A month or so ago, my computer died, making a metallic death-clink as I tried to turn it on.
Buying a new (secondhand) pc was the easy bit; it was setting it up that took time. The email accounts with their imap settings and ports and what not, the custom files and shortcuts that I use on my text editor (which has never taken to Linux and may have to be ditched, as the cursor seems to be quite skittish), the settings for uploading everything -- and many other things -- had to be copied over from an older computer. Anyway, I'm back, and pissing me pants.
I am now working (again) as a trolley dolly on the trains. One day recently, I was on a train which should not have been in use, since it had no toilets working. About two hours short of my depot, I started feeling a desire, then an urge, to piss. I was standing with my trolley in one of the door entrances, a bit like the arrangement on tube trains. It's a public place where all can see you.
A well-meaning guard came over for a chat. I was in an agony of bladder-control, and as he spoke, I could hear a pitter-patter of piss passing down my trouser leg and onto the floor. Neither he nor any passenger gave any indication of noticing the urinating trolley dolly. When he left I rubbed it with my foot, to spread it out to evaporate. Despite this controlled release, I was still desperate for a full opening.
At my home station, straining still, I did a scissored walk to the lift to get my trolley over to the other platform. I was just about to close the door on the lift when a young couple came smilingly in with their suitcases, reasonably demanding conversation. My face was as strained as my voice, and the piss came down my leg again, re-soaking my trousers. I had to walk with them over to the other lift to get down onto our mutually desired platform. In there, there was, for a reason I hoped they'd blame on the lift's previous occupant, a strong smell of incontinent tramp.
I got into the depot and to my relief, no-one was around. I stripped off my sodden trousers, pants, socks, and put them under the hand dryer for many minutes. Still clinglingly wet, I put my trousers back on and went to put my trolley away and to do the admin. To my dismay, there was a fellow steward parking his. I foolishly said that I'd got caught in a shower, and tried to keep my scented lower half away from him.
On the train home to Bristol, I found a newspaper and sat on it, to minimise transmission of my piss to the seat.
The following day, without me raising the subject, nor having mentioned anything of this to anyone, a guard told me of a female trolley dolly who experienced the same pressing exigency, again on a train with no toilets. She simply said that she was getting off at the next station, and left her trolley to its fate, to be collected later. Hers is a model of confident bladder management that I will emulate in future.
A happier time on the railway was spent as the most valuable six square inch piece of plastic I own made its outstanding debut the other week, getting me up to Lancaster in order to see my youngest off to her university in Brittany, where she'll spend her year abroad as part of her degree in French. Flashing my train pass, I was told to sit in first class, escaping the problem family-cum-refugee camp conditions in second. I drank my cider in spacious, privileged peace.
On the last leg, from Manchester, I sat with two twentysomething women, and a man whom I couldn't help staring at, trying to force my brain to put some detail on our mutual recognition. Eventually we worked out that we were a couple of years apart in the same secondary school. The girls were lively in a somewhat forced way, not as drunk as they were pretending to be, and trying to make up for the missing alcohol with bodily animation. They insisted on sharing their music, wiring us up, an earbud each, into their phones.
Down my local, there were mutterings in the ranks as a pint of bitter had gone up to £2.65. A man started showing me clips of crashes from a motocross event. He told me that modern motocross jackets inflate upon a crash, which is why riders seem to bounce across the course.
Back in Bristol, there's a cheque from HMRC for six hundred pounds as a tax rebate. Unfortunately, I also received a series of letters, or rather, Notices of Enforcement, saying that I still owe six grand in Council Tax, from up to nine years ago. It's not quite that amount -- I was in Kazakhstan and elsewhere in the UK for some of the time. If they start nagging, there's the magic wand of a Debt Relief Order which should wave the bailiffs away. I've started locking my door at all times though.
