Shopathon

Trowbridge train station on a Saturday morning is pretty busy. Mind you, if you lived in Trowbridge, you’d be looking for a quick way out. This is the town of roundabouts…clearly designed by someone who was a fan of the Hampton Court Maze chapter in Three Men in a Boat, this is a cunning ploy to bring you back to where you started from. Still, at least attendance at this station has moved on from the days when the platform was adjacent to Bowyers sausage and pie factory: no longer is the wait accompanied by the squeals of pigs whose throats have just been sliced or the over-riding stench of death. No more are we gagged by the smell of hops brewing over at Ushers.


An excuse for a train arrives: three carriages, which are insufficient given that there is football at Bristol and rugby at Bath today. It’s impossible to get a seat together so I sit next to a woman who has a number of tissues stuffed in each ear.

I’ve been like this since Yeovil, she says. That man two seats behind is driving me mad.

I don’t know what man she’s talking about because all I can hear is Barbara who is behind me, having forced a youngster out of his seat by looking aged. So, there are some advantages to being in our sixtieth year. She’s engaged the woman next to her in conversation. This poor trapped being, it seems, started out on this torturous journey from her home in Poole. That would be her home which is in the next road to my home. Weird.

Meanwhile, the woman next to my seat starts telling me about the play they’re all going to see at the Theatre Royal to celebrate her sister’s birthday.

Who is in it I ask?
Pardon?
Who’s in the play I try again?
I was talking to my son she said. Rather abruptly, I thought as I looked round for said offspring; who turned out to be three seats in front.
………………………………………….

We make the mistake of going into Debenhams. Barbara says we’re just having a quick look at the shoes, then going for coffee. An hour later, she is still missing in action. During this time, I have tried on a number of garments, travelled to the top floor to use the facilities, travelled back down again and outside into the pouring rain where I had a lengthy conversation with someone, went to Sainsburys and bought some cigarettes, had a little walk and smoked a cigarette, went back into Debenhams and searched all the floors and ended up at the make-up counter.

Excuse me. Do you have a means of locating lost people?
A message is relayed over the intercom generally used for absent children and Barbara instantly appears clutching her newly purchased shoes.

I saw you once she says. You were going up an escalator.

Now she has to change the shoes she only bought twenty minutes ago because they don’t match the bag she hasn’t yet bought. I, meanwhile, have bought a very nice orange top that I don’t have anything to go with. Yet.

And so it continues. For some considerable time. At one point, I lost her again in M & S but I did at least receive a phone call to say she was depressed.

There are no bras to fit me she cried.
Get a grip woman; this is M & S. They have bras for everyone.
Oh. Just spotted a yellow one. I’ll call you back.

I bought another orange top. Still nothing to wear it with though. Yet,.
Hours later, we trudge back to the train station which necessitates a detour back through Debenhams.

Oh look she says. There’s an orange top you haven’t bought yet.
…………………………………………….

There are about 400 rugby fans on the platform. At least 375 of them are drunk. Reader, trust me: this is not an exaggeration. One man has located an ornamental tree and is wearing the bush part on his head like a green afro coiffure. Surely they’ll put on more than three carriages for the journey back? Wrong.

As many as possible from this throng try to get aboard and we wave at the 250 left at the station. Every time we reach a stop, there is a cry of ‘go, go, go’ as twenty five drunks disembark in order to let two people off. Barbara swings her bag round and it lifts the skirt of a woman crushed in the aisle. The woman with her skirt now tucked in her underwear turns immediately to slap the face of a man busily involved with a hip flask. It’s carnage. It’s hilarious.

When we leave this train, eight glorious hours will have passed since we first climbed aboard this morning.