Bognor Regis

(This photo has nothing to do with Bognor Regis - I just thought it was cool. That's Bruno looking out over the Thames from Battersea Park at an interesting old boat.)

On the weekend (Brits usually say "at the weekend" but I'm trying to stick to my roots, here), B and I visited the Imperial War Museum near Waterloo. Our local train station was closed for engineering work so we walked the better part of a mile to another one. This station is quieter, has trains coming through only four times an hour, and is smack dab in the middle of a green park.

A Londoner might gasp: "Only four times an hour? That's madness!" Well, I grew up in the suburbs of America, where the bus came twice an hour, and only ONCE on Sundays. Really, the glamor of living in an area where I often wait less than ten minutes to catch a bus or a train hasn't worn off yet. Londoners will be sitting there griping about how the bus or the train is too full and I'll be the one in the midst of them all grinning like a loon because hey, while the bus might be packed, it's THERE and moving. Plus, you can get like, anywhere. Seriously. There are places in America that you simply cannot get to via bus or train... or if you can, it's incredibly inconvenient. It's really no wonder that non-drivers in America feel so disenfranchised.

Anyhow, back to Bognor Regis. We'd spent a good few hours at the museum and made our way back to the train station. Our train would be there within fifteen minutes so we found a seat and listened to all the other announcements.

Ok, I've got to cut for a moment here to explain something important. England has weird place names. It totally does. The best way to find them is to drive along rural backroads and sign-spot. There's a place called Thong. And on the way to Norfolk we drove past a town called Formerly. That's got to cause some confusion:

"So, where do you live?"
"Formerly."
"No, I meant where do you live currently?"

Right, so back to Bognor Regis. A train pulled up to platform 13 and the automated announcer comes on and broadcasts the usual spiel "Platform 13, for the 15:20 train service to BOGNOR REGIS, stopping at..."

I don't know if it was the exhaustion for the day or the cookies I'd had earlier, but every time the announcer said "Bognor Regis" in his funny voice, I almost died laughing. And then it got stuck, or delayed, and kept repeating itself. By the end, even Bruno chuckled.