London Calling

We’re off down to London for a brief visit and for once I’ve managed to persuade the other half into joining me. This means leaving the car for a couple of days at the station, if we don’t want to get a cab. But can we do this? We don’t know. We know we can pay for a day’s parking at the station easily enough but have never paid attention to what the policy is overnight. The internet tells us only that there is parking, not what it costs or how long it lasts. Well, that’s easy enough, thought the other half: we’ll just call the station the old fashioned way and ask them.

Except we can’t. There is no phone number listed for the station. There’s a central help line instead, except the central help line doesn’t have an option for finding out what the parking facilities are at a station, it’s for timetable enquiries and delays. There is an option to speak to a human – who may even know about the parking situation at Bigtown station – but none of the humans are available so we can’t find out. At the moment, the only way we can find out whether there’s overnight parking available at the station, is to drive down there and ask.

This can’t be right. I am old enough to remember when you could look up your train station in the telephone book and speak to one of the staff directly. Sometimes you’d get a grumpy one, and sometimes you’d get a helpful one, and occasionally you’d get no answer and you’d have to try again and sometimes you’d be held up waiting to buy your ticket because the guy behind the desk was on the phone trying to explain to some idiot about overnight car parking facilities. But you could usually get the answer to a reasonable question by speaking to a reasonable human being.

And I’m fairly sure that there is a phone number for the station, we’re just not allowed to know what it is. Maybe when we’ve been here a while – ten years maybe, or a couple of generations – someone will tell us what it is.

Back in a couple of days…