If you drive, you know the real exam begins before you even buy a ticket. The car park is a game of Tetris played on hard mode. You’ll circle like a hungry shark, praying that the bloke in the silver Ford Fiesta is actually leaving and not just fetching a coffee from the kiosk.
Then there’s the pricing. Parking here is so expensive, you half expect the ticket machine to offer you a mortgage. It’s cheaper to adopt a horse and hitch it to the bike rack. But you don’t have a horse, so you cough up and mutter about it for the rest of the day.
The Waiting Game
Once inside the concourse, you face the eternal wait. The digital board is a master of suspense. It flickers from "On Time" to "Cancelled" faster than you can say "Thameslink apology." You watch a man in a suit slowly deflate, his coffee growing cold in his hands. We’ve all been him.
The announcements are a special kind of poetry. "We are sorry for the delay to your train due to a cow on the line at Radlett." A cow. You nod, because in the world of St Albans, a cow is just as plausible as a "signal failure" or "leaves on the track." It adds character.
46143 | St Albans City Railway Station one of two railway st… | Flickr
