Travelling light...

This has been a busy week. The weather has been up and down, one minute raining, the next brilliant sunshine. I've been going into Milan to work in the morning, which is something I really enjoy - not the journey but the teaching.

Talking of the journey, we had a tragic incident on Friday. I didn't know the details until the next day but here is my experience. I had to be in a lesson in Milan at 12:30, to do this I had to catch the 10:50 train (and spend 50 minutes hanging around). I trundle up at 10:40 to discover the train had been cancelled. However, what was unusual was that instead of dispering, the passengers were still milling around (I won't go into analogies of termite nest, how cliched). Being somewhat resigned to the bad train service, I went to a local cafe, had a coffee and called my company contact to get her to warn my student. When I finished my coffee, I went back across to the station because a huge coach had pulled up in front. It seemed that TrenItalia had, for once, been efficient and organised a substitute service. This surprised (and pleased me) as normally a cancelled train leads to the Shrug "What can be done..." response.

This coach was already full when I got there and people who had boarded were being ordered off by a local policewoman. However, once it had gone two more appeared, and this is where being big, bolshy and British paid off. I 'persuaded' the locals that it was important that I got on this coach (being about a foot taller with a big, heavy handbag did help). Once ensconced it was a matter of sitting and waiting. About an hour later, we arrived at the next train station where we got off the coach and onto the train.

While travelling from my station to the next, we crossed a bridge on which a train was stopped. Next to it were a couple of fire engines, an ambulance or two and several police cars. These had blocked one side of the two lane bridge which explained why it had taken us an hour to go by road, a journey which takes about ten minutes by rail.

I managed to get into my lesson only twenty minutes late (which suited the student who was extremely busy). The journey back was incident-free which left me wondering what it had all been about.

On Saturday morning, I was sitting in my local cafe having breakfast (as I can't get porridge here, I've developed the habit of having a latte macchiato and a brioche in a cafe every morning) when my eye was caught by the front page of the local newspaper. My Italian isn't good enough for me to read the paper but, having bought my own copy and with the aid of a dictionary, I found out that an elderly man had thrown himself under the train, just before the bridge at about 8:30 that morning.

I don't know what prompted his decision but it did put my annoyance into perspective.