It was a bottle of South African Chenin Blanc, slightly warm and open a little too long, and I can tell you no more than that about its provenance. It had a chic silver logo on the label, and the shape of the bottle was longer and slimmer than usual; you might have expected to find it presented with a flourish by a lithe and tanned Eastern European waiter barely out of adolescence with whom you would pretend to flirt despite his evident homosexuality while he generously indulged you by playing along at some state of the art London eaterie, rather than under a seat on the delayed 7.20 from Waterloo, but that, I'm afraid, is where I found it.
When I say I found it under a seat, it was in fact me that had put it there in the first place, and it was sheer good fortune that the day when The Observer's wine critic gave away his barely-touched tasting bottles, and I remembered to pick one up before leaving the office, was the very day that the engine of the aforementioned 7.20 shuddered bravely and sighed its last a few hundred yards outside Witley station. It was already 40 minutes late, for various reasons which can all directly or indirectly be traced back to the last Tory government's staggeringly thoughtless cupidity in privatising the railways, and then it just stopped. Like that. In the middle of bastard nowhere, right in a Bermuda triangle of mobile phone signals.
There was a bit of good natured grumbling at first, becoming progressively less good natured as the minutes clicked depressingly by and then all the lights went off, because some desperate souls had apparently begun to fling themselves on to the track. We'd been reassured at the beginning that the Fat Controller would send a replacement engine just as soon as the appropriate forms had been filled out in triplicate and countersigned by someone in Macclesfield but de-electrocuting the track put the kibosh on that plan, and as we looked furtively about wondering who we would eat first if the siege lasted weeks, I noticed several pairs of eyes on my bottle, its opened cork jutting provocatively.
It's touching how quickly the spirit of the blitz can be rekindled in times of trouble. Commuters who wouldn't have established eye contact in the normal course of things happily swigged before passing it on, joining in mingled saliva and cheery banter like 17-year-old inter-railers. We were almost sorry, three-and- a-half hours later, when we were finally shunted into the station and freed, and probably would have swapped phone numbers if only we could have got a signal. Think about it, South West Trains - just hand out bottles of slightly warm wine and see what a difference it makes to the atmosphere aboard your indescribably shite so-called 'service'.
