Lucy Mangan
Why the pregnancy police are best ignored
Ihave a new book to promote (so saying – it’s called Bookworm: a Memoir of Childhood Reading) and am thus about to embark on a summer of train travel as I criss-cross the country to talk at various literary festivals. It’s going to be heaven. Not the speaking – that terrifies me, although it’s always lovely in the end – but the travelling.
Because – GET THIS – someone else does all the booking. Instead of weeping tears of blood trying to buy tickets on a website set up by the award-losing design team of Messrs Escher, Mobius and Due-to-a-technical-fault-we-plan-on-fixing-sometime-never-you-cannot-have-this-ticket, you just… get on the train. With tickets someone has sent to your phone.
Train travel without the admin is the dream. The only way it could be better is if they sent the actor Tobias Menzies as your escort. All you have to do is fling a few clothes into a Gladstone bag and enough books to see you through six uninterrupted hours of quiet-coached bliss and sit down.
Every couple of hours the tea trolley arrives, which creates the exact level of excitement at which the British psyche best operates. A ripple of communal happiness – shy smiles exchanged as sugar sachets are rent and tipped – swells and dissipates, leaving everyone in solitary contentment once more.
You arrive rested and having not made several new friends along the way. Thank you, whoever is weeping the tears of blood on my behalf. Thank you from the bottom of my heart and reinvigorated soul.