You know what they say: lunch in Southampton, dinner in London, breakfast in… Preston?

By now, I should have been mid-viva in Stornoway. Instead, I’m in the Apple Store on Buchanan St. in Glasgow.

The original plan had been to get the sleeper overnight from London to Glasgow (arr 0720), then hop on the 1050 from Glasgow Intl to Stornoway, viva the candidate, hop back to Glasgow on the 1935 flight and then get the sleeper back down south.

Instead, I got up this morning at 0730 (having been wondering where my 0645 wake-up call and breakfast had gone) to find that I was still in Preston: signal failures on the West Coast overnight due to cable thieves. To top it off, my phone had managed to kill itself overnight so badly that it needed to phone home to Apple before it would let me do anything (like turn off my alarm, for example). The Caledonian Sleeper doesn’t do wifi, or, as it turns out, 240V AC at more than about 0.5A, so I hadn’t been able to keep the laptop charged either.

Eventually we crawled into Central at 1110, so clearly the viva is a bust.

Today, therefore, I will be cruising the streets of Glasgow looking for fun (or at least food, drink and a film) until about 2200 this evening.

Edited to add: to top it off, there was no water coming out of the taps in my berth, and Glasgow Central doesn’t have a first class lounge (pay for a shower when I’m travelling first class??), so I’m verging on fragrant. Also, the breakfast on the train, when it arrived, was cold.