Train.
On Saturday there was a major tra1n crash. My tra1n .. that I use all the time. I wasn't on that particular one but I could have been - so that makes you think. Over the years I have narrowed things down so that I always sit in the same seat and if I can't get it I feel really upset. But I always do get it because I have train fever and am at the station so early that I can run like a greyhound along the platform and be the first person on. Even when the tra1n is coming from the West and is already full, most people wouldn't want my seat as it is right at the end and far away. It is the last (or first) one, leaning with your back against the wall of the driver's cabin and in the coach where phones are not allowed. It means you have to walk the entire length of the platform and then the carriage and most people just don't bother. I love my seat and as there aren't that many trains I have come to know the different scratches and marks on the seats in front and can often recognise tiny marks that I have secretly made myself.

If I had been sitting in my seat I think that I would probably be dead. The whole of the driver's compartment was crushed and from looking at the aerial photograph I think that the next section of the first carriage (mine) has a horribly concertinaed look. BUT ... by a simple twist of fate ... I actually would not. As by random chance they had backed the train into London the wrong way round, with the first class behind the engine and my favourite seat now right at the other end at the back. This happens very rarely indeed. There have now been three serious crashes with many deaths on my line in the last few years. Each time an unforseeable error that should never happen again. This time a man decided to commit suicide by stopping his car on an unm@nn3d cr0ss1ng, which would normally have involved the tra1n skidding to a halt with his car underneath. But for some reason it jumped the tr@cks and the whole tra1n snapped and fell over ... except the last carriage, containing, for once, my seat.

So now I can't decide where to sit in future. I think if I have to move further down where I will be surrounded by children and phones and music, I will die of raised blood pressure. Then again if I stay in the same place I may be so stressed and afraid that I will die of raised blood pressure. Also, because I obsess about such things, I have studied pictures of tra1n cr@shes in the past and, as with this one, the tra1n often seems to jack knif3 and jump the tr@cks in the middle while leaving the ends untouched. Also, also ... in the papers today they were saying reassuringly that your chances of dying in a tra1n cr@sh are 'only' 1 in 500,000, while your chances of dying in a d0mestic accident are 1 in 70,000. So it is safer to get on the tra1n than to stay at home.

As I HAVE to travel regularly on the tra1n, again in two days' time in fact, I think that I will stay with my favourite seat. Taking as some kind of sign that if I HAD been on that actual one, the unusual turning round of the carriages meant that I would have had a miraculous escape ... and would now be writing about having been saved for a higher purpose and how I was suddenly seeing everything more clearly ...

- posted by Iris @ 11/09/2004 11:31:00 PM (0) comments comment