Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

For... freedom!

I did something today. I spoke out for an oppressed minority. I stood up for a cause. A lost cause, even. I stood up to be counted. I did not flinch. I was determined not to be ashamed of who I am. I did not care what people thought.

Yes, that's right. I walked into WH Smith on Waterloo Station and openly, without any furtiveness, bought the new National Rail Timetable without offering a lame excuse such as "it's for the office". Sure, people buying such things without a good excuse usually get the same polite-yet-disapproving smile the sales assistant reserve for people buying porn mags (actually, maybe I'd have been less brazen about it if I'd wrapped the timetable in a copy of Razzle) but, well, timetables just appeal to me, and the National Rail Timetable is a good one. Sure, it doesn't have the authoritative heft of the Deutsche Bahn Allgemeine Kursbuch, a multi-volume behemoth which comes in a box with a handle, or the perky yellowness of the Nederlandse Spoorwegen Spoorboekje, but it's still 2600 wafer-thin pages of closely spaced numbers and armchair travel. And this being Britain, it comes with a booklet of amendments which have been made before it's even come into force.

Oh yes, and I can even use it for planning journeys - I find it easier to use the timetable than the web as with a timetable it's possible to see the bigger picture (how many trains there are, when's the next connection if I miss it, etc) than with the web journey planner, which only presents a number of possible complete journeys and - most importantly - doesn't allow for trains being late and missed connections. Not that such things ever happen in Britain, oh no.

The ultimate armchair traveller's timetable might be Thomas Cook's European Timetable and its counterpart the Overseas Timetable, but I find it hard to justify buying them for myself if I'm unlikely to ever actually, well, use them for any real travelling.

A banner repeater, yesterday.

Posted by mpk at May 7, 2004 6:19 PM | TrackBack