The Crazy Lady of GNER
Was on a train from London to Leeds with my fiancée just back from sunny Poland. We were sitting in the middle of the carriage, and the first thing we noticed was the rather loud conversation happening on the seats in front of us. 'Two ladies' seemed to be having a really loud but totally nonsensical conversation.

This is nothing unusual you might think, but then things got a bit weird.

One of the presumed ladies kept getting up and loudly stomping up and down the carriage every two minutes. We are talking about the form of walking little 2 year olds do when attempting to sound like an elephant, placing each foot down in a stomp as heavily as possible.

After this had been going on for quite some time I happened to stand up to get something from my bag when I noticed that the other 'lady' from the conversation was no-where to be seen. However, only one person had kept getting up and stomping up and down the carriage. Instead of someone else there was simply a large pile of shopping bags on the second seat.

There was of course no second person and the happy stomper had in fact been having a rather loud and animated conversation with herself for the best part of the journey.

It gets better....

This pattern of loudly talking to herself and getting up and charging about the place continued for quite some time, and as you can guess everybody was looking at each other with the same thoughts in mind. I was held in check from voicing my opinion by the embarrassment of my fiancée. Amazingly everyone else in the carriage was too polite to do or say anything either, so we all just sat there quietly listening and watching this one woman show.

Eventually we pull into some random station in the middle of nowhere and a ticket lady happens to be in our carriage.

'Are we stopping here?' says Stomper in barely understandable English.

'Erm, yes', came the reply.

'OK, I'm just going out for a smoke then ' grunts Stomper.

'Well we're only here for about 2 minutes...' says ticket lady as patiently as possible.

'That's alright then just wait for me.' squeals Stompy

She proceeds to drag all of her rather large shopping bags (of which there were several) off the train in order to light up. Needless to say the train pulled away practically straight away, leaving her to whatever fate awaited her in some obscure part of the midlands.

Silence fell in our carriage for the very first time on the entire journey. Then, one young lad said quite eloquently and in a broad Northern accent exactly what we were all thinking:

'She was a fucking nutter!'

Length? About 200 miles
(Polish bstard, Wed 4 Jun 2008, 1:27, Reply)