“Yeah so what you need to do,” he sighed from behind the plastic screen, “…is take the 7:27 to Bristol via Didcot, then catch the X32 or X33 rail replacement bus that’ll take you to Oxford. Sorry mate. It’s the only way. Viaduct collapse. Yeah next please?”
I sighed too. I imagined an old Victorian viaduct, one arch given way to a gap for cold grey sky. I pictured a mound of crumbling bricks bending and twisting the rails and sleepers into weird, cruel angles, and an old man in a flat cap scratching his head and saying something like, “I ‘ent seen nuffing quite like this n’all me years,” while serious men in Network Rail high-vis jackets and hard hats dart around the mess.
That’s what I imagined. What I realised, even before the fleeced man behind the information desk had finished explaining, was that I wouldn’t get the Bristol train and venture onto the dreaded rail replacement bus service. The line would not be fixed by the evening - my journey home would, if anything, be worse. I was abandoning that plan and working from home.
It’s not a Victorian viaduct, at least not the handsome red-bricked kind I was imagining. I googled it. It’s a two-arched iron bridge over the Thames. The pillars are bricked, but the bridge itself is rusty grey, a kind of British Rail bridge circa 1976, now marked with decades of faded graffiti and river slime. And it’s not collapsed - it looks like it just moved a bit, and the surveyors are worried about it. It’s probably down to all that rain we’ve been having.
So no Oxford for me today. Instead I got the enormous privilege of hunting for the Post Office Warehouse in my lunch break. Now, I’ve been there and I still don’t know where it is. Nevertheless they were holding a parcel I missed last week and got into trouble for not receiving.
I don’t know if it’s like Brigadoon or something, but the Post Office Warehouse is just never where you think it is. I followed the sat nav, parked up and scanned my eyes across the industrial state I was in. Plumbing and heating, mechanics, Land Rover specialists, burly men carrying boxes, the sound of a welder somewhere, a distant shout, the smell of engine oil on the breeze. The car park was packed with white vans. No sign of the Post Office Warehouse.
It’s things like this that get me really stressed out. I phoned Sammy. She knew where it was. I was in a flap.
“I just wish I were the person who could treat everything as some sort of fun adventure,” I said to myself on the way back to the car. Instead I just get into a bucket of stress and panic about getting lost, and I really don’t like it. It was all fine, but I’d run out of time for lunch and came back home to my laptop.
On the way home, I was driving and remembering what learning to drive was like back in the 90s. I used to go to pieces if I made a mistake, and then made a dozen more in most lessons. My instructor once asked me what I was playing at and called me something rude. He wasn’t a great instructor. But that is how I feel often these days - one small mistake and I lose confidence in myself.
“Right mess, in’t it?” says the old man, still observing. “Still, bridge like this - ’n, you chaps’ll have it back op in nah time ’tall, eh.” He laughs at the men in hard hats while they set up instruments and exchange furtive glances.
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