Free texts and ringtones

You know it’s going to be a good day when you jump on the train at 11:30 in the morning to find a guy watching East is East on his laptop.

This set a precedent for my mystery shopping trip to Barrow in Furness yesterday, a place I’ve been to twice before and regretted it both times. This time, however, I was determined to make the most of it. So, armed with a wodge of John Donne religious poetry, I set off towards Manchester with a giggling 40-year-old staring at a laptop in the corner of my eye.

The god thing about getting a train around 11 o’clock is that the droll, 9am rush has scuttled away, leaving the freaks and the jobless to man the carriages until 5pm. Today was no different, with a plethora (I HATE that word!) of oddities smattered around me.

The train was clearly full of the popular side of the freak show, however, with a variety of text alerts sounding at regular intervals. My favourite was a Countdown noise from the Channel 4 program spearheaded by the mighty Jeff Sterling. The woman giggled every time it played.

(I have just looked up at the TV and there’s a shot of a man, watching cricket in South Africa, in a paddling pool – absolute genius!)

Along with the Countdown conundrum, a 40-something man with too many tattoos for anyone’s liking insisted on playing half the theme tune of the Godfather before answering his phone, while I heard a noise from down the carriage at one point that sounded like the generic background music of a really old Playstation game. As we pulled into Manchester Piccadilly, an old woman’s phone rang – it was a wolf whistle.

Wandering around Manchester waiting for my next train, I noticed one of the T-Mobile adverts currently doing the rounds that asks the question to a giddy little 15-year-old “What would you do with free texts for life?” This particular one said she would have a mass pillow fight in Manchester. Now luckily for me, O2 has just given me free texts for life (terms and conds. apply) and yet something tells me a Huddersfield-wide mud wrestle won’t be on the horizon. Sadly, I may have free texts but I don’t have the bloody Yellow Pages imprinted in my phone.

Back on another train to Lancaster I was lucky enough to sit down next to some posh schoolboys. They had all the credentials: smart blazer and tie done up, polished shoes, pronounced their ‘t’s. One went a little bit too far however, and brought out of his satchel a flask of coffee… I think I would have been disowned at school if I had done that.

These chums quickly left the train and I was once again alone until an old lady sat opposite me. She looked utterly delighted at being on a train. Her happiness took a slight turn however as the train stopped in a tunnel. The woman nervously looked out of the window: darkness. So what did she do? She looked out of the other window just to make sure. I don’t know what she was expecting to find. Tunnels are generally symmetrical in build.

(It’s just started snowing outside! On a side note – Yahoo! news today ran with the headline ‘Prepare for treacherous weather’. Clearly the guy who wrote it was from London, as the report went on to state how ‘10cm of snow could fall this weekend.’ No way! Ten entire centimetres? Get the snow tyres out Joan.)

Anyway, I got to Roose (just outside Barrow) at a decent time, did my shop, and realised I had two hours to burn. So, I headed off – like I did about three months ago – into Roose town centre. The centre consisted of a Co-op, car wash and Post Office. However, it also had a small independent pharmacy. I can just imagine this is the kind of place someone would go out of their way to, in order to buy condoms or pile cream. Avoid the embarrassment of being recognised by travelling to the corner of the known world – Roose.

My trip back was fairly uneventful. A woman was breast feeding her 4-year-old child, which was a bit disturbing, and a rather fat man boarded the train holding two boxes of 10x double chocolate fudge muffins (he’s gonna have a wild night I thought). That was it really. I got back to Huddersfield at 7:30 to find a drunk man talking to the statue of Harold Wilson. It wasn’t much of a conversation to be honest.