Southampton Hates Me

There's a theory among some of my atheist friends that the easiest way to turn someone atheist is to get them to really read a holy book from cover to cover.

On that principle, I guess you could say I'm a long-term aSouthamptonist. I went to study in Southampton (one of our historic seafaring cities) as a teenager, when I'd rejected - and been rejected by - Oxford, and still wanted to be a gorgeously unscrupulous lawyer. I spent a year in one of the many suburban areas of the city, and while I made some good friends during that year, I grew to loathe and despise the place. I think it's something about the idea of nailing about six suburbs together around a couple of interesting streets and then filling them all with posh people going sailing. To this day, I have a morbid fear of quiet streets, neatly trimmed shrubbery and clean pavements. Hate them. Hate them, hate them, hate them...

Yesterday, I had to go back there for the night. It didn't bode well.

To start with, I had a moment of idiocy. Let me ask you this: how do you make lasagne?

You know how you make lasagne. You fry meat, That's fry. Y'know, letting all the oil and juice ooze out. Then you make a tomato sauce, and fry it some more. Add pasta sheets...and then make a bechamel - that's cheese sauce. Layer the meat in sauce, pasta and bechamel, and then, if you're especially decadent, you top it off with real, fresh melted cheese.

Now, tell me - if you were taking drugs that found every molecule of fat in your digestive system, turned it orange and flumed it out of your body whether you were ready or not, and you knew you were going to be on a train for a couple of hours from London to Southampton, and then stuck in a conference room for a couple of hours, and then stuck on a train back to London for another couple of hours...would you have eaten lasagne and garlic bread just before leaving your office?

I only thought of all this about five minutes after I'd eaten it. Did I mention I'm an idiot?

Anyway, I schlepped to Waterloo with just two minutes to spare before my Southampton train pulled out. No problem, I thought, I'll get my ticket on the train. As far as I know, this is an acceptable procedure - certainly I've travelled on plenty of trains this way. Of course, without a ticket in advance, I got through the barriers at Waterloo by using my Oyster card.
Got on the train just in time, had to walk through about four carriages to find an available seat and sat in it. After about 45 minutes, the ticket-salesman wandered through the carriage, and asked me for my ticket.
"Return to Southampton please," I said.
"You don't have a ticket sir?" said the man, drumming his fingers on his portable ticket-dispenser.
"Nnno, I'd like to buy it now please."
"So you're riding without a ticket sir?"
"I'm..." I wondered if there was another way of saying it that I hadn't yet discovered. "I'm trying to buy it now."
"How did you get on the train sir?" The obvious answer - that I'd used my legs - seemed calculated to annoy him, so I said "I used my Oyster card."
"That's ticket fraud, sir," he said. "We can't use our Oyster cards to queue-jump, can we?"
"That's not what I did," I said.
"Yes it is!" he almost yelled. "You think you're better than everyone else, and can ride for free!"
I wondered about the possibility of getting up, mooning him and splattering him with agent orange. Again, calculated to escalate the situation. I took a deep breath.
"I'm trying...to buy...a ticket," I said, speaking slowly, despite digesitve cramps and a pounding in the head. "I'm not going to argue with you. Are you going to sell me a ticket or not?"
He printed me off a ticket, and charged me the return price.
It was a single ticket.
"I wanted a return," I said.
"No," he said. "Only single tickets on the train. If you'd bought it beforehand..."
He printed me a 'penalty fare card' and smirked off.
My phone was on silent, and it rang, silently. It was d. I looked up and discovered I was sitting in a quiet carriage. So I whispered that I was in a quiet carriage, and she hung up, as you're supposed to do. The bloke next to me tapped me on the shoulder and shouted, loudly.
"YOU KNOW THERE'S NO PHONES ALLOWED IN HERE!" he told me.
"Didja not see me just end the call?" I asked.

Seriously, Southampton hates me. I didn't think of this at the time, but I have to wonder whether these Southampton-going fucks were pretty much just picking on the fat boy...(Shrugs). Probably not, they were probably just idiots. Y'know, with dicks the size of cashews. And halitosis. An an unsightly psychologically scarring skin disease. Yes...that makes sense.

The night was fine after that. Nearly died in the back of a geriatric friend's car, when it turned out he used a satnav, but didn't actually understand what the little moving car meant. I didn't get back home till nearly 1AM, but considering I'd thought I was gonna die on my fifth revolution round one of Southampton's evil roundabouts, as long as I got home in one piece, I didn't care.

I'm never leaving the house again, cos human beings are just mean.

Well, OK, maybe, but I'm never going back to Southampton, that's for damn sure...Bad things happen when I do.