And so today started sombre and so terribly got worse. I had to leave my girlfriend’s after a fantastic weekend together and I was feeling rather shit. It’s been like this for three years now, we have a long distance cliché going on and this is always usually the hard part. I caught a train from hers into Birmingham Moor Street and went to the Bullring because that’s the only worthwhile place to go. I queued at Greggs but the rubber thingy around the oven was being replaced and it was taking forever to get the usual sterling service, ten-in and all that. I went to Burger King, even though I promised myself I wouldn’t because food and travelling are a bad combination where I am concerned. It turns me into a mega fat kid.

I’m incredibly pissed off scoffing away at my Aberdeen Angus because my coach ticket, sent to me in text format, refuses to open on my phone and I will have to explain to the driver and might not get to board. So I’m depressed and now worried too. And so I get down to the bus terminal at 10:45 and the boarding queue is confusing: there are two queues for two different buses, but I don’t know where the first one ends and the second one begins. So I make an educated guess and duck in the middle somewhere. Then this fat black Gina Yeshere-sounding woman taps me and says “excuse me, mate! This woman has been waiting here longer than you yeah!” Now remember, I am sad and fragile. Normally I would turn around and say something witty like “I’m not your fucking mate” or maybe even “iz it coz I iz black” but I just looked at her for a couple of seconds and then walked away, with the intention of going to the back of the queue.

However, instead I just kept walking. The coach left at 11 o’clock and I was definitely going to miss it now because, before I knew it, I had walked back up to the Bullring with a tear in my eye and the whole way there I had been on some sort of manic episode. I called my girlfriend and told her the situation and she was as befuddled as you probably are now. Stranger’s words really hurt, don’t they? I begged around the streets for directions to Birmingham New Street and once there bought a one-way ticket to Glasgow at a cost of £84. Great swift process: you zip your debit card in, enter your pin and you get your ticket. Of course a plane would most likely be cheaper and four times quicker, but I didn’t mind. Cary Grant rode a train once I recall and he got lucky. And as he so nicely put it: “beats flying.” It certainly beats travelling with Gina Yeshere.