The Manor
If you could see me right now, you would laugh 
I am currently sitting wrapped up in a mustard yellow blanket, trying to drink decaff out of a toothmug. It’s a rather ancient looking blanket which is probably none too clean, but it’s so absolutely bloody freezing cold where I am that when I randomly discovered it at the back of a wardrobe I decided that cocooning myself in it might be my sole chance to escape death by hypothermia. In fact, it looks very much like the sort of blankets which we used to use in the Girl Guides when we were working towards the Fire Safety badge, and needed to practise rolling somebody who was supposedly on fire along the floor to put the flames out. As for my rather strange manner of refreshment… well, first I probably need to explain where I am and why I have the misfortune to be here.
I am, to be precise, in the middle of nowhere. When I told you that Wantage was the back of beyond I was actually exaggerating slightly. There are two places I know which are more remote and godforsaken than Wantage, and this is one of them. Where this is I don’t want to say; firstly, because you won’t have heard of it anyway, and secondly because given that you won’t have heard of it you might decide to google it and that would in all probability give away the name of my employer. I am, however, in Buckinghamshire, in a manor house which technically belongs to the National Trust but which my firm has been renting off them as a training centre for several decades.
Staying in a manor house sounds rather exciting. To a certain extent, it actually is. The sweeping drive up to the building is beautiful, with a view of the walled garden and a small, private church, and then in the background you have the outline of the Chiltern hills, which manage to look quite alluring even in the middle of winter. All the training courses are held in the manor itself. You can either go up to the classrooms via a magnificently grand staircase that allows you to temporarily pretend that you are a heroine from a Jane Austen novel. Or you can go the back way, up a frightening steep and narrow set of steps which was obviously meant for the servants in days gone by. On the upper level the floors are wonderfully uneven and creak in a most alarming manner. The house used to belong to the family of a famous Victorian Prime Minister, and so there are stories attached to certain rooms and one which is allegedly inhabited by a ghost. In the summer you can go out onto the front lawn and play croquet after dinner 
Unfortunately the sleeping accommodation is not quite so grand. For reasons which I do not understand but I presume were financial, the National Trust has allowed my firm to build a small colony of prefabricated buildings in part of the grounds. Well, I suppose the course delegates have to live somewhere, and we do tend to descend on the place in rather large numbers at certain times of the year, but they are a slight blot on the landscape from a purely aesthetic point of view The rooms spread out down the long arms of corridors in all directions and, for reasons best known to the builders, are not numbered in strictly numerical order, which can make it a bit difficult to find your room. When you do succeed in locating it, you may wonder if you have accidentally been given the key to the broom cupboard. Think student accommodation, but without the wardrobe. The walls are really wafer thin, so that you can hear the mobile phone conversations of everyone on your corridor with great clarity, and it is also commonplace to be woken up in the middle of the night by the banging of fire doors and drunken shouts when people who have managed to escape in taxis for the night return home.
I arrived at my room around 9pm, which I am annoyed about. I mean, the course doesn’t start until 9am on Monday morning, so there is actually no requirement for me to be here right now. One of my friends from work was booked to attend this course too, and between us we had arranged that we wouldn’t get here until the morning, and that he would come to my house to give me a lift. Unfortunately, last week his evil line manager had other plans and decided to take him off the course to staff an emergency audit. And so I am here all by myself :cry: I investigated the train times to see if I could still make it down on the Monday, but from door to door it’s a three hour journey and so I came to the regrettable conclusion it just wasn’t possible. It kind of blighted my entire Sunday though, knowing I had to come down here in the evening. And there is no overtime payable for it, of course.
Getting here was quite an achievement in itself. They have been doing engineering works on a bit of track in Birmingham which is part of the Chiltern Line to London Marylebone, which is the way I normally come. Rail replacement buses had thus helpfully been laid on for a two week period between Birmingham Snow Hill and Leamington Spa. Fair enough. I was reading this on the National Rail Enquiries website, so I clicked on the Current Engineering Works page for further details. There were intricate descriptions of what one should do if one had been hoping to travel via Dorridge, and then in the small print, hidden right at the bottom, there was the following observation.
Please note that the online journey planner is showing an incorrect timetable for Saturday 16th and Sunday 17th of February. This is due to a problem with our service provider. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.
WTF?!!! They put an incorrect timetable online, apologise for it, and don’t see fit to replace it with the correct one?! 
Words fail me. In the end I decided to get a Cross Country train from Birmingham New Street to Leamington Spa and continue my journey from there which just about worked. However, I came incredibly close to missing my station due to the fact that for some reason train companies often don’t see fit to announce the stops on Sunday evenings and the electronic display at the front of the carriage had got confused and was one stop behind in its proclamations of the next halt. Matters were complicated by the fact that it hadn’t occurred to me to print off a list of the intermittent stops of the train and I couldn’t get a good enough signal to go on National Rail Enquiries from my phone and find one. However, luckily for me I felt the train slowing, happened to notice a retail park where I once went to the cinema to watch a Wallace and Gromit film, and leapt up dragging all my stuff behind me.
The Manor was just a short taxi ride away. It never ceases to amaze me how a short taxi ride can cost in excess of ten pounds, but this one at least is reclaimable on expenses. And then I was here, and being given the key to my room. The block I am in is called Manor View which does not in fact have a view across to the Manor, but rather into about ten other people’s bedrooms, and so it is imperative to keep your curtains firmly closed at all hours of the day and night. It is one of the worst blocks to be in in terms of noise, and the fact that everywhere is decorated in a nauseating shade of pink, but at least it is not one of the haunted blocks. I have stayed in one of the haunted blocks before and had a strange experience with my window opening itself in the middle of the night…
Upon opening the door to my room, my first thought was that I had made a mistake and actually stepped outside again. It was freezing! Absolutely totally freezing I flicked the light on and ran straight to the temperature control for the heating which, I quickly realised, some very helpful person had seen fit to set to 5 degrees. I swung it up to 25, which is as high as it will go, and huddled over by the radiator. The situation improved slightly for a certain amount of time, until it occurred to me to open the door to the bathroom. The bathrooms here are notoriously cold, especially if you don’t remember to switch your towel rail on, and I for one would not want to strip off and have a shower in them. Today, however, it was arctic! In a fit of absentmindedness I made the mistake of sitting on the toilet seat and quickly sprang up again as if I had been electrocuted. If you decided to sit down in a snow drift, I imagine the effect might be fairly similar
This was the point at which I retrieved the mustard blanket and contrived to wrap myself in it. I had a further brainwave that to make myself a hot drink might be a good way to warm up, and to this end I began to boil the kettle. I was disappointed to see that the only coffee available was decaffeinated but resolved to give it a go nevertheless and had just opening the sachet and was on the verge of pouring it into the cup when I realised … that there wasn’t a cup! Nor a teaspoon actually, although I could have lived without that. I searched high and low for it, opening drawers right left and centre in case I was accidentally overlooking it, but no, there was no cup. Considerably annoyed, the only course of action available to me was to appropriate the tooth mug from the bathroom. I was a bit apprehensive about pouring boiling water into a glass mug, remembering an unfortunate episode I once experienced in a chemistry lesson when a test tube exploded under a tap, and so my coffee ended up being lukewarm and drunk in two instalments. Better than nothing I guess, but hardly ideal.
I can’t wait for the rest of the week 