The Most Pointless Journeys of My Life
Created | Updated Mar 24, 2005
I'm sure everyone has had their fair share of pointless journeys, but at the same time I'm convinced that no-one else in the world has them quite as often as I do. Ironically enough, writing an article about each of these journeys does in fact give them a purpose, albeit a simple and previously unintended one.
I used to be terrible at planning things, and so I used to rely on others to come up with good ideas. The problem with not being able to plan things is that you don't know a good plan from a bad one.
Warren Street to Euston via Guildford
The concept of leaving an extremely large place full of shops to go to a markedly smaller place with less shops, in order to go shopping, is one that still causes me a great deal of confusion. I can only assume this has something to do with my enduring dislike of clothes shopping.
I had just finished some particularly difficult exams, and was feeling rather unhappy with the prospect of sitting in my room revising for the reprise the next day. I was therefore genuinely overjoyed when I got a phone call from my girlfriend asking me if I wanted to go to Guildford with a couple of friends. We met up at Warren Street underground station and headed off to Waterloo 'International' station. This struck me as rather odd, as Guildford is barely outside London, let alone international...
The train to Guildford wasn't leaving for another half an hour, and so we decided to go to 'Burger King'. It was busy, and so I waited as each of my friends ordered a 'whopper' while I tried not to snigger too loudly. The time eventually came to get on the train, and it was at this point we realised we had no tomato sauce. We sat on the train for ten minutes before it left without any of us running off to get the aforementioned condiment, as we were all paranoid that we'd get left behind. So we ate our chips without sauce.
When we got to Guildford, we headed off towards the shopping centre. When we got there, the actual planning began. 'So what time are we getting the train back again?' I asked, expecting the answer to be in hours, or perhaps even days. After a quick discussion, the answer 'fifteen minutes' was produced. Trust me to point out that the station was now ten minutes away in a westerly direction...
After some frantic shopping, or standing around doing very little (you can guess which I was doing), we had to run back to the station to catch the train. As we ran over the footbridge, I nearly collided with a bloke pulling a rather large suitcase, but surprisingly he moved out of my way and yelled 'go for it!' as a means of encouraging me not to miss the train. I didn't feel it was appropriate to stop and explain to him that the other members of my party were lagging about half a mile behind me.
To my amazement, and to a certain extent relief, we caught the train back to London. I eventually ended up at Euston station via the Northern line, having acheived nothing but a slight increase in my level of fitness at the cost of a rail ticket to Guildford. Still, it's cheaper than joining a gym I suppose.
The Most Pointless Journeys of My Life Archive
