Mystery

When the train gets held at the station, people naturally start to complain; no exceptions. Not even if a diabetic passenger collapses moments after boarding because he probably didn't eat breakfast that particular morning or something. In fact, anyone in the adjoining carriage will, by human law, poke their head out into the aisle and stare through the little sliver of window in the door between compartments to see the backs of a crowd blocking off the impromptu patient of Chester railway station's emergency medical team. The complaining people, all the while, speak in tones reminiscent of why you left the area to go to University in the first place.

Whilst at University, you spend far too long stressing about coursework; both your own and that of fellow students. The fellow students' workload is dumped upon you not by your own choice, however. Once a healthy and stable workmate/friend/peer/colleague relationship has been established, that virtually acts as an unspoken 'open-door policy' for your comrade to inflict their stress on others. Luckily, this phenomenon only every occurs for two days before an assignment deadline in intense concentration. Once it's over, everyone reverts back to their happy selves leaving them able to partake in social or, in some cases, anti-social events usually involving alcohol and mild embarrassment.

Around the "term ending" times - i.e. Christmas and Easter - the former working groups and subsequent social groups end up saying goodbyes and farewells to one another as they dread a whole three weeks away from each other's company. If you're lucky, in the run up to the Christmas break, one of your peers may happen upon ownership of a Drinking Roulette-based game which essentially consists of a cheap moulded plastic roulette wheel, ball-bearing and several numbered shot glasses. Sometimes these glasses become filled with cola or water, or even undiluted squash for the particularly daring. Other times, fruity ciders fill the thimble-sized receptacles, and sometimes your peers explore the reduced-and-unspecified shelves of the alcohol aisle in the Crewe branch of Tesco, which happens to exist on stilts above it's ground-level car park. This results in the acquisition of a £7 bottle of what can only be referred to as the "mystery drink", which looks like Jägermeister, pours like soy sauce and tastes like Italian pesto and industrial paint thinner.

Once goodbyes have been exchanged alongside sordid secrets - all of which remain inside the room in which they were once spake - there eventually comes a time where you return to a former dwelling and a former existence you tried so desperately to get away from a little over two years ago. However, aforementioned victims of (possibly) long standing medical conditions do their bit to impede your progress - or regress as it were - whilst the surrounding passengers remind you of the fact that such people actually do exist.

As a result, you end up sitting on a static vehicle covered in layers of clothing, surrounded by two small suitcases on wheels, suffering an aching shoulder from a bulging satchel and realising that Patrick Wolf's The Bachelor album is actually pretty decent and that it does not, in fact, finish after track three. All the while, you find that it's a little difficult trying to admire the quaint, bizarre confluence of what can only really be described as "electro-folk" when you're staring at deserted buildings and faded rubbish that lies amongst train tracks that have clearly been out of use for years.

Eventually, you should make it to your destination, albeit forty-five minutes later than you would've previously hoped and proceed to realise how little your life seems to amount to as well as how much you wish the diabetic bloke from the train a speedy recovery as you gulp down tea laced with a stupid amount of sugar.