I was going to a concert up in London this evening. Before setting off for the station I checked the National Rail website to see the trains were on time - they were. After I got to the station just after six o'clock, I looked at the screens and I'm sure the train I was going for, the 18:17, was still marked "On Time". But when I got down to the platform, it was marked as "Delayed". The reason, it turned out, was a tree down in the Liss area. After a while, the station announced apologised that it appeared to be a very big tree and it was going to take time to move it. Both the up and down lines were blocked and trains were being cancelled in both directions. I was wondering about taking a slow train that started at Guildford, knowing that that would get me to London after the concert started. But then they announced that the 18:34 was being started at Haslemere, beyond the blockage. Just to confuse matters, the platform indicators were showing this train, the still delayed 18:17, and the train that was originally supposed to be the 18:34, stuck somewhere in Hampshire and now cancelled.
The train when it did arrive was 12 minutes late and arrived into Waterloo just one minute before the concert was due to start. There was no way I was going to make it for the first item, Tout Un Monde Lointain by Henri Duttileux, a French composer who died this year in his nineties. His music doesn't make it to concert halls that often, so I was rather annoyed about that. (So, I'm listening to a recording of it right now.) But I did get to hear the second half of the concert, the 13th Symphony of Shostakovitch, a bitingly satirical piece written during the Khrushchev thaw in the Soviet Union in the early sixties. Great performance.
The concert finished about half past nine and when I sauntered up to the station they were still announcing that services were subject to delays, but the train I caught was on time.
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