The Cosmic Inconvenience of Public Transport

It is a widely known fact that time is relative and not absolute, it is a matter of speed and gravity. Or the irritating beep of your alarm app. 

My alarm did exactly that at 4am this morning. While most other people were experiencing the weak gravitational fields known as sleep, Mary and I were experiencing time dilation approaching the same feeling you’d have somewhere close to a black hole. We were moving around at pace, packing the final bits, washing and dressing ready for our journey home. But it felt like we were moving slowly and with no urgency at all. 

Then, there was the matter of transportation. We arrived at the quay to await the arrival of the catamaran. A superb vessel that is not content with the simple nautical arrangement of one hull. The catamaran has two, providing exceptional stability, the ability to navigate shallow waters, more space for people to sit and a way to defy brain lag and make the journey across the Solent feel like exactly 22 minutes. But when it is 05:40 in the morning? That 22 minutes of sitting in a seat comfortable enough for a nap feels like a mere 10 minutes. 

Having arrived in Portsmouth, Mary and I plus the other souls practicing bipedalism, lurched towards the railway platform in the hope that our perambulation would be sufficient to get us safely aboard the 06:08 to London Waterloo. Mary, being small and nimble, dodged and weaved her way past those other lurching wretches. I got stuck behind a man wheeling his bicycle in a manner that suggested he had no idea why he’d brought it with him. 

Once safely on the train, we sat staring into space, comatose and bleary-eyed. Dreaming of achieving caffeination once at Waterloo. The journey time was 2 hours. Which I was not going to waste. I folded myself into the seat like a contorted sack of potatoes, and closed my eyes. Exactly 32 minutes later, I was awoken by the guard announcing we’d arrived somewhere or other that wasn’t Waterloo. I settled back into my sleeping position to be disturbed by the hiss of the internal doors and the guards' cheery call of “Tickets or passes please!”. 

Sleep was now a passing thought. I closed my eyes but for reasons only known to my brain, sleep didn’t return. So, Mary and I did a collective staring out of the window while time moved relentlessly forward as we passed through Guildford and Woking. 

On arrival at Waterloo, a glance at the schedule for trains to Coventry from Euston Station suggested the caffeination would have to wait. We jumped like energetic sloths into a taxi cab. The driver of which clearly understood time because he followed the old English tradition of wellying it to get us to Euston. 

We decanted ourselves from the taxi with all the grace of a sack of wet laundry being tossed into a blender. A brief consultation with our digital watches—those tiny, glowing monuments to the human obsession with slicing eternity into manageable, anxiety-inducing chunks—revealed that the universe was once again plotting against us. The only logical response was bipedal acceleration, a frantic mode of transit more commonly referred to by those in the grip of a panic attack as ‘legging it’.

We surged through Euston with the desperate, focused intensity of Olympic athletes competing in the inaugural ‘Jogging Urgently While Carrying Things That Are Much Too Heavy’ finals. A final, breathless heave through the ticket barrier and a leap that defied several minor laws of physics saw us successfully installed upon the train to Coventry.

I launched our suitcases into the overhead racks. Where they settled with a thud that suggested they were quite finished with the concept of movement. And collapsed into a seat that felt like it had been designed by someone who had heard of the human spine but didn't personally approve of it. Mary pointed at her watch with an expression that managed to convey both a profound relief and a weary acknowledgement that the universe had, for once, allowed us to win on a technicality.

An hour or so later, we arrived in Coventry. The universe, which is very large and busy with much more important things like the heat death of stars and the curious behaviour of dust, didn't mind in the slightest.