours for me – I can work, read, snooze, daydream or people-watch and there is nothing to distract me.

BUT, when the trains go wrong, they go horribly wrong and cause me all sorts of problems. Yesterday I arrived two-hours late for a meeting and today, I will be arriving home two hours late – so late that my evening meal was an M&S sarnie, a bag of crisps and a packet of ready chopped ‘fresh’ fruit alone among strangers on a train seat, while my fellow passengers looked on. I hate that. I have a suspicion that DMs meal will have consisted of bread, buttered and with either marmite or ketchup so he probably did worse than me…..but that’s his problem – he had the wherewithal to get a decent meal at least.

I do, though, love seeing the way other people picnic on trains. Take the young couple in the seats opposite me. They’re obviously newly ‘in lurve’, judging by their conversations – she had to ask him if he liked chicken and he asked her what flowers she likes…..so they’re clearly not all that well acquainted…..unless, that is, they both suffer from having no memory beyond the last five minutes!!!! Anyway, their meal tonight is sushi, sandwiches, packaged salads, grapes (and yes, I’m not making this up, they are, as I type, feeding them to one another – dunno if that’s really SWEEEEEEET or really cheesy, it’s certainly one or the other) and chocolate, all washed down with a bottle of Rioja that he proudly ventured down the train to the buffet car to get opened by the staff there. So, we can deduce from this they’re not practiced at this lark – any fool knows you can now get some pretty decent slosh in screw-cap bottles and they were drinking it out of plastic glasses so they couldn’t have been horrified by screw-caps.

Peeping over the shoulder of the chap next to me and reading the emails he was typing and reading was not very exciting I must say, unlike the book I have read most of on this journey. I’ve finished ‘the White Stuff’ now and passed it over to Colin last night for him to read – he reads most of my books sooner or later, I’m somewhat like his own personal book library! Actually, I’d say that the fact we read almost entirely the same kind of books is one of the reasons we like each other so much. Often when he comes to stay with us, his bag is groaning under the weight of half a dozen returned books!!!! Thinking about it, it’s because he RETURNS my books that I like him so much actually. Once I have read a book, I consider it a cherished friend, never to be given up.

Today’s book is the second novel by a man whose first had me, Colin and even David, who reads around as many books in a year as I eat bars of chocolate – in other words one or two, in stitches of laughter (separately, not as one, you understand – we didn’t have a little book reading group where one of us read aloud to the other two). I know, I’m rambling – the book I’m reading is by Mil Millington.

The first book he wrote jumped off the shelf of Waterstones and into my shopping basket purely on the basis of its ridiculous and rather wonderful title – ‘Things my girlfriend and I have argued about’. I have to say too that what’s between the covers of the book is every bit as appealing as the title and what’s more, it’s considerably more satisfying. I loved it BIG TIME. In fact, I rarely randomly visit websites unless I’m trying to find out something or want to buy something, then Google becomes my best friend. I was, though, after having to face the fact that I’d finished the book and would never savour its humour again, tempted to log onto the website, that spawned the idea for the book. If you get a chance, and you’ve not been there before, do go to www.thingsmygirlfriendandihavearguedabout.com - it’s a complete corker and once again, after an hour reading it, I was laughing so hard I forgot to breathe for a bit. Hell, even if you’ve been there, go back – it’s well worth it.

This one (A certain chemistry) has embarrassed me today, in the opposite way to Allison Pearson’s book that I wrote about some time ago. ‘A certain chemistry’ is absolutely hilarious, in the way that you can’t stop guffawing at out loud on the train, much to the smug amusement of other passengers, who goggle at you with smirks on their face as the tears roll down your cheeks and you splutter while trying to stop giggling. I’ve read 250 of the 350 pages today and whereas I should be spitting with fury at my extended trip – after all, I’m well into my own time now, I’m actually part-way to thanking First Great Western for not providing a train from Dorking to Reading for more than two hours this afternoon. It gave me more time to savour the book’s fabulously ridiculous, farcical plot.

I’m signing off now, in the hope I can get to the end of it by the time I get home…..yes, I’m writing this on the train but I waited until there was no-one beside or behind me to start my writing…….well, as I make a hobby out of pogging other people’s laptops, I know the dangers of someone with good eyesight like mine peeping!!!!

Last year, I was at Gare Du Nord photographing the metro which always seems a great deal more exciting than the London Underground somehow!