Dear South West Trains

Dear South West Trains

When a train - let us say last night's 1857 Brighton-Reading service - is running a mere ten minutes late, it is perhaps best not to terminate that service at, say, Basingstoke, stranding your fare-paying customers on platform four, thus allowing the return service to run on time and to make your performance statistics look good.

This is mainly because there may be passengers on that train who have paid good money to be taken to Reading, who may not be, in the main, completely pleased to find themselves stranded short of their destination in what can best be described as sub-arctic temperatures for the best part of an hour.

The guard informed me that a network controller had decided that because there were "so few" customers requiring the service to Reading, the train would terminate early and make good the ten minutes lost to the timetable. In doing so, South West Trains managed to inconvenience myself and other customers by more than an hour. I'm sure there's some twisted logic in there which I, a mere customer, am not privy. Well done.

The station manager, train driver and guard were all very sorry and frankly embarrassed by the company's actions, but platitudes do not make the trains run on time, nor make up for my late arrival at work. Someone, somewhere needs to be taught that treating customers - even ones they cannot see from their control room - like something stuck to the bottom of their shoe is perhaps A Bad Thing To Do.

Yours, Scary

Neatly precised by Ionicus, who has qualifications in prose and hardly any pictures of a naked Carol Smillie:

Dear cunts
Fuck you and your fucking trains.
Love,
Scary

I think I'll stick to the original.


Shagger

David "Shagger" Blunkett - where do you start with this excuse for a man? I'm not going to take the piss out of his disability - anyone can kick a guide dog when it's down - but the writing's on the wall for his political career. In huge red, six foot high letters. With a handy braille translation.

But when a cabinet minister is caught shagging a married woman, gets her pregnant - possibly giving birth to a whole tribe of Mini Blunketts - how is it, according to The Sun, the woman's fault when she goes back to her husband for forgiveness? After all, any politician caught up to his balls in trouble has done the decent thing. Even Cecil Parkinson.

The merest whiff of shagging about was enough to see off Boris Johnson, and poor old Paddy Ashdown dropped his trousers and was exiled to Bosnia in return. However, if there is nothing more vengeful, less honourable than an enraged New Labourite, Shagger Blunkett's hissed "Stop harrassing me" when doorstepping journalists managed a whole two questions of him on the affair doesn't bode well for the future of a free press.

And what of the Filipino maid business, with the sight of a Home Secretary launching an inquiry into his own behaviour, which will, naturally, absolve him of any blame? If I'd have got involved with fiddling the books for the Au Pair, I'd at least have made sure she was a looker.

Speaking as a repentant shagger, my message to Blunkett is simple - if you don't like it up you, then don't stick it up her. A bit late for that, isn't it?

I do, however, look forward to seeing Shagger chaining himself to the railings outside Buckingham Palace as part of a Fathers 4 Justice stunt.