I have spent this week staying in the Travelodge at Leicester. There is no particular reason why I am doing such a random thing, except that I have the profound misfortune to be dating somebody who comes from Leicester. I thought it would be nice for us to spend some time together, since we didn’t have much chance before Christmas, and I managed to get a room in the Travelodge for £30 a night.

I am not a snob when it comes to hotels, but my feelings about Travelodges are mixed. I love Premier Travel Inns, and would happily stay in one any time, anywhere; their breakfast is of the highest quality and their rooms are always clean and comfortable. Travelodges, on the other hand, seem considerably more basic although they aren’t always considerably cheaper, and so many little niceties like soap in the bathroom are missing. The first time I ever stayed in one I was most put out to discover it didn’t serve breakfast and that instead my £5 a day would earn me a brown paper bag placed outside my room each morning, with a dubious looking apple and a yoghurt pot of cornflakes The one I’ve been staying in in Leicester isn’t bad in some respects. The room was actually quite spacious and had a long sofa in it, which I liked. The bathroom, however, had a rather unpleasant smell and to me the bath looked none too clean. Plus one night there was a school trip of rather obnoxious children staying there, which had I wanted to go to sleep before half one in the morning, might have been a bit of a annoyance.

It was worth it though to get to see my boyfriend, although he was mostly working until ten so we only got between about half past and whatever time we manage to keep our eyes open til. I’ve been trying to complete my Star Wars education during the week which has been rather fun, although I have to confess it’s an awful lot more complicated than I expected and I don’t always understand who everyone is! Until last November, I’d never seen an episode of Star Wars in my life. In fact, I had a habit of getting confused as to the difference between Star Wars and Star Trek, and sometimes even Doctor Who Then in November my boyfriend introduced me to it; I was a bit sceptical at first but it ended up being miles better than I’d expected and now I’m quite a fan.

Aside from that, I’ve been trying to make some progress with an Esperanto course called ‘Paŝoj al plena posedo’. I bought the book quite some time ago, and my boyfriend promised that if I did the exercises he’d correct them for me. There’s a little course booklet which comes with it and gives you instructions on what to translate. Each chapter of the textbook has an extract from some sort of story in it, and one of the exercises is invariably to translate it into English. The course booklet then has another text, which has to be translated into Esperanto.

On the face of it, this sounds like rather a good idea and a worthwhile thing to do. When I purchased it, it was with the idea of forcing myself to do some more practice, and I got through the first three chapters in reasonable time. By the time I for to the fourth, however, I seemed to come unstuck. It wasn’t exactly that the exercises were increasingly difficult, but the things they were suggesting I translate began to increasingly annoy me. It just felt like whoever had written the texts had gone out of their way to choose pointless passages full of untranslatable concepts. One particular example which springs to mind was the phrase “light tea-time music”. What on earth is light tea-time music when it’s at home?! In the end I went for “leĝera vespermanĝa musiko” which may or may not be complete gibberish depending on whether “tea-time” relates to the time at which the music is played or is a random musical genre in it’s own right.

The exercises which I virtuously attempted last night included similar gems, including one sentence which seemed to go on for half a page and included a ridiculous number of instances of the phrase “one another”. When I got to chapter six I was forced to give up on the grounds that not only was I unable to translate “door-scraper”, I was unable to foresee an occasion on which I would ever want to!

It is good though to have time to do things by myself and not to be trapped in Wantage where every minute of my life seemed to belong to work. I had a certain feeling of elation when I left Wantage last Friday. I think everyone did, not least the client financial accountant who pretty much hugged the entire audit team she was so glad to see the back of us. She did, however, express the desire that the team for next year’s audit be the same, saying how nice it was now we’d all got to know each other. I’m not entirely sure if I share her sentiments Don’t get me wrong; the staff in Wantage are all really pleasant, but the job is so stressful and the site itself is kind of spooky. I don’t much like being there late at night when all the office workers have gone home and you have to walk in and out the maze of factory blocks which all seem to emit sinister noises and threatening bursts of steam.

Talking about threatening things, by virtue of spending the weekend with my boyfriend I have managed to avoid any further zombie-related nightmares I have slept uncharacteristically well all week actually, although I woke up somewhat shocked at half five this morning because I had no recollection of having fallen asleep. I ended up being slightly drunk last night, and I remember getting back to the hotel room, getting in to bed and my boyfriend setting my laptop up because we were going to watch some wrestling. I remember us listening to some sort of theme tune, and I remember him fast forwarding through a bit of it trying to get to something else, and I remember thinking that this was going to be interesting… and after that I remember nothing more! Apparently my boyfriend asked me if I was watching it, only I had my eyes closed, and I claimed I was, but I have no recollection of anything else until I woke up at five thirty wondering where my laptop was and who had switched the lights off.

I didn’t actually feel entirely sober this morning either :blush2: I’m sure I should have been, since I’d been asleep for hours, but I had walking-in-a-straight-line issues en route to the office which made me decide not to do any important work for the first few hours of the day until I was feeling more normal. I would absolutely kill for a cup of coffee right now but I’m waaaaay too shaky to perform delicate balancing acts with trays through doors, so I’m trying really hard to hold out until 1 pm when I can go out and buy one. It’s just occurred to me that it is about 40 hours since I last had an injection of caffeine and I don’t actually know how much longer I can survive

I was hoping to buy a cup at the station in Leicester actually but I encountered an unforeseen obstacle to this plan upon arriving at the platform; my train was actually on time and so I didn’t have a spare ten minutes to kill in a café A train running on time is not an eventuality which I have to contend with very often, and it quite upset my world view for about thirty seconds, after which time I realised that the train may have been on time but it was on platform one when it was scheduled to be on platform three and thus all was in fact right with the world.

Now I really don’t have a problem with travelling by public transport; I love trains in fact, and I use them all the time seeing as I haven’t yet taken the momentous step of booking myself a driving lesson, but this week the service between Leicester and Birmingham has been severely testing my patience. For a start, this week all the electronic signs in the main hall of Leicester station which normally display the departure times of the next ten or so trains have not been functioning. Quite what is wrong with them I’m not sure; I’m still harbouring suspicions that someone may just have forgotten to flick the on switch, because curiously all the electronic signs on the platforms are working perfectly. This means the only way of telling where your train is departing from is to choose a platform at random and walk halfway down it until you find the display. Happily, being the small northern town which it is, Leicester only has four platforms to choose from, but you can be sure that whichever staircase you go down first will turn out to be the wrong choice

The displays at Birmingham have yet to give up the ghost, but the announcements leave a lot to be desired. I was innocently standing on platform 10a on Wednesday night, alongside the hordes of other people who try to catch the Leicester train from that platform every night, when the sickly synthesised voice which insincerely tells people how deeply sorry it is for the severe delay to their service, announced that there was a platform alteration and the 17.59 to Leicester would now be departing from platform 12b. Since it was now 17.57 there was a moment of mad panic as people dashed for the staircases. I was lucky in that last time this happened to me, a nice elderly gentleman showed me a secret passage by which it is possible to get between platforms underground, without climbing up the enormous staircase back to the main station again. Several other people and I hurried down this passage and were just arranging ourselves in strategic positions on platform 12b which we believed best calculated to enable us to gain seats, when there came another announcement from Mr Electronic Insincerity.

“This is a platform alteration. The 17.59 service from this station to Leicester will now depart from Platform 10a. Platform 10a for the 17.59 service to Leicester”.

I confess to have a severe “I don’t believe it!” Victor Meldrew moment

We all proceeded to dash back through the passage, except somehow I got a bit lost and emerged on platform 11a where I very nearly boarded a train to Hereford and was never seen again.

I could overlook this as a minor inconvenience which hasn’t destroyed my life, but as the week progressed I got increasingly irritated with Cross Country, who I think are providing a much worse service than good old Central Trains used to. I swear the trains they are running have less carriages. One night this week they sent a specimen which consisted of a mere two coaches. The number of people who appear to commute between Birmingham and the environs of Leicester each day is really quite considerable and the effect of cramming them all into such a small space was not pleasant. There was standing place only by the time I arrived (10 minutes prior to departure) and so I settled myself into a nice corner by one of the doors within easy reach of the handrail. I had the presence of mind to remove my backpack from my back and was just about to remove my coat when a sudden influx into the vestibule area resulted in me being wedged in such a manner as made it impossible to sufficiently move my arms. I was therefore condemned to stand in this corner for the 55 minutes it took our delayed service to reach Leicester in severe danger of either overheating or passing out from the smell of a banana a person standing next to me saw fit to eat. Considering I was paying £16.70 a day for the privilege, I was more than a little annoyed :cry:

Moral of the story? I really need to learn to drive…

Tags: Leicester, trains, Travelodge

This entry was posted on Friday, February 1st, 2008 at 1:02 pm and is filed under Random rambling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.