22 July 2010

£1.55

£1.55? To cross town? An unjustifiable amount for a small town. For a pound you got access to all that lay in zones one and two of London. One euro made all Paris intra-muros available.  But £1.55 for a journey that would take him half an hour to walk was ridiculous. With the driver change it would take just as long on the bus. And it wasn't coming for another twenty minutes. Fifty minutes and £1.55 to cross a crappy town in the north of England. The only thing he would avoid was the rain.

This is not a public transit system, he thought, but a network of mobile shelters that might take you somewhere slightly more interesting than the place from which you started.

And of this, at least, he was assured; a chat and a coffee waited at the other end. Paris and London could not offer him that. The price of the coffee? £1.55.
Jul 22, 2010 5:01:34 PM | 10 Minutes of Writing

The comments to this entry are closed.

NEXT POST
A million dollars It's been an age since I posted anything, at least six months. Reasons will be forthcoming, but one resolution has been to include a 10 minute writing exercise into my day. The (quickly) edited results shall be posted here with the tag 10 Minutes of Writing. Here's the first. “I had been feeling like a million dollars,” he said. At the age of thirty-four, James Reader had found himself in a hotel room in the west end of Glasgow, alone and unemployed. At noon, check-out had long past and yet he still clutched to the bedclothes and the trapped warmth...
PREVIOUS POST
She doesn't live here anymore She doesn't live here any more, but you can still feel her, the combination of inertia with a vague nervousness. After her husband died she kept the house by the sea for the sake of her children; she wanted to provide them with its stability as they had none in their lives. Besides, with the vision of retirement in the city gone, she found herself adrift in choices as wide and empty as the views she spent her days staring at. Soon after her husband, her mother died, and, unable to make the necessary decisions, she moved much of the...

Sam Wood

Sam Wood is a writer and teacher. When not distracted by other projects he is working on a book on rootlessness in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England.

The TypePad Team

Search

My Other Accounts