Me and Paul Simon Down at the Widnes Railway Station

I came back from Widnes this morning for the outreach session. I noticed a plaque about Paul Simon there, and it turns out that this experience has --- without any intention at all --- given me something in common with Paul Simon! :)

Quoting from the wikipedia entry: "Widnes Railway Station is one of two stations where Paul Simon reputedly composed the song "Homeward Bound", the other being Ditton railway station. It is uncertain exactly where the song was written: in an interview with Paul Zollo for SongTalk Magazine, Art Garfunkel says that Simon wrote the song in a train station "around Manchester"[6] while in an earlier interview for Playboy Magazine Simon himself mentioned the train station was at Liverpool.[7] It is likely, however, that it was written at one of the two Widnes stations during a long wait for a train, as Simon was traveling back from Widnes, where he had been playing.[8] A plaque commemorating this claim to fame is displayed on the Liverpool bound platform of Widnes railway station.[9] Simon is quoted as saying "[i]f you'd ever seen Widnes, then you'd know why I was keen to get back to London as quickly as possible."[10]"

I just bought the song. I don't remember it, but it's really good (not terribly surprising for a Paul Simon song).

Right Track, Wrong Train

Cyndi Lauper certainly got it right when she sang "Right Track, Wrong Train". Because, you know, I did that today. And I only had a choice between North and South. Oops.

Note to self: Train networks are directed.

P.S. There were both very unkind and kind people on the train when I needed to borrow someone's cell phone to let my friends know that I would be an hour or so late. (To the bitch who didn't let me use your phone: You could have just said 'No' instead of lying that your phone was out of batteries and then starting to use it 2 minutes later and thereby rub things in.)

'Ticket to Ride' LARP

As I've discussed on my blog before, LARPing is pretty big in the UK. Well, last night I had the chance to try out a really awesome new LARP on my way home from Durham. This particular LARP is based on the board game Ticket to Ride. In fact, I was having so much fun playing this LARP that I decided to stay up very late playing it! (Well, it was almost all night except for some serendipity.)

The opportunity to join this game came rather unexpectedly. The train that I needed to use to go one stop to Darlington was 21 minutes late, which caused me to miss my connection to King's Cross, and the next available train from Darlington to King's Cross would cause me to miss my train from Paddington to Oxford (note that I was going to need to take the Tube from King's Cross to Paddington). Yesterday, a guy at Oxford said I absolutely could not go on an earlier train even though I was at the station early enough to do it, so I didn't try doing that this time (even though I was rather early). Every single train up until mine was on time, but then I drew the card of epic fail and that was it.

I talked to various people at the station and the strategy I was given was to go from Darlington to the Birmingham New Street station and then take the Bornmouth train to Oxford. (This would then reverse my itinerary from yesterday except for the brief foray into Darlington, which much to my chagrin didn't seem to have "DEI" written anywhere.)

The train ride from Darlington to Birmingham was about 3.5 hours, and I somehow managed to accomplish the whole thing without a banjo on my knee.

I got some food while I was there (one place was still open) although there weren't any garbage cans in the public part of the station "for security reasons." (They also arbitrarily didn't allow people to use one of the seating areas, and don't allow people to use any of the power sockets in the station, though I snuck a bit of recharging and sitting in before I was told to leave that area.)

I figured I was going to have to wait for 6 hours for the first morning train to get my ass over to Oxford. Then I would have to go through my arduous Thursday (3 tutorial sessions, 1 lecture, an extra 20 minute meeting with a student scheduled for tomorrow, and 1 seminar, which I was likely going to end up skipping) without having had any sleep. Ouch! On the bright side, I was going to get some work done --- I had pretty much finished my letters of recommendation for a former SURF student while waiting at the Durham station, so I was going to finish those (but not upload them to appropriate web sites) and finishing refereeing a paper. I also have a book with me, so I was going to read a bunch of that as well.

However, the guy who kicked me out of the special area suggested I go to customer service in case they could do something. Getting kicked out ended up being a blessing in disguise, because apparently the company actually takes their responsibility to get me home quite seriously. (Imagine that! But of course this is rather different from my experiences in the US...) Basically, they hire cabbies to take people home in such occasions, so as I write this, I am in the customer service area waiting for their hired can to take me home to Oxford. While missing the connection (and the associated connection missings based on which trains were subsequently available) was annoying, I'm very pleased with their method of addressing the situation. And it wasn't like I had to convince anybody to do this. (OK, technically I'm still waiting, but it seems like this is going to work out and I am actually going to get some sleep tonight.)

It turns out that the cab driver was an epic failure as well, as at some point he went 20 miles in the wrong direction and had to backtrack and I ended up needing to walk the last half mile home. Hence, I am finishing this blog entry at 3:30 am instead of an hour and change ago. (By the way, Cornmarket street is really creepy at 3am.)

For what it's worth, none of my mad graph theory skillz were helpful for this LARP.

Anyway, goodnight!