West Ham to Pitsea, 10.30 to 11pm

This train smells of curry....What is this country coming too?..It's all ruined, RUINED...What happened to pie and mash and liquor?...It's all about minorities. Why aren't we speaking German? Or fuck that, Arabic?...I'm ashamed to be English now...I was born in fucking Basildon but I look around and ask myself, where am I now, in Pakistan, in India? Everyone's Polish...Pie and mash!"

Friday night, late night, a strange gap in the service, means this particular train is always bustling.

This rant, from one girl (mid-20s, I reckon) aimed, first, I suppose, at her two mates, but in essence at the rest of the carraige, continued from their boarding the train at West Ham until they departed (as was inevitably predictable) at Shitsea, I mean, Pitsea. I didn't listen to it all, switching in and out between that and the inferior entertainment available on my MP3 player. It felt like being a bit like being in a Mike Leigh drama at times. For some time loudmouth (or, rather, lardmarf) garl was engaged with some kind of conversation with a well-spoken lady of Indian origin on the carraige about her opinions...she kept defensively saying "but it's not about that...". God only knows what it was about, then.

Other highlights of the journey: somewhere past Pitsea, a woman on her phone saying "I was really close to lamping the bitch" (exact context of this uncertain), and a women telling her friends about the differences in taxi-sharing etiquette that exist between where she used to live ("not a nice place" - but they do share cabs there, Grays) and where she lives now, Leigh-on-Sea (adopts hoighty-toighty voice, "We don't do that sort of thing here", even if it means you have to wait another half an hour for a cab or contemplate a steep walk up the hill/cliff above the station). Indeed it transpired that the only people in fair Leigh who would contemplate such a thing would be a "sex pest", which the speaker was keen to emphasise that she was not. But hmmm, yeah.