I’m getting to know the tree quite well now. Three* times running this week, on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, the train slowed, and finally stopped completely right alongside the tree. On one occasion for about ten minutes. I must have been sitting in the same place on the train, as each time I had the same identical view of the tree, which is small, and has a surprising number of leaves for this time of year.

On Thursday I finally managed to understand the muffled burbling that came out of the speakers as a message from the train man, saying that the delay was due to congestion at Tyseley Junction. This was therefore exactly like the part of the Reginald Perrin programme where he is always 11 minutes late due to one hold-up or another, which leads him, as he is eventually losing (or some might say finding again) his sanity, to write to the train company and suggest that they amend their timetables. I might write to the train company myself, in a sort of “fiction meets reality is stranger than fiction”.

It’s a good tree though, and now we are old friends. I’ll miss it if the train people get their act together and don’t keep stopping the train to let all the other trains, which presumably have timetables too, go first.

* In fact, it was four, as I was also on the train on Friday, when it slowed and stopped in the same place. But this time I was sitting on the other side of the carriage, and as it started to slow down, I embarked upon a difficult tissueless sneezing fit.