OUT MARYLEBONE WAY

I hadn’t been to London for a couple of years, so, when I received the opportunity to go and chair a meeting there last Monday, I leaped at the chance.  I caught the Sunday night sleeper from Waverley.  The ticket price was £256 and that was second-class.  I found that the railway company still offered the same old sleeper compartment, a tiny, tatty, dog-eared cabin-trunk with scarcely enough room to hold a séance.  I had taken the precaution of booking a single-occupancy compartment, which meant I was spared sharing the cabin with a stranger who  smelled of garlic and onions and snored like ‘Puffing Billy.’  

There are two berths in a sleeper compartment.  If you buy a first-class ticket, they put the upper bunk back into its nacelle in the wall.  If you have a second-class ticket, they punish you by leaving it where it is, locked in place with an allen-key - as immovable as one of Paolozzi’s statues, so you are unable to sit on the lower berth unless you have the physical deformities of a Quasimodo.  

I first used the sleeper back in the late eighties, before First Scotrail got their hands on it.  In those days, you received a natty little bedtime pack when you embarked.  This contained a toothbrush, toothpaste, a flannel, a comb and a foot-mat, which you unfolded, placed on the normally dirty carpet, which protected your bare feet from catching tinia pedis and other unspecified fungal diseases.  These useful artifacts were supplied in a neat little string-pull cloth bag in a discreet shade of blue bearing the name of the then railway company, which might well have been the Great North-Eastern Railway.   Now?  Nothing. Not so much as a piece of dental floss. 

In the morning, you used to get a passable breakfast – a tub of orange juice, a small pack of cereal, a breakfast bar and a pot of tea.  Now, the hatchet-faced woman attendant with hair that looked as if it had been spun on a lathe handed me a cardboard beaker of hot water, a tea-bag and a piece of shortbread that was the size of square of chocolate and tasted like ship’s tack.  Changed days, indeed, and not for the better. In retaliation, I didn’t leave a tip and I left all the sheets in a ruffled state instead of re-making the bed, which I would normally have done.  

I stepped onto the platform at Euston Station at ten past seven in the morning. I had three hours to kill before the meeting even started.  I decided to walk.  It was pitch-dark as I wandered along the Marylebone Road, past Madame Tussaud’s and the base of Baker Street, the home of the Great Detective, until I reached the Edgware Road, where I headed north towards Marble Arch.  I found Seymour Street, the venue, with little difficulty.  It was a cricket-ball’s throw from the end of Oxford Street.  

A pink and glorious sky was starting up as I looked for a breakfast emporium.  I could find only Kentucky Fried Chicken so I went in and ordered a breakfast platter and a coffee.  A young Asian girl handed me a flat box which, when I opened it, contained some fragments of scrambled egg that looked like a culture, a triangular hash brown so hard I almost fractured the plastic fork with which I was supplied, a postage-stamp of leathery bacon and two minuscule sausages that were more black than brown.  I consigned the whole lot to the dustbin, and drank the coffee, which was passable.  

The meeting went off reasonably well.  My colleagues had plenty to say.   Some of it even made sense.  I felt I chaired the meeting quite well, even if my only contribution was to remind them that, once again, they had wandered miles off the subject and could they please get back to the agenda? 

At half-past two I was disgorged onto Seymour Street and heading east for the ragbag of a station that is King’s Cross.  The pink and promising morning had turned into rain in copious quantities, and I received quite a soaking.  I stopped by to look into the wonderful gothic fantasy that is St Pancras Station.  I was dismayed that hanging down from the trusses of that remarkable train shed roof were five huge, contiguous rings designed to announce the London Olympics.  They looked cheap and meretricious.  I wasn’t too enamoured either with the giant statue at the station entrance which represented two people in a passionate embrace as they bid one another adieu.  A young couple were replicating that at the statue’s foot and I set my cap at them in sexagenarian disapproval.  Jealousy, probably.  

I strolled reluctantly into King’s Cross and onto the 16:00 to Inverness.  I had booked a seat facing the direction of travel, on the right hand side of the carriage, in the Quiet coach, in a pair of seats.  The travel company must have had an impish sense of humour, for I received none of these things. Instead I sat back to the engine in a table four opposite a morose middle-aged couple travelling to Arbroath.  I didn’t even know any of the main line trains stopped there.   I wasn’t going to have 4 ½ hours of their company, especially as I know nothing at all about kippers and the ‘Mallard’ table seats are excruciatingly uncomfortable, so I looked to swap seats.  Amazingly, in the unreserved portion of the train, there was hardly anyone seated, so I nabbed a comfortable seat to myself, facing the direction of travel, etc. etc. - all the things the travel company and my £256 were unable to achieve. 

When I finally arrived home at just after nine-thirty in the evening, I wondered what form of madness had dragged me over 900 miles in a single day to tell people to stick to the agenda.  I can only think it was the lure of Marylebone that was so difficult to resist – it certainly wasn’t to do with any sense of self-worth or self-gratification.