Friday 24 August 2007

The Woolpit Wiff

Diary entry on 02 July 2007.

The day had started off pretty un-eventfully. I had spent my first night in my new accommodation and I still had that hotel room feeling. That visitor feeling you get after waking up in strange surroundings on your first day in a hotel room. So it was that at 4am in the morning I awoke to sunlight beaming into the room from under the black blinds that I had, earlier the previous night, tried furiously to roll down as far as possible. It felt rather odd that the pedantic landlord had got such a basic design detail so wrong. The blinds did not cover the height of the windows. These were not blinds, they were giant mini-skirts that were clearly not fitted to cover all the details. I felt my privacy whittle away. I would be exposed! Ah well, I concluded, it was a small detail and one I would deal with later the next morning.

Indeed, 4am and the "blinds" were the first thing I was dealing with. Yes, the small detail of allowing light from the rising sun dead onto my face woke me up at least a whole hour earlier than I had planned.

I had a business trip to Suffolk County later in the morning so I set my alarm clock to first go off at 5am. As I am a notorious addict of the "snooze" button, I placed the alarm clock no less than 4 feet from the bed. This was self devised failsafe design to make sure I would at least have to move more than a couple of muscles to hit snooze. The obvious idea being that significant body movement would wake me up. From past self-observation and experience, even the act of heaving about my entire frame - all 12 stones and 206 bones of it - to get the alarm would still not be enough to wake me up, I elected a second failsafe - set 3 alarms at 15 minute intervals on two different phones, both placed 4 feet away on either side of the bed. "Genius", I had thought to myself, happy in my designs. It was that a little before midnight that I had gone to sleep frustrated with the "failing blinds" but satisfied that my "state of the art" wake up mechanism would see me wide awake by no later than 5:30am Monday morning.

So there I was, 4am - awake! And not by my elaborate network of well placed mobile phone alarms set to go off in an hour, no, but by the failing blinds barely covering the windows. Feeling I needed the extra hours rest, I garnered as much ingenuity as I could master half asleep, to cover my face from the light with two pillows and angle myself back into sleep.

“Gosh!” I exclaimed as I jolted out of bed confused by the bright sunlight and momentarily delusional from these unfamiliar surroundings. The sun now brightly light the room and my African senses suggested I was experiencing mid-morning sun rays! I raced the entire length of 4 feet to my phone to check the time. 6:41. Yes, “Gosh!”

At the very minimum, I should have been on the Jubilee line well on my way towards London Bridge station for a connection onto the Northern line. The Northern line would take me to King's Cross - St. Pancras station. It was here that I would board the train to Bury St. Edmunds via Cambridge at 7:45am. Had I woken up at 5:30am as planned, I would have covered the 1 hour 50 minutes trip to Bury St. Edmunds and followed that by an approximately 15 minute taxi ride to Woolpit, Suffolk County by 10:00am in time to settle and prepare for a series of meetings with the first scheduled for 11:00am.

As it had turned out, covering my head with the pillow to shield from the sunlight had effectively sealed off my ears to the multiple alarm mechanisms designed to wake me up! Classic scenario of perfect safety design made irrelevant by operator behaviour. In this case I had been both designer and operator - the failure was a huge blow!

Realising that missing the train would set-off a series of highly undesirable events; I rushed to the shower to perform a high school ritual purposefully called "The Portrait". This involved washing the face, neck and armpits only. Perhaps the name was suggestive of getting clean only those parts of the body that would be visible if you had a portrait taken - face, neck and shoulders? This was not a time to fuss about missing my ritual of the full body morning shower. This emergency called for drastic measures and "The Portrait" seemed a perfect tool in my arsenal of unsavoury options horned in at boarding school all those years ago.

7:15am, The Portrait taken hurriedly and spotting a Pierre Cardin - super 140 - grey/brown micro pin-stripped suite over a white combed cotton Viyella double cuffed shirt, morning paper under my arm, laptop and travel bag beside me, I stood by Canning Town station waiting for the Jubilee line to take me to London Bridge. This was a classic Londoners look. Finally, I had arrived - I was a Londoner!

With a Jubilee line train every three minutes, I didn't have to wait long.

8:03am, nearly 20 minutes after my scheduled time of departure, I had arrived at King's Cross - St. Pancras station alighting from an over crowded Northern line train. I still had to make my way to the actual train platform, collect my e-ticket from an ATM style vending machine and then pray that there was another train whose locomotives were trained towards the direction of Suffolk County.

8:11am, the answer to my pray was flashing on the huge psychedelic information board ahead of me. There was an 8:45 train to Cambridge from where I could connect onto a train to Bury St. Edmunds - my destination. It wasn't until 7 minutes prior to departure that "9A" flashed under the column headed "Platform".

The journey had begun!


Ntheye Lungu.

1 comment:

Seedsmith said...

Dude! I didn't know u could write this well. Well put!