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From: Dave Death Category: Art Date: 11 September 2006 Time: 10:59 AM Review: Setting off after midnight from a dinner party in Hampstead Village at which I had enjoyed exquisite food, drink and good humour, I fell asleep on the last train home. At 2.20am I woke in Bedford to the news that the train was terminating here and would all passengers please leave the station. The next train was at 5.40am. In jeans and t-shirt with no money or place to go I asked the railway staff to let me stay in the waiting room. But out I had to go. There were a crowd of drunken young people outside the station. A girl sat on the steps sobbing that she was going to be sick, while her thuggish boyfriend tried reasoning her into a taxi. Others tried to work out how many cabs they needed. I texted a friend I'd left behind in London who offered to pay for my taxi home. I said that it was my fault and I'd deal with it. I thought I might be able to walk the eight miles back to my parent's village. I'd done so once before, years back. I walked for half an hour but turned back barely on the outskirts of town, just before the flat country roads and absolute darkness. I read my way through the copy of The Sun I'd picked up on the train. I walked around the car park. I tried to out-stare a stray ginger cat, who ran whenever I walked nearer. Its eyes were piercing and devilish; I felt like it was evil, or I was evil, or both. I stood inside a phone box, thinking it would help me to preserve heat. That evening I'd had three beers, three glasses of wine - I was tired but not particularly drunk. I played Tetris on my phone. Every half hour a taxi cab would pull up with its engine running and I would ignore it till it drove away. A crowd from a club turned up and offered to share a cab till they heard I'd no money. At 4am came a care-home hoodie. He said he was 14 and had been in the police station all night, having missed the last train back from visiting his family. Would the home kick him out for being away? No, he said, they weren't allowed to. He looked much younger, but spoke with a preternatural confidence. He said he didn't go to school and didn't get private tuition - no teacher would teach him. He just walked around all day, or got "mashed." He seemed bright, or at least confident. A large man with a loud hip-hop stereo joined us as it grew closer to the time the station opened. Someone else wanting a light for their joint. The station finally opened, and I was on the train. The kid got off at my stop and said he had a mile to walk back to the home. I got on my bike and cycled back to my home through freezing mist, arriving six hours after I'd left the dinner party. I've been stranded far more horribly in the past; but I'm aware this sort of thing just doesn't happen to other people. This time, at least, I just had to wait and deal with the cold. I think there might be some kind of subconcious urge I have to put myself in these situations, in echo of Philip O'Connor ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_O'Connor ) to test my place in society, to show that I could just as easily be a tramp as anything else. Perhaps more easily.