Down South – Day 1

Last Easter I had a lovely 5-day trip to Scotland and the Shetlands doing mystery shops. I stayed overnight at a B&B, ate readily prepared supermarket meals, and became best friends with my ipod.

Today, a semi déjà vu kicked in, as I set off on my way to Hampshire (which is one of those places below London which isn’t Dover or France). I packed my big bag full of poetry, a pork pie, a laptop and a brand spanking new volume of Macbeth, and set off down to Leeds station to catch a speed demon down to London Kings Cross (spelt Kings X on the train timetable, which I took five minutes to realise).

I was heading to a town called Alton. When doing some B&B booking yesterday I googled (definitely a verb) ‘Alton B&Bs’, and clicked on the first link. At the top of this page, even before the list of possible Alton hotels, there was a flashing sign saying ‘THIS IS NOT ALTON TOWERS!’ This made me chuckle.

Anyway, to get to Alton you have to get a train from Waterloo Station. To get to Waterloo Station you have to wander around the labyrinth of the Underground looking for possible lines that aren’t under maintenance work. I thought I did quite well: only got lot twice!

Eventually I ended up at Alton train station, where a steam train was sat puffing away on the opposite platform. Crossing over to have a sneak peek at this noisy machine, I accidentally slipped back through time about 90 years. There I stood, staring at a green steam train, in a perfectly painted, maintained and flower-bedded platform. A hidden platform behind the usual dross concrete sties, this place was a picturesque idyll; the perfect scene for a woman with a handkerchief dabbing her eyes awaiting her hero from the train, with smoke billowing so that he walks out of seemingly nowhere in a terribly romantic scene from the 1940s that makes you wonder if the aisles of theatre halls of that era were fitted with vomit drainage systems.

I left the station, (handkerchief still in pocket) and set off for another town called Alresford. Here I made possibly one of the biggest cock-ups of my illustrious mystery shopping career. Having bought my selected items from my store, I left without picking up my receipt. I realised this 15 minutes after leaving the store, and so returned. I had the struggle of asking for my receipt, making up the excuse that I needed to keep track of my finances without letting loose that I was in fact a mystery shopper, and managed to convince one of the staff members to rummage through a bin of receipts until he found mine.

With that relief I left Alresford and headed to my final stop, a hamlet called Four Marks. Before this though, I was made to sit in a bus shelter next to two neanderthal girls who would have thought salad dressing was funny. They were sat, watching cars go past, saying if they would like the car or not. Not exactly annoying maybe, but when you take into account they were saying it in the ‘I want that one’ and ‘I don’t like it’ voice of Andy the wheelchair man off Little Britain, and giggling each time, it seriously got to me.

The giggling continued until I got on the bus, where my ipod decided that it didn’t want to be my friend anymore. For no reason whatsoever, my earplugs died. I changed plug (I can only use one ear obviously) and it worked, barely. So, sitting in silence on the bus, I turned to see the giggling mongoloids fixed on the road, looking for other cars.

Gladly I got off the bus, and now find myself sat in my room of a B&B looking at the pub menu. I think I need a pint…