Backdated: Wednesday 17th March, 07:10

I have made a discovery. The little fold-down tables that trains have are no good for typing on. They’re designed for you to forlornly pick through a limp, overpriced BLT on. If you hunch over there, no problem, it adds to the “Should’ve bought some food with me” atmosphere. It’s no good me arriving in Crewe and leaving the students of South Cheshire college with the impression that all Oxford students are like a cross between Harold Macmillan and Quasimodo. Now I have a reasonable typing position, and I feel very post-industrial as I listen to Nirvana on the headphones, tapping away at my iBook in a grey-marl Oxford University t-shirt. The problem with using a laptop in the “lap” style though, is that my bare lower arm comes into frequent contact with a metallic armrest that’s made of an alloy of steel and primordial night.

On the whole, I like trains. I’m certainly a lot more comfortable now than I was on the coach to wherever it was I went the day before yesterday. Sandown Park. I leave it up to you to decide whether that’s a meaningful comment on the relative merits of public transport, or the fact that I had to wake up at 04:45 then.

This is only my second day in the Wandering Age (i.e. this week). Already it’s so familiar to me, though. My parents are not the kind to drive from Devon to fetch me every holiday, and I’m not the kind to drive unless I find myself 20 miles from the safety zone of a nuclear blast with the clock on one hour and counting, and there are no suitable public transport alternatives. The result of this is that seeing woodland lakes and isolated farmhouses fly backwards past me at twenty-five metres per second is no longer a dreamlike experience for me. These days, all it does is make me hunger for a limp BLT.

In the end I didn’t go to Cambridge yesterday: I’m now going tomorrow. This is pleasure, rather than business, you understand. Then again, it still means I’ll be spending about 35% of my waking hours on a coach. I mean, I don’t like coaches. Anyway, Housemate Jo is going to Cambridge today. She’s flying back to Belfast by way of Stanstead, after spending a few days with her old Friend Lydia.

Hold on, you’re saying, hold on. If I had yesterday off, why am I only reading this on Next Monday? To which I reply: leave me alone.

Song in my head: “Heart-shaped Box” by Nirvana