AN ADVENTURE WITH THE GARRULOUS FIVE

It was the first time I’d been to Dundee for seven weeks. I was a little nervous about seeing them all again – it had been such a long time. I thought I might have been in for a quiet train journey. I wasn’t. An Asian lady who looked not unlike Sreesanth, the Indian swing bowler, sat diagonally opposite me at my table. She started to read Forty Hadith Qodsi , so that looked like it took care of her for the duration. She kept on her red woollen gloves, although the train was by no means cold. A party of five garrulous young women sat behind me, excitedly discussing their day out. I took them to be university types on their way to a lecture or conference, though one or two of them looked decidedly like mature students to me.
Dawn was scratching the sky as we pulled out of Waverley. At Haymarket, a burly Chinese man sat next to me. He had a toilet brush for hair and a 16-25 railcard. He looked about 38. He had a fistful of paper Powerpoint handouts and he laid down on the table a brightly coloured scarf that would not have looked out of place around the neck of Rupert the Bear. He was en route to a strategic accounting workshop in Aberdeen. He was to discuss the key implications of Whittington’s four perspectives of strategy for the design and use of management accounting systems. I bet he wished Whittington had taken up plumbing or cake-making instead. The Chinese chap had a female companion who was obliged to sit in another seat so, as soon as we reached Kircaldy, he was off to sit with her in two vacant seats whilst I heaved a sigh of relief. He was taking up rather too much of the seat cushion and armrest for my taste.
As day broke, I noticed the clear sky, save for a bandage of cloud in the far distance. The coffee was late. At least it wasn’t served by a French person. This one was Latvian, Estonian or Lithuanian, and the hostess, a most pretty girl, had a surname so full of consonants she would have scored over sixty on a Scrabble Board. What she did not have, however, were any sweeteners, or serviettes. I did manage to get a receipt, by flourishing my pad and pen vigorously and pointing to the coins in my change. It was like Charades for a couple of minutes. The Garrulous Five were discussing essays. “I’ve already exceeded my 20,000-word limit”, a posh English one said.
The Asian woman answered her mobile phone and I grinned as she was immediately cut off because we entered a tunnel. I thanked Heaven once again for the ‘cut and cover’principle employed by all the early railway companies.
The Garrulous Five were discussing marketing. “It’s not a true outlook using questionnaires,” observed one of the mature students. “Questionnaires aren’t, like, the best thing for observation,” replied a very much younger student. “She’s not bothered about results, more the methodology used,” said the posh English student, definitively.
As we pushed inland, a thick mist, an amorphous, ethereal mass of ghostly tumbleweed rolled over the sodden landscape, giving the appearance of an over-exposed photograph. Momentarily, I felt like Ichabod Crane in Sleepy Hollow.
As we passed through Cupar, my mind wandered back to old Fred, one of my staff in an earlier incarnation, who commuted from there to Edinburgh every day for years in an old, clapped-out Fiat Panda. He had virtually to rebuild the engine every lunchtime so that he could stagger home again each night.
An attractive young blonde woman in a herringbone coat sat looking out of the window and listening to her i-pod, if it was not indeed an i-pad. She looked pensive, reflective, her full lips drawn together into an unhappy pout. I thought perhaps a broken romance. I never found out, for she disembarked at Leuchars, at the same time as a pensioner in what looked like an orange jump-suit and a back-packer with the strange outward appearance of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.
As we rolled over the rusty Tay Bridge, the Garrulous Five were still hard at it. They had moved onto something called a marketing paradigm. “If you’re talking about your model, somebody’s vision statements and your targets, that’s quite a lot”, observed the oldest of the mature students, who had been relatively quiet hitherto. “Just call it ‘goals’", said the definitive Englishwoman, “you don’t have to show evidence of your achievements.”
That seemed to be the last word on the subject, so I stepped off the train with my knowledge greatly enhanced.