Ridiculous

This morning there was a smattering of snow - as I left the house with Chrissi, we were delighted and amused by this. Enough to cause things to look pretty, not sufficient to cause problems.

Or so I thought.

My journey was problem-free until I reached Woking. As the train approached, it stopped just outside, as it always does to allow the previous train to leave the platform. Then it stayed stopped. For an hour. There had been breakdowns at Woking on both the fast and slow lines downstream, so no trains could move anywhere. We had little choice but to wait for them to clear one of the trains away and move us into the station.

At this point it wasn't a matter of simply resuming my journey - there was too much of a backlog. So another 40 minutes of waiting until the train I needed to catch arrived. The net result was that I was at work at a little after 10 instead of around a quarter to nine as usual.

Irritatingly, this was not the end of my travel hassle. On the return journey my train was delayed by 20 minutes, meaning that it didn't catch any of the connections; to add further irritation the next set of trains were also delayed, meaning that I waited at Woking for 40 minutes for the second time that day for a new train to arrive (at least this time I was able to wait in the warmer waiting room as opposed to on the cold platform). I eventually made it back into Surbiton at 7:35, nearly an hour after my normal time.

To say the least, I wasn't best pleased. It wasn't the best use of my time, and as I'd annoyingly forgotten my phone charger I used up most of the battery in the morning and didn't have enough phone battery left to entertain myself on my return journey. I resorted to staring moodily out of the window, which helped to pass the time but could have been better!