*Yawn* I am very tired after an early start. I had my second exam this morning, you see - Hindi 1. Ouch. Not good, really, there was a lot I didn't understand, a lot I didn't know, a lot of guesswork and a lot of reading for gist. It was, yes, a nice challenge but bullshitting in Hindi is much much harder for me than bullshitting in English and I got stuck and fed up quite quickly. To be honest, it was quite boring on the whole really. I've never walked out of an exam early before - but I did today. I didn't even bother to have a silly, pathetic joke or write any funny words, I just got out of there. Not very early, I might add, I was there for over 2 and a half hours, but a reasonable amount of that was daydreaming.
So, anyway, I made sure I got up nice and early which, just like on Thursday, turned out to be a pretty good call. Having got up early I made rather a meal of getting out of the house - I was tired and spent a lot of time in the shower. Eventually I did get out of the house and arrived on a platform where it was slightly mizzly. I didn't have a very long wait for the WER through train which arrived in Coded. She was good, too, very nice stops, although nicer at platforms, I would say, than before blocks with a maximum safe speed of 0, i.e. blocks transmitting a stop code. Or, to put it another way, she stopped a little more gently at platforms than at red signals and block marker boards, but hey. Also, whoever was on the front of my Uxbridge this morning was superb - I've never known an S stock to be driven that well.
Anyway the WER was presumably fresh out of the depot and it took me round through WOO - where there was a train in the sidings - and on to SNA. Here we got a platforms and hold call due to a faulty train a BEG westbound. Well, better there than LEY I suppose and the wait was not too long so I'm guessing they got it going one way or another. On the subject of the one that went defective at LEY, Aslef shrugged has confirmed that it did reverse at BEG and head back east to the depot.
Anyway, sadly, today's faulty train did still have an impact on our journey. The whole westbound road was very congested. We were cleared out of platform 2, but only as far as LES 5752 (the signal in front of the bridge carrying GOBLIN), where we were held for the train from platform 1. It was stationary as we drew alongside it but pulled away just as we were coming to a halt. Before long we also had a clear signal but were held for a second time just outside LEY on the west. 3 times we came to a stop between STR and MIE and I stopped counting properly after that, but I'm pretty sure we stopped at least once between MIE and BEG and at least twice on the approach to LIS.
Hey, it's just congestion, like any other congestion. Not much you can do really when the faulty train's already on its way. You could turn a few short, but with the headways, you'd only delay the service even more. If you start tipping out trains and putting them up sidings not only do you reduce the number of trains and start having everything in the wrong place, but it also delays trains behind while you do it. A few might have been terminated at more convenient locations - WHC, LOU and NOA spring to mind and maybe a train or two was cancelled out of the depot or put away. I have no idea, but I doubt they bothered with any of that. No, all you can really do is try and recover the service, regulate the service, maybe turn one or two slightly earlier or shorten a couple of trips (turn a NOR into a NOA or make a few WERs into EABs). Anyway, not a big deal, not a big deal at all, even on exam day. I was still early. It was just a longer journey in than usual.
Eventually I did make LIS where I changed for the all stations Uxbridge I mentioned before. Did anything happen between LIS and Euston Sq? I don't think so. Some lines have all the luck :P
I wrote that while waiting for the time of my oral exam later in the afternoon (16:00). Oh wow did TUT crash and burn. Normally I'm quite good at conjuring up bullshit under pressure, but in Hindi? Well, apparently not, I was clueless. My reading aloud was pretty decent, I think, and I managed to get through the questions on the paragraph I had just read (we were given it fifteen minutes before the start of the exam). Well, certainly half of them went pretty well and I think I got through the rest alright.
After that I was reduced primarily to mumbling as my brain tried to comprehend what was being said, then come up with an answer it actually had the words for. TUT's brain was suffering from severe delays and at times had to be part suspended. I was asked to keep my sentence structures up - trouble is I didn't have any words to arrange into a sentence, otherwise I might have managed to! :P I mean the pressure scrubs off some of your ability to recall words, especially when a large percentage of your mind is given over to other tasks like understanding the question, trying to come up with any kind of answer at all - regardless of language - and thinking about grammar. Also, obviously, there's a small monitoring section tasked with telling you just how badly you're doing :P
Ooooh - big failure. When the long fifteen minutes were finally up (as I say, usually I quite like this sort of thing - I was rather looking forward to it - I guess my Hindi is just really poor - I really do know nothing :P) I related:
"It's really nerve-wracking! You just forget everything, it all goes! As if you knew it in the first place..."
One of them gave me a knowing smile at that point. I knew it went badly. He did too :P
I therefore left in a very good mood - nothing like well and truly fucking something up to get the excitement going! I made my way back to Euston Square and boarded a Met train to Aldgate. We passed an H&C line train to Hammersmith in Moorgate platform 3. Doors were a bit slow in opening for some reason, but we made LIS without much fuss.
Once there, I changed for an EPP train. I have a vague feeling some small thing of note may have occurred but my brain has turned to mush so I can't really tell you. Very warm, I changed at WOO and had a pretty substantial wait for the HAI which took me home, where I arrived about five hours ago. It's taken me a long time to really see my way to doing anything at all :P
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