TfL does not, as you might guess, stand for ‘transport
fucking lunacy’. That’s putting it too
strongly; but only just. I will tell the
story.
To travel from Romford to Charing Cross, you need to get a
train to Stratford and then change to the tube.
So we bought train tickets for that first leg, assuming we’d then clock
in to the tube for the rest of the journey.
Not so. Without walking
for half a mile, exiting the station and then re-entering it and walking the
half mile back, there seemed to be no means of paying for the second leg of our
journey. We asked a nice staff man who
didn’t see the problem, and indeed there turned out not to be, as we were just
waved through by the weary attendant at Charing X on the flash of a bit of
roughly right-coloured cardboard. Lucky.
Z rightly insisted on a more informed approach to the return
trip, so we clocked in at Charing X, exited and re-entered at Stratford, and
caught a slow train back to Romford.
(Finding that one was a whole different, which I’m too tired to relate
in detail.)
The moral, if any, of this story (apart from don’t go to
London from Romford without serious forethought) is as follows:
If you are going to bring a lot of different things together
under one name, make damned sure the bits add up to the whole, rather than the
whole consisting of the bits.
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