An interesting day...

...in which I have what my manager terms a "genius moment".

As you will know if you've been following my exploits thus far, I am currently working away from home.  This usually involves getting up at 4:30 on a Monday morning (all together now: "aww").
This week, however, I phoned the taxi firm a bit late in the weekend so I had to make do with an earlier time slot.  Since I need a cup of coffee just to be semi-functional in the mornings I had to get up about 4:10AM.  

As usual I sat at the PC messing about on twitter and facebook for a bit while drinking my coffee and waiting for the taxi, but when I stood up to go and get my shoes on I managed to trip over the mouse cable, which had somehow coiled itself around my foot like a deadly snake poised to strike.  I went flying across the front room, but managed to prevent myself falling.

The taxi turned up and as I was doing my usual last-minute inventory I realised I didn't have my phone.  I'm sure you'll be familiar with that horrible sinking feeling you get when you realise that something you need is missing and you only have a short amount of time to find it...anyway, I remembered it had been in my shirt pocket so must have flown out in the trip wire incident.  I managed to find it under the sofa after a couple of minutes of frenzied searching.

Things went back to normal after that; I got to the station in plenty of time (30 minutes early, in fact), where I sat wishing I'd worn warmer clothes for a bit.

On the London train this week there were no charging sockets, and the train was a bit manky compared to the usual standard, but the journey continued as usual until I got off at Banbury for my first change.

The train was a little late getting in, so I only had a minute or 2 to make my connection. As I got off I heard the announcement saying the 7:55 was departing from platform 2. That's not the platform it usually goes from (it usually goes from the platform I get off at), but I assumed that the train I'd just got off was in the way so they'd sent it to a different platform.

I didn't hear the announcement when we stopped at the first station as I was in the vestibule at the end of the carriage and the speaker seemed to be broken.  However, when we got to the next station I saw the sign.
"Coventry". 

Hmm. You know the awful feeling you get when you've just done something incredibly, monumentally silly? The sort of thing you know people are going to laugh at you about for years, and eventually needs counselling to get over?

I'm sure you can see where this is going. It is rarely a good idea to get in a train that is going in the opposite direction to where you need to go, but that is what I had managed to do.

Fortunately the later version of the train that I should have got on at Banbury was at Coventry, so I managed a mad dash across the bridge and then a dive onto the "right" train with about 2 seconds to spare.  I was an hour late for work but they were all suitably amused by my stupidity.

At Reading (going in the right direction) the train stopped, as trains do at stations. A man got on, went to the loo and then got off again while the train was waiting. That seems like quite a risky strategy to me, but perhaps all the loos at the station were out of order.

My wife was very sympathetic when I told her about my day...once she stopped laughing (which took quite some time) she said "trouble comes in threes so something else had to go wrong yet".  Thanks for that, darling.  However, I hold that the tripping incident and the phone incident were separate, and that I am therefore now safe.

Anyway, running and stuff. Yesterday I went for a run with Nicky, of skinnyblog fame (see link on left, I can't do them on phone). We did 4.3 miles in about 50 minutes, including having to climb through a hedge to avoid an overflowing ford.  That's really pretty good, especially as that's the first time I've done that distance, but I do need to up the speed some to beat the 2 hour mark for the half marathon.

Right, apologies for all the spelling mistakes I've no doubt made and the lack of nice formatting. Phones are not an ideal medium on which to type blog posts, but needs must when you're faced with your own stupidity...