At Liverpool Street I walked to Coach A, at the front of the 10:30 'one' service to Norwich, to get an empty table with a a forward-facing window seat.
There's only one other person in the carriage.
Two Deutche Bank colleagues get on the train. The lady asks the man which seat he wants. He replies:
'I always sit with my back to the train. Ever since I was in that train crash.'
A chill goes through the carriage.
I smile at the man as if to say: 'Go on, tell us your story'. He continued to expain to his colleague, possibly his diary secretary, that in 1986 ('you probably weren't alive!') he was at the rear of a train passing through Stafford which crashed on a crossing. The crossing had always given priority to trains from London, but one day they changed it, and they didn't tell the driver, and by the time he realised, it was too late.
The lady sitting opposite him had been flung into the table ('Where you're sitting') and a woman in the toilet came out covered in blood. Three carriages were on top of each other when he got off of the train.
It was quite funny how detatched the man seemed as he recounted his story. I suppose he's had twenty years to mull it over.
Interestingly, no one else in Coach A, myself included, changed seats. I guess we all felt a bit too self-conscious.
You have to balance the increased chance of death with the desire to have a nice view.
It's a bit like a Larry David anecdote I heard once:
"I did once try and stop a woman who was about to get hit by a car. I screamed out, 'Watch out!' And she said, 'Don't you tell me what to do!' I tried to save her life and she screamed at me. That's all it took, I got out of the 'nice' business at that point."
only a bit, though.
Here's a picture of the train crash:
Further info about the accident can be found here.
I arrived at the venue in Ipswich to find my face plastered all over it:
(Click to Enlarge)
It was mildly unsettling, a bit like in that episode of I'm Alan Partridge when Alan walks into his obsessive fan's living room to find it covered in pictures of himself.
On the plus side, they'd stretched my face vertically, which made me look rather svelte.
(a method used in the video for "Promise of a New Day" by Paula Abdul which employed anamorphic lens compression to stretch images of her vertically on the screen, thereby making her appear taller and thinner.)
Let me assure you that such jiggery-pokery is not part of my technical rider. In fact I often supply venues with pictures of me looking quite ugly, so that when people come to the show they're impressed by how fit I look in comparison.
Tricks of the trade.
No comments:
Post a Comment