Signal Failure?

He really is a slow learner! There was absolute silence all day yesterday, no texts, no phone calls, nothing. I went to bed at a few minutes to midnight and I was sound asleep when the phone rang. It was Robbie, totally oblivious of the time. I had a moan about the lack of contact and he said that there is no signal downstairs, but higher up in the building he can get a signal. On a believability scale that is poor, so poor that it is almost Network Rail rail standard! I was too sleepy to want to talk much especially when there was a danger of straying onto the subject of trains at any moment. I ended the conversation and settled down to sleep again with a crazy image in my mind of all the people at Robbie's meeting wandering around waving their phones in the air trying to get a signal!

Not having Robbie around has it's compensations, it is much quieter and I get to do as I like. I had liver and bacon yesterday, it is my favourite meal but I hardly ever have it because Robbie doesn't like it. I also got two extra hours in bed this morning, I didn't need to get up until 7am, I could get used to that!

Mystery Men

Robbie was at work until late in the evening yesterday because he had to work from home in the morning while waiting for the Sky repair man to come and replace the sky box. We had no TV over Easter because the sky box turned up its toes, I didn't miss it that much but certain other people were having withdrawal symptoms. I am fairly happy as long as I have my radio, I can't survive without Radio 4. The Sky man turned up eventually and everything is back in working order, so when Robbie got home last night he parked himself in front of the TV and watched junk until 1.30am.

Talking of Radio 4 it was responsible for a serious rise in my blood pressure yesterday. The You and Yours program had a 'phone in' about rail travel, George Muir from ATOC, Nigel Harris from Rail magazine, Tom Windsor a previous rail regulator and the dreaded Iain Coucher from Network Rail were all there to answer questions. The first three sounded sensible and plausible, but yet again Iain Coucher sounded totally insincere and complacent. Someone who rang in had been prevented from getting to work that morning because of an engineering overrun at Shenfield. He did his usual splutter and stutter, then explained that the planned engineering work to work on signals had been completed on time but it just so happened that the very next signal to where they were working developed an unrelated fault and this caused the delay. Whatever! When Sam was younger he always blamed the squirrels for whatever he had done wrong, he was very convincing, but that didn't mean I believed him. The calls to the program were overwhelmingly critical, the only company to receive any praise was Virgin; whatever you think about their service you have to admire their PR!

I overheard Robbie making a series of work calls during the morning, he kept talking about Craig and Timmy and I began to wonder who they were, a gay couple perhaps? Did Robbie have a secret life? Eventually I asked about them as I hadn't heard him mention either of them before. It turned out that he was actually referring to a place, Craigentinny nr Edinburgh, apparently it is the place where the trains 'go to bed'.

East Anglian Daily Times

Monday Morning Blues 21.01.08

Monday mornings seem to crop up far too frequently. This morning found me driving towards Kettering at just after 6am to get Emily back to Leicester in time for a 9am lecture. Robbie decided to travel to work via Leicester too, he says he likes a bit of variety in his life, but really I think he just wanted to be sure that Emily was OK. I got them to Kettering station in plenty of time, but there they stayed until just after 7.30am because a signalling problem was causing long delays. Emily still got to her lecture on time, but if Robbie's colleagues hoped for a peaceful morning without him they were doubly disappointed, he wasn't late in the end, and when he got there one of his colleagues made a serious error of judgement - he asked what Robbie did at the weekend! Apparently Robbie was still talking several hours later! It could have been worse, he could have worn that dreadful shirt. He wore it on Saturday, I didn't notice at first because he wore his waxed jacket done up tightly under his chin so that I couldn't see his shirt. This made him look rather like a character from that dreadful program that he likes so much - Kenny from South Park. The shirt looked every bit as bad as I had feared and I was cross with him for wearing it in public. Maybe he was wearing it for protection - to repel the Wild Woman, if so it worked! Come to think of it, it could well have been Robbie's shirt that distracted the lorry driver and caused the bridge bash on Saturday. He loves it, but I think it will look better after a mixed wash accident!!