That troublesome railroad line from Portsmouth to Cardiff - on which I never have reason to stay beyond Bristol- maintained its consistent record this week as I had cause to use it again. Consistently bloody awful. Statistically it cannot be only when I use it that it's terrible but it's not even newsworthy, not to my knowledge even mentioned, which suggests that other lines are consistently worse. Quite remarkably, I'm even thinking of going via Reading in future. Reading station, for heaven's sake.
Today the train from Bath to Portsmouth was delayed by the same amount of time that my first train had been so, technically, I got lucky. But that's where it ended. Two coaches, both full, turned up to collect not only its own passengers but those from the two previous cancelled ones. While I enjoyed the strategic necessities of chess, I'm less enamoured of the all-in melee that constitutes the sport of rugby union but I had to use an amalgam of both disciplines to ensure I was at least on that train.
What is so difficult about a train company having to send trains from Portsmouth to Cardiff and back. I'm having to assume that it sees its main purpose as not the carriage of passengers but the business imperative of returning a dividend to its shareholders.
Everything is being turned inside out. It seems far too soon to be quoting football as an example of how things could be run but already it is QED that putting a sensible bloke in charge of some young people generates far more goodwill and success than appointing paragon examples of lack-lustre money men like Rooney, Beckham, John Terry, Ashley in his white suits and surrogate Becks role and having a tired old theorist on £4m a year get them removed from the tournament as soon as it gets serious.
Similarly, as soon as the impossible job of negotiating a way out of the EU- the point of which has always been lost on me although its unfeasibility never was- takes a tentative step forward under poor Theresa's mindblowingly unachievable remit, the minister in charge is off and can't handle it and all his weird cronies begin at highly disgruntled and bid themselves up from there.
I'm not particularly one for striding boldly into new eras with its incumbent technology and development, I remember Harold's white-hot crucible and Jeremy's forward-looking manifesto, but suddenly one can't help but notice how modern and vibrant (?) places like Baku can look and yet our country, that once thought it led the world in so many ways, can't run itself and listens to tiny-minded throwbacks who think it's Elizabeth I overseeing them rather than Elizabeth II.
All of which makes it yet more pauseful when I go into the new Portugese Deli for my egg mayo baguette and the Portugese parliament is on their telly and the lads there tell me they are useless, corrupt and nowhere near as good as British politicians, or when a few years ago I sat with a novelist from Northern Ireland at a poetry reading in London who compared the Northern Irish assembly with Westminster in similar terms.
It's hard to take. Perhaps I'm developing a Cassandra complex, by which I can foresee disaster but can do nothing about it. I mean page 22 of The Perfect Book, the poem called Against Travel. I only meant that going any distance was too much trouble. I didn't mean Bath Spa railway station but I undersestimated the situation. Like the Great Man, I really wouldn't mind going to China if I could come back the same day but he said that a few decades ago. Wiltshire seems a big ask now.
Home seems immensely preferable given the logistical hazards of being anywhere else. It often has me in it for a start, which gives it a good start over anywhere else. But one doesn't surrender that easily. Maybe I can get to Chichester and back tomorrow for some choice Bach and Schubert.
Otherwise, it's my generation and those we brought forward that loused it up. It takes a long time to irrigate the system and cleanse it of all the malignancy.
Maybe Gareth Southgate should be in charge of everything but let's hope we are all still behind him if he doesn't land the odds of 5/2 about le futbal mondiale. There's plenty went before him that also didn't and did very well for themselves having not done.