The much delayed service to Lincoln Central via beautiful Worksop

It's not the journey, it's the people you meet along the way

[Sunday 2nd] I’d been in Rotherham (as an aside, serenely peaceful, given its recent, painful, history - all quiet streets and blue skies), hiking a bit of the Trans-Pennine Trail.

On the way home, I found myself with time to kill at Sheffield station, awaiting a train further south. On the way to Rotherham I’d eyed up the Sheffield Tap on platform 1, lusty with promise of real ale. So it seemed that fate had steered me to its pumps, its dark woods, and its deep booths.

It was in one such booth that I met Dave - and his wife, Fran. Dave did most of the talking - but I mean that in the gentlest of ways. He has the voice of Brian Cox. Dave is 81. His wife is “younger” - she still works (though somehow Dave got the better deal - they don’t look a day apart in age), dealing, in more his words than mine, with the mentally ill and obese (how do they fit them all on one ward?). I wanted to high-five him.

In-between our conversations Fran kept herself busy raiding M&S for yellow-labelled sandwiches to keep she and Dave satiated whilst they awaited a very delay train “towards Lincoln” (to, in transpired, “beautiful” Worksop - why do people feel they can only hint at their destinations? Are they at risk of theft or foreign occupation if known??).

Dave nursed a pint of something Stygian black and 4.6% ABV. We’d first entered discourse whilst he was reviewing the back of a packet of crisps. “Rapeseed oil”, he explained. “It’s okay, these are cooked in sunflower oil” he then said, relaxing into the leather bench seat. Playing dumb has its merits. “Like that stuff RFK is concerned about?” I offered. Apparently, I was correct. Apparently, rapeseed oil was developed to lubricate machines during the War when the U-boats cut off supply lines. I’m sure he’s correct. I still don’t quite understand why it makes crisps noxious, but we moved on.

I suggested that maybe it was akin to the concern over non-stick pans. “If Teflon can survive re-entry on a space shuttle, should it really be in the food chain?”, I baited. “So you understand!” he said, in all seriousness.

In any event, Dave took his eye off the crisps and Fran ate the entire packet whilst he was holding court. I don’t think she checked the ingredients list first, either. The recklessness of youth…

I was subsequently advised that Fran had been a vegetarian, but had seen the error of her ways. I suggested many of us made token gestures towards socialism, but that it was usually just phase.

Dave has two very highly accomplished sons - one an accomplished violinist (a skill he’s apparently traded in for computer programming at the behest of his new wife - the harlot! The disapproval was choked down but palpable).

The trains were delayed, Dave explained, to generate further income by forcing more passengers onto few services. Maybe, as with seed oils, he’s right.

I made a point to Dave about how beer used to have a much higher alcohol content - but that it had been reduced, first at the behest of factory owners who didn’t want intoxicated labour - and then to fit the shifting Overton Window around the acceptable strength of booze (as enforced by the tax regime applicable). He paused, gaze fixed somewhere below the surface of the table. “I don’t follow you logic; could you explain again?”. How charming. I repeated my previous utterance, word for word. Now Dave agreed whole-heartedly.

Occasionally I checked the time and the scheduling of my own train on my phone whilst Dave (in his borderline whisper) held court. Each time I did so Dave would ‘catch’ me in the act and stop, mid flow, saying “Oh, you’re busy”, and each time I would endeavour to explain that we were at a train station, that the time, and timing of train departures, was a particular concern, and that I could in fact multitask. And each time, re-assured, Dave would promptly resume his chosen topic, apparently amnesiatic to the preceding incidents.

It was tempting to imbibe further and delay my onward transit for the sake of Dave’s - and to a lesser extent Fran’s (she was quiet but her occasional remarks were surgically precise) - company. But after a second, swifter, pint of Thornbridge’s superb Double Green Moutain (8.6% ABV) we shook hands and I left them to their egg and cress sandwiches and the bid them safe return to beautiful Worksop.