The Matt cartoon is the best, or possibly only, reason to look at the front page of the Daily Telegraph. Today’s offering shows one of the three wise men saying to his two companions: “I’m stockpiling myrrh in case there’s a do-deal Brexit.”

That was a good effort, but I was struck by a possible alternative. All you do is replace ‘myrrh’ with ‘mirth’. Well, we could do with stockpiling mirth, especially at a time when the country is led by a mirthless woman on a mirthless mission.

Over on Twitter, Susie Dent dips without comment into the back pages of her dictionary mind: “Niffle-naffling, fudgelling, and pingling: three old words for working feebly and ineffectually because you’d really rather be doing something else.”

Susie, who has 332,000 followers, describes herself in her Twitter handle simply as “That woman in Dictionary Corner.” She may be making an abstruse comment here about our government’s sclerotic Brexit waltz – one shuffle forward, twenty-two back – or perhaps she is just disinterring three good old words for feeble procrastination to be used in ordinary non-political life. I’ve been pingling about this afternoon before getting down to writing this blog.

Another good word was stirred up by Brexit the other day. This entertaining aside to the niffle-naffling main event arose when Jean Claude Juncker, the European Commission president, apparently accused Mrs Maybe of being vague.

According to lip-reading experts, an incandescent Mrs Maybe challenged Mr Juncker, saying: “What did you call me? You called me nebulous.” This sent everyone googling the word, to discover it meant hazy, with the following synonyms offered: indistinct, indefinite, unclear, vague, fuzzy, blurry – all words that stick to Theresa May like wet leaves on a windy day just before Christmas.

The need for a stockpile of mirth is certainly suggested by headlines this afternoon about 3,500 troops being put on stand-by in case of a no-deal Brexit. Troops on stand-by! What sort of a glorious future is that? What’s more this penny-pinching government is grubbing up £2 billion to spend on planning for no-deal. That’s two billion quid we allegedly don’t have to spend on something that almost everyone swears is a terrible idea.

Troops on standby, chaos in the wind – that all sounds a long way from trade secretary Liam Fox and his idiot bragging about how the post-Brexit trade deal would be “the easiest in human history”.

If you’d prefer a new bit of pro-Brexit twitspeech, how about this from arch-Leave Tory Penny Mordaunt describing no-deal as “a managed glide path”. That sounds to me like a pretentious way to say crash-landing.

Here’s the problem with Brexit, apart from the one about no one really wanting to talk about it anymore. Right from the start of this unproductive slinging-match, Brexit has been a blank, an aspiration, an idea; it’s been an empty speech bubble waiting to be filled in with angry words. The reason that Mrs Maybe is nebulous is probably just that the whole Brexit thing is nebulous, a dream, a notion, a feeling, all moth-eaten fur coat and no Union Jack knickers.

Europe doesn’t understand what we want because we don’t really know what we want, except that we don’t want what Theresa May petulantly insists is the only deal in town.

Over on the Guardian website, a headline asks readers: “How are you preparing for a no-deal Brexit?”

Well, I am burying my head in this here bucket of sand.

I READ a disappointing piece of fiction yesterday. The plot twist was all too easy to spot, the main character was predictably unreliable, and I guessed the ending before it arrived. Not that it ever did arrive.

You see, that disappointing piece of fiction was the First York bus timetable. And the unreliable narrator was the No 5a.

We’ve enjoyed fruitful journeys in the past, that bus and I, but not this time. Not this time on the first night of proper winter. Not this time with icy rain falling and the weather presenters muttering darkly about instant ice and frozen pavements. Not this time after a horrid rainy drive from Howden to get back just in time to dash around the corner for the bus.

7.32 it said on the timetable. The minutes shivered by. Two other hopeful passengers arrived at the stop. Ten more minutes passed without any plot development. I left the other two passengers and took my scowl off down the road to the stop where the No 1 bus hangs out.

Quite a few people were waiting. That’s a good sign or a bad sign. The illuminated sign said the bus would be along in two minutes. Then the letters reshaped themselves into 14 minutes. Two tourists laughed at our strange English ways. “It keeps doing that,” one of them said.

Giving them a nod, I turned from the delayed gratification bus stop, and headed into town.

So, if you saw a man wearing, besides the usual clothes, two coats, a woolly hat, knitted gloves and a frown, that’ll have been me beetling between bus stops. I glanced over my shoulder at each narrative stopping-off point, but there was still no plot development.

On I walked, glancing at the pavement, thankful that the dark mutterings about the weather hadn’t come true in York. The ground was wet but not iced.

I walked all the way and saw two buses. One was empty and the other one the right bus going in the wrong direction. The right bus going in the right direction must have been carrying all the red herrings.

I arrived at the Crescent Club long after everyone else, but nothing had started yet. I drank three pints of beer to banish the disappointing narrative of the bus that never arrived, and today as I type my head hurts.

This was a family outing, with two of our three plus one partner. The gig was a solo turn from Ben Ottewell, who used to be one of three lead vocalists in Gomez. The band’s first album became a family favourite, played in the old silver Volvo on long journeys, all the way to France once.

Ben’s the one with the rasped baritone, a voice of gravel and honey. He was great, just him, two guitars, a mic and a soundman who made it all sound like a big-arena affair, instead of an intimate gig in a former working man’s club.

“By the way this is a small guitar,” Ben said by way of introduction. Perhaps he didn’t want rumours of ukulele playing to be shared. A small guitar but a big sound.

Something wonderful lies in watching one man and a guitar singing songs he has written. Some of those songs put me back behind the wheel of that old silver Volvo.

Ben wasn’t well and called out for whisky near the end. More gravel than usual in that throat.

The bus home turned up on time and there were no disappointing holes in the plot.

On the BBC Today programme earlier, Nick Robinson was talking to Iain Duncan Smith. “You realise all over the country right now people are saying…”

“Shut the f*** up…”

Apologies, perhaps it was just me saying that, although the existence of such widespread national equanimity seems unlikely. Anyway, pardon the involuntary vocal spasm. It happens every time that man appears in public dragging his sneer behind him.

I really should be more grown-up about this, but just can’t help myself. Does anyone else have a special greeting for this Tory veteran who was rubbish at leading his own party, before withdrawing to the fetid Tory margins to grumble about everything that has followed?

Duncan Smith is telling everyone that yesterday he voted to oust Theresa May as Tory leader with a heavy heart. Not as heavy as the hearts of those of us unlucky enough to hear you on the radio, matey. God but that man is annoying.

His nickname is IDS, which is only one consonant away from IBS, and that can’t be a coincidence. Anyway, as you see, I suffer from irritable IDS syndrome.

Not only that, but I endure a nasty rash and rageful boils every time Jacob Rees-Mogg creaks his mouth open to utter another reptilian peroration about Brexit. He was there again last night, unable to keep his snooty teeth clamped together even as the latest coup by his hardline Brexit buccaneers had failed to dislodge Mrs Maybe.

There he stands like the Ghost of Christmas Cancelled, whining nastily about how the only proper Brexit is the one he had a wet dream about back in the 18^th century.

Calling the vote of no-confidence in their leader at such a time was an act of arrogance and hypocrisy, as has been pointed out elsewhere. And if you want to know what arrogance and hypocrisy look like in a suit, look no further than IDS and JRM. And while you’re at it, don’t overlook Nigel Farage. Arrogance and hypocrisy flow through that man’s veins as readily as beer and nicotine.

Theresa May lives to mess up another day. While that’s hardly an inspiring thought, we’re probably better off with her sort-of in charge rather than leaving the door open for Boris Johnson or JRM or, heaven help us, the simply appalling Esther McVey.

It’s typical that Mrs Maybe should withstand a no-confidence vote when it’s difficult to have confidence in her at all. Does anyone have confidence in her now? Where some see dogged determination, others detect a stubborn refusal to listen and a strange sort of introverted arrogance, a stuttering swagger and a nervous tick of self-righteousness.

I’ve complained before about Labour sitting on their hands and doing nothing much about Brexit, so I’ll let that one lie for today. Just now, that IBS man was saying that the possibility of Jeremy Corbyn being elected prime minister was far more serious than Brexit. If anything makes me warm towards Corbyn, it’s the thought that Tories like Duncan Smith hate and seemingly fear him so much.

As for the not-yet-deposed Mrs Maybe, she is off to the continent again on another Brussels bumble, bizarrely convinced that her debating skills will bring home the Brexit bacon in the end.

Half the people thought one thing, half the people thought the other. They had a vote to settle the matter. The half who thought the one thing beat the half who thought the other but not by much.

The people who thought the winning thing went about the place bragging that the people had spoken – all the people, every single one. The people who thought the other thing said that wasn’t true and withdrew into grumbling clusters.

The people who won the argument about the thing then spent two-and-a-half years bitterly arguing among themselves and found that they had got nowhere at all in trying to do the winning thing.

The thing saga wound on, without any hope of a happy ending, or without any hope of an ending at all. Quite a few of the people who’d voted for the thing wondered if they shouldn’t have chosen the other thing. Some began to worry that the winning thing was the losing thing after all.

Others tore at their hair and said, will no one rid us of this endless noise about the thing, the thing that never goes away and yet never arrives either.

The woman who was trying to get the thing done was either brave and determined, or a stubborn misguided loon who’d blown all her chances by being obsessed about not letting anyone into the land riven by the thing. She’d barricaded the doors and stood at the window, looking like she was haunted by her own ghost already.

Hardly any of her friends liked her any more and she’d not had that many to start with. She’d grabbed the chance to get the thing done when all the others in her party were too busy arguing or seeing how many knives they could stick in each other’s backs.

The woman who was trying to get the thing done was opposed by a man who had his own problems. In his heart he thought the thing was probably a good thing, as he’d never liked the way things were run with those countries across the water. But most of his friends were against the thing, and he didn’t know what to do, so he sat on his hands and hummed to himself instead.

The woman who was trying to swing the thing arranged for everyone to vote about it in the big house. But the inky elves wrote that she didn’t have a snowball in hell’s chance of winning her vote about the settlement of the thing. Ever resolute, she said that she would have her vote anyway. Even on the morning of the vote, she got her friends, those who could find anyway, to say that it was all on for that afternoon. Then she was ambushed by cowardice and changed her mind at the last minute.

She hurried away from the country to see what could be done about her hopeless arrangement. With any luck, the people she pays to stop other people getting into the country will take one look at her and say, oh, you’re not coming in here, no one wants you back, it was bad enough when you were strong and stable, and will you look at yourself now.

Many people who voted for the thing were good ordinary people for the most part, although the thing was taking such an age, some of them had gone and died already.

And the saga of the thing wound on, and it winds still now, turning the country riven by the thing into a land of strange derangement where everyone shouts at each other only to then say, oh will you just give over and shut up already.

THE ways of communication between parent and distant, more-or-less grown-up child are easy nowadays. Or they are if the O2 network is working.

This thought is raised by various memories and a worrying headline. The personal flashbacks include my time-shot university days in the 1970s when phones were bolted down rather than mobile. A call home required standing in a queue with a fistful of change.

In my first term away, I managed that once. Today’s young people are more attentive to their possibly anxious parents, texting or messaging daily. That’s my impression from talking to students, and from having a post-student daughter who was distant but isn’t for now.

This is almost certainly for the good, although at a time when mental health concerns among students are high, it’s possible to wonder if the old casting off didn’t also have its advantages. My mother wondered and worried, as she has since told me, but I just got on with being a student castaway 200 miles away in that London.

Would young people freshly away from home be better off not being in such constant contact? Would breaking the parental bond a bit more reduce anxiety? No idea, but that doesn’t happen now thanks to mobile communication.

When our daughter had her year in Australia, she messaged her mum most days. She sent me notes, too. We faced-timed and some days she called the house phone, usually as she was walking back from the gym in Perth. Towards the end of her long absence, she went backpacking. That’s when she had the most fun, and when in theory we had most cause to worry, not that I remember fretting much.

The worrying headline concerns a 22-year-old British backpacker who appears to have disappeared while travelling alone in central Auckland, New Zealand. Grace Millane messaged her parents every day, then the messages stopped, and she hasn’t been in touch for a week.

Her family said Grace normally bombarded them with pictures of her travels. In a statement, they said: “Grace has never been out of contact for this amount of time, she is usually in daily contact… we are all extremely upset. It is a very difficult at this time to fully describe the range of emotions we are going through.”

Her father arrived in Auckland yesterday, tired and distraught. There isn’t much more than can be said about the disappearance of Grace Millane. The modern media habit of expressing concern online – “We are thinking of you at this difficult time”, or whatever – always strikes a wrong note for me.

Shared humanity should make such a statement redundant, and newspapers putting such messages on their websites risk tipping into unhelpful sentimentality. The media’s job at such times of extreme worry for families they don’t know is just to convey the facts as best they can.

That isn’t a heartless observation; it’s just that newspapers shouldn’t need to say that they care, as that should be implicit in the business of being a human being.

Naturally enough, I hope the news is better than it sounds.

The last of us has yet to arrive for the beer, curry and talking about shit club. Only a slurp in and we have broached Brexit already.

Two of us think Jeremy Corbyn has offered no leadership or guidance on Brexit, while the outnumbered one, being a keen Corbyn man, says that’s nonsense as Labour aren’t in power, so there’s not much they can do.

This argument fails to convince the two of us who think that Corbyn is hopelessly conflicted on Brexit; and our complaints fail to convince the staunch Corbyn man.

Then the fourth member of the party arrives. This reconfiguration allows the conversation to decamp from that most quarrelsome of dead-horse-flogged topics (apologies to anyone using the new vegan dictionary), and we move on without settling anything.

Moving on without settling anything seems to be the mood of the moment.

That night in the pub last week came back to me after yesterday’s PMQs. Corbyn was generally thought to have blown it. The day before, Theresa May had suffered three Commons defeats in 63 minutes, a record even for her. Given a chance to gloat or at least to land a gleeful punch or two, Corbyn didn’t mention those three defeats. He didn’t bring up Brexit at all. Instead, he began one of his solid sermons on austerity.

This is comfortable territory for Corbyn and he made some decent points about the struggles people face. Mrs Maybe delivered her usual robotic statistics rap – “more people in work, blah-de-blah”, without acknowledging that it is people in poorly paid work who are struggling.

You can make an argument that Brexit was in part caused by austerity. Along of course with all those hoarse cries of freedom – freedom from what, you might wonder, while inching ever closer to that cliff; freedom to do as we wish, cry the freedom squaddies; freedom, perhaps, to throw ourselves on an unfeeling world, or onto those rocks below the White Cliffs.

And so on. That’s the problem with moving on without settling anything.

Yes, austerity can be said to have played its part, as some Leave voters were feeling the pinch or feeling ignored and overlooked; or just feeling that life should feel different or better than it did.

Still, in the Parliamentary boxing ring, Corbyn’s tactic just seemed odd. In a sense he shares with his opponent a curious dull stubbornness. When people expect him to crow about the other lot having trudged into a stinking quagmire, he changes the subject and accidentally offers Mrs Maybe a hand up from the mud.

I raise this matter, and write these thoughts, knowing that people may well spot that this is another Brexit blog, and wander off to do something more profitable.

It’s easy to appreciate the yawns. Earlier this morning, I switched off the BBC Today programme as John Hymphrys interviewed Theresa May. It was annoying and pointless and went nowhere. Instead, I spent a few minutes deleting emails on my phone: a more profitable use of time.

Right now, there is a headline on the Guardian website reading: “‘People’s eyes are glazing over’: Brexit fatigue grips Basildon.”

Basildon and everywhere else, I shouldn’t wonder. That leaves me to depart with a sigh, while trying to work out if fatigue can grip anything: if you are extremely tired, aren’t you more likely to release your grip and let go?

Oh, who knows; who knows anything these days.

In the normal run of inky things, the front page of the Daily Star should be picked up with a pair of tongs and held a good distance from the nose. Today’s noisome offering is: “A load of bull.”

This is not, as you might suppose, a final snapping of patience about Brexit, the gift that keeps on taking away. No, this is the Daily Star turning up late to the party with a story about how veganism might affect our language.

Anyone who has glanced at the Star through half a disdainful eye will not be surprised to learn that the first word of the story is “snowflakes”. For this is a newspaper that spies snowflakes wherever it casts an angry headline. Sometimes these are real snowflakes intent on bringing a hell-freeze (or a bit of winter); more often, sadly, they are young people smeared with that offensive description.

“Snowflakes are out to bash common British such as taking a bull by the horns…” the paper fumes over its breakfast sausages. This story about how language might have to adapt to reflect the rising number of vegans surfaced yesterday. The Star’s take is summed up by its “World’s gone mad” strapline.

At Swansea University an academic called Dr Shareena Hamzah has researched whether language might have to adapt as more people stop eating meat.

“If veganism forces us to confront the realities of food’s origins, then this increased awareness will undoubtedly be reflected in our language and literature,” Dr Hamzah suggests.

“The increased awareness of vegan issues will filter through our consciousness to produce new modes of expression.”

The Star seems to have missed the part where Dr Hamzah said it was unlikely such phrases would disappear altogether, presumably because it doesn’t fit the “world’s gone mad” scenario.

To take the bull by the horns is, as Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable reminds us, “To face danger or a challenge boldly”. A good and assertive phrase, although it does have its roots in bullfighting, which is often frowned on nowadays.

Another example is “bringing home the bacon”, which means to succeed. Brewer’s adds that the expression dates to the habit of trying to catch greased pigs or to the “Dunmow flitch”. Happily married couples who had lived long together without quarrelling were said to be “eating Dunmow bacon”. This dates to a custom from the Middle Ages when a man could go to Dunmow church in Essex , kneel on two sharp stones at the door and swear that for “12 months and a day he had never had a household brawl or wished himself unmarried”. This entitled him to a flitch of Dunmow bacon.

That sounds like a worthwhile treat and I’d take the trip to Essex myself, but my generally non-quarrelsome wife is vegetarian; and my daughter’s just turned vegan, so I’d better be careful what I say.

Other linguistic examples are “killing two birds with one stone”, which Dr Hamzah suggests could be replaced with “feeding two birds with one scone”.

Peta, the animal rights lobby group, suggests that we should replace the phrase “to flog a dead horse” with to “feed a fed horse”. That variant isn’t bad, although brutality can empower language. Feeding a fed horse is kinder than flogging a dead one, but it doesn’t have the same forceful meaning.

Brewer’s sums the dead horse phrase up as: “To attempt to revive a question already settled or worn thin, thereby wasting time and effort.” That has a certain austere elegance, I’d say.

I am not sure that we should take too much notice of Peta, for they are always seeking to cause a meat-free stir about something or other. The other day they suggested that the village of Wool in Dorset should be renamed “Vegan Wool”, even though the place has been called that for a millennium, and the name has nothing to do with sheep as it comes from the old word for well or spring.

And, to close, I wonder when we will stop flogging a dead Brexit.

I’m A Celebrity… is back on television, but I am not stuck to the screen. Not even an old Post-It-note’s worth of glue keeps my eyes adhered to the jungle programme.

But I know it’s on because a daily skim of the newspaper headlines reveals the usual lazy-arse ‘what’s popular on TV’ headlines, along with pictures of the contestants without their tops on. This year, the uncovered one has mostly been Noel Edmonds, whose neat physique at the age of 70 has inspired headlines and how-to-look-like-Noel features.

Having little interest in the programme, and no desire to look like Noel, here is my best guess: he keeps trim by being annoying. Those muscles are kept taut by years of causing general irritation.

Yes, life’s too short to watch I’m A Celebrity. But it isn’t too short to fray the hours on Netflix. Here are some of the fritter-some shows I have watched lately.

I would like to recommend Borgia, only it has stopped. A deadline warning started to pop up on screen during this lurid and loosely historical tale. Rushing through, I finished bang on time. Whether this was an achievement, or a waste of time, is open to debate.

Sensible me: You could have put those hours to more productive use.

Netflix-watching me shrugs: it was good to start with, and anyway there’ll be something else along in a moment.

And so there was.

Next up was The Method, a Russian crime/psychological drama that is well made, interesting and satisfyingly bizarre.

A young law graduate begins a strange apprenticeship with the famed investigator, Rodion Meglin – a mentally ill sociopath man whose ‘method’ is mysterious and dangerous.

Method is well made, bonkers but compelling, not least down to the central performances from Konstantin Khabenskiy and Paulina Andreeva. To say more would spoil a good and occasionally gruesome plot.

My latest find is Four Seasons In Havana, a Cuban crime drama (never tripped over one of those before). Jorge Perugorria (pictured) plays Detective Mario Conde, a Cuban amalgam of all the messed-up, lonely detectives you have ever seen. But don’t let that put you off because this character is great…

• A rumpled, booze-sodden, nicotine-stained man (tick, tick, tick);

• Who breaks the rules (tick);

• And is strangely irresistible to the gorgeous women of Cuba, despite looking like a crumpled brown bag that once contained a bottle of cheap rum (more ticks, line them up in a row).

An interesting twist is that Conde fancies himself a writer. This gives the cases an intriguing mix of fact and fantasy. And you are never sure if the improbable sexual conquests have happened or been summoned up by his cigarette-fuelled imagination. Best of all, Conde’s like a rough-edged Cuban Morse, but with rum for beer, and writing for crosswords.

Havana looks fantastic, dark and brooding – although our much-travelled American Airbnb guest took one look and said: “Havana’s nothing like that: it’s light and open and spacious.”

It’s a good look though, and Four Seasons In Havana is my top tip if you want to relax and put time through the Netflix shredder.

Mrs Maybe has been playing people’s bingo for a long time now. The rules of her shabby game are easy enough to follow.

All you do is count the number of times the prime minister mentions “the people” when she talks about Brexit.

From day one, Mrs Maybe decided on this tactic by ignoring all those people who voted Remain. Instead of acknowledging it had been a close-run vote, she deposited the 48% in the bin of convenient narrow squeaks. She disparaged this sizeable minority as an elite and “citizens of nowhere”. And then set about pretending that the British people had spoken with one voice.

This isn’t true or even a bruise on the kicked-about apple of truth.

Some of the British people had spoken in a poorly debated referendum that was knocked together in a hurry by her predecessor – the name escapes me now; a referendum, what’s more, that may well have been influenced by allegedly dodgy funding from Leave.EU impresario Arron Banks, who is still facing an investigation. What did he spend and where did the dosh come from?

But the only rule for Mrs Maybe’s Brexit Bingo has been to ignore or belittle the 48%. The prime minister could have chosen to consider their fears from day one, but instead turned her back on them.

Now she is trying to win public support for the generally disliked deal she has struck with the EU – a slow-motion arrangement she now must drag through the Parliamentary hedge.

Her main hope of success lies in the “just-get-on with-it mood”. An understandable sentiment in a Brexit-shot country, but one which boils down to slogging on with the mess she’s got us into, because it’s a ‘better’ mess than any other sort of godawful mess.

Theresa May’s grasp of political tactics has always been odd, ever since she blew that unnecessary election by betting the house on her oratorical powers (evidence for existence: none then or now).

Now it’s true that her persistence does win some admirers, but is blind stubbornness really such a virtue? And further proof of her peculiar way with a tactic comes with her “letter to the people” in which she promises to campaign for her deal with her “heart and soul” before next month’s crucial vote in the Commons. In this strange and misleading missive, she also says that March 29 next year “must mark the point when we put aside the labels of ‘leave’ and ‘remain’ for good and we come together again as one people”. Well, good luck with that.

The odd thing about her letter is that she doesn’t have to win around the people as they’ve already had their say in that narrow squeak of a referendum: it’s the MPs she needs on side.

And now Mrs Maybe wants a Brexit debate with Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, reportedly on the same night as the final of I’m A Celebrity (“Rumble and the jungle”, according to the clunky headline in this morning’s Sun referencing a boxing match from 1974).

You may recall that she declined to take part in a leaders’ debate before that unnecessary election, but now she wants one with Corbyn. That, by the way, would see a Remain-voting Tory Brexit convert in the ring against a closet Brexit-fancying Labour leader whose party leans for Remain.

Theresa May wouldn’t take part in a debate that might have influenced voters – but now wants a vote in which there is no point in influencing voters. She wants this because she has a plan and Jeremy doesn’t, according to her logic.

There is a faint glimmer of truth to this. Corbyn’s only true tactic on Brexit has been to duck and dive in the hope that Mrs Maybe will fail, leading to a general election that Labour will win – a victory to be followed by a new Brexit solution summoned by magic.

Still, at least she can depend on Donald Trump – to cock things up for her by declaring that her EU deal scuppers trade deals with the US. Well, at least chlorinated chicken is off the menu for now and US companies will have less chance of infiltrating the NHS.

WHEN I leave this ledge, it is usually by car, although one spot of work in York is reachable by trusty old bicycle.

One advantage of driving to work – the only one – is you don’t have to catch the train. This has been a year of train horror stories, some in the south and around London, others here in the north, where Northern Rail continues to frustrate and infuriate commuters or anyone else foolish enough to think travelling by train might be a good idea.

Here are two train tales, neither connected to work or indeed Northern Fail (as it’s known in these parts), but both suggestive of the everyday chaos of train travel.

Recently we had a long weekend in Poland. Everything on the outward trip ran smoothly, from the Metro to Newcastle Airport, the Ryanair flight to Modlin Airport outside Warsaw, to the friendly and efficient taxi driver in her minibus.

Getting to Newcastle was the challenging bit.

We’d booked on a train at just after 4pm and the board showed two at around that time. The one we should have been on edged ahead of the other one, then fell behind, then went ahead again, in a weird time-travelling race. Then one train arrived and there was no way of telling if it was the ‘right’ one. We ran along the platform to ask the guard, who said it was, and we hopped on. We couldn’t get to our seats because the way was blocked by a tea trolley that had run out of water. And the carriage was rammed.

We had to stand in the crowded carriage, next to a large bin bag full of rubbish. Our friends were somewhere else on the overcrowded train. A young mother with two small children was close to tears. She’d been travelling for a few hours, put off one train and then not allowed to use her tickets on others. She was heading to Darlington to meet her mother and would have about an hour there before having to turn around again.

We saw her later, on the platform, being hugged by her mother. We saw her because we were on that platform, too. The announcement came as the over-filled train pulled in: “We would like to apologise but this train will be terminating at Darlington.”

The disembodied voice advised us to rush to the next Newcastle train, but when we did that, we discovered our tickets weren’t valid on Cross Country trains. We had to wait for the train formerly known as Virgin, and that entailed hanging around for 40 minutes as it was late.

We eventually arrived in Newcastle around two hours after leaving York; early the next morning, we would fly to Poland in around the same time.

One week later, I was at Leeds Station after an early Christmas meal out with the journalism lecturers at Leeds Trinity University. We’d been to the Town Hall Tavern, a pub stocked with Timothy Taylor beer, and the food was good.

Then it was late and I was ready for home. The train was due at 10.52pm and perhaps 30 or 40 people were on the platform. All had made the mistake of assuming the departures board was telling the truth. Bang on time, a train pulled in, but it was in darkness.

Then a station employee said in passing: “Oh, the York train is on platform 16-and-a-half” (or something), so 30 or 40 people hoping to arrive in York sometime that night had to run or propel themselves as best they could to the new and unannounced platform. I made it with seconds to spare.

Is this a sensible way to operate the railways? Two anecdotes don’t make a policy, although many more such anecdotes might just. Labour says that it would renationalise the railways. I’ve no idea if that’s a good idea, although it may well be a popular notion.

I suspect a re-nationalised rail service would work better in some ways and be awful in others; my gut tells me it’s not a bad idea, while my head says: “Hang on, it’ll only fall apart in some other way – you know, the old-fashioned rubbish way instead of the modern rubbish way.”

One thing’s for sure, though: what we have now fails to work too often. All those competing companies on the same line hardly make sense, especially when you are turfed off a train without explanation and can’t automatically board the next available one.