This is the story

of the woman sitting opposite me on the 1800 hours service from King’s Cross to Edinburgh, calling at York, Darlington, Newcastle, Berwick and Dunbar. Her story is that she is totally honest and this is a problem because she feels that her honesty compromised her performance at the job interview, her first for five years. She is not good with paperwork, she is good with an electronic diary but organising paper, literally bits of paper, is not her strong point and she admitted this, she said that she always used to leave the paperwork to her ex-husband, and now she is wondering why she said that. When they pressed her on what else weren’t her strong points, she kept being honest (peals of laughter) so made a total hash (she thinks) of the interview. She did an enormous amount of research into the company but not enough preparation on what she would bring to the role, and she knows from her current role the strong points that she could bring to the role. And it frustrates her that she didn’t say this because she would be really good at it, the role, and then it frustrates her that we enter a tunnel and that she loses contact with whoever she is telling this to at the kind of volume you might use if you were in a really busy restaurant or at a rock concert or in the middle of a fucking battlefield and then we come out of the tunnel and she reconnects with more peals of laughter and apologies for having been in a tunnel, and I wish her, I really wish her, all the luck in the world, and I hope that despite her pessimistic appraisal of how the interview went and despite her inability to be anything but honest the company will see that she is in fact perfect for the role and when she gets off at York they will send a message offering her the job, and that she will move, lock, stock, barrel, kids, family pet, new relationship and all to London so that I’ll never, on this train journey, ever have to hear her fucking story again.