Train strain

Bank holiday Saturday afternoon and I’m standing in a jam-packed railway carriage bound for Cardiff in Wales. If I lift my head, my face is in my nearest neighbour’s face, so I’m contemplating my feet. A Welsh woman somewhere is holding a long and intimate telephone conversation in a voice loud enough for all in the carriage to follow it. ‘My little one-stop shop? Is that what he called me? I’ll kill him. If I’m his little one-stop shop, then he’s Kwik Fit — and you can tell him I said that.’

I’m going to Cardiff to look at a Citroën Picasso. I’ve just looked over one at Southampton, but it wasn’t any good. The advert had more or less said that the car had been previously driven by a nervous nun and was as good as new, if not better. But it was a shed. There were fag burns on the seats, the electric mirrors weren’t working, the driver’s electric window ditto, and the odometer had obviously been tampered with. The previous keeper had left a couple of his CDs in the car: Motorhead’s Ace of Spades and Wake Up Dead by the US thrash band Megadeth. So the gearbox was probably shot as well. And although the fortunes of the British National Party are presently in the ascendant, I’m not sure I’m quite ready yet to drive around in a car with the letters BNP on the licence plate. ‘I’m open to offers,’ said the seller, sensing my disappointment. ‘I’ll give you a fiver to drive me back to the station,’ I said.

Both the Southampton and the Cardiff Citroën Picassos I’d seen advertised in last week’s edition of the Auto Trader. You can catch a train from Southampton to Cardiff — changing just once at Romsey — so the journey was simpler than I imagined.