She decides to take the train for her 12.30 London appointment. No point in hoping the car will find the way. She gives herself two hours to travel the fifty mile distance to central London. She can arrive cool and smart for her career interview, or so she thinks. It’s February and the weather is vile, there’s a boat washed up somewhere along the Cornish coast, fishermen are being winched off trawlers in the North Sea, rivers and valleys are flooding.

She reaches the ticket office at her local station where posters boast a 40 minute ride to the heart of the Capital and a gust from the Gods turns her umbrella inside out. She drags the complicated, flapping cone through the doors of the ticket office and heads for the counter. The train is due at 10.19, and it’s 10.10. There’s one tired ticket vendor in the office and he promptly picks up his phone the minute she shows up.

Three minutes later she’s still listening to his long drawn-out half-awake drone all about coffee and toast, and sandwiches, and possible sandwich fillings and maybe burgers and he’s not sure, but he’ll find out. She wrestles with her umbrella getting it to look normal. And waits. Five minutes later a queue has formed. The phone call is over and her Day Travelcard, off-peak, swivels through the glass with change. The tension is killing and she runs through the gale, across the bridge and down slippery steps to the platform.

The train is late and commuters and shoppers stare at empty tracks and wrist watches, as the wind and rain whips up skirts and coats and makes a mockery of the station canopy. The train is hot and there’s standing room only. There’s little to view through streaming windows except urbanity beyond a dish-water torrent. At points of call the train fills up and she squeezes into the corner of the double seat next to a very wet and over-padded windcheater containing a large and solid human being.

The late arrival prompts the train’s captain to a try:

“We apologise to passengers for the late arrival of this train. This was due to a signal failure between Peterborough and Huntingdon and there was no-one to handover to at Finsbury Park, so I had to bring this train here myself, thus foregoing my break.”

There’s choking disbelief and squeals of derision. Someone says, “Tell him how noble he is” and at last she is smiling until she realises the trip has cost her her crease-free clothes and any pretentions of care for her hair.

Underground, she wades through discarded crisp packets, thermoplastic cups and torn chunks of newsprint. She lands in the seat of a tube train as the sliding doors close revealing one word in two parts coming together, “do” on one door, “ors” on the other. “Doors” is graffitied in blue spray paint which decorates all furnishings of the carriage.

At Cannon Street she hurtles up the escalator to the surface and out onto the city streets to dodge more litter, black puddles and car spray as she skims to the grand entrance of the building where her appointment waits.

She’s five minutes late but it feels worse because her interviewer says nothing and is gracious, neat, poised and perfumed as he smoothly delivers his well-practised words, gesturing indifference to any apologies for the late arrival. The office is cool and open plan, with rows of people quietly working; surreal, clean and courteous. She senses that he has lost interest already and that his mind is elsewhere.

It’s then that she notices she can’t move her foot. She sits back in her seat to take a peek at her boot, but trashes all care for decorum when she discovers her boot is stuck to the immaculate, pink, thick, new carpet by a big glob of dirty, grey, mint-exuding gum.

“For God’s sake, get me some meths, now” and promptly brings the interview to a close.