Bristol; Saturday, 19 February, 2022

I got up relatively early for breakfast, meeting with colleagues, on the idea that we’d all be making an early get away from Bridgwater, but that turned out to be a pipedream as Great Western continued to cancel trains one after another, with the morning turning into the afternoon before there was any sign of movement on the railways.

Eventually, a little before 12:30 a train was shown to be preparing to leave Taunton, the next station down the line, in the direction of Bristol, so me and one colleague headed to the station to see if we could catch that.

The train did arrive just before 13:00 and proceeded to run very slowly, with lots of long pauses between stations, all the way to Bristol – finally arriving a little before three. A journey that should have taken not much more than 30 minutes actually took nearly two hours, but at least I’d finally made it to Bristol, albeit nearly 24 hours late.

I headed over to the hotel and checked in and then headed out with the intention of having a wander around Bristol – but my plans were quickly beaten back by a change in the weather. From the previous days high winds but clear skies we had now moved into the slightly less strong winds, but lashing rain instead, so pretty quickly I decided the best thing to do would be to pop into a supermarket to pick up a few things for dinner and then retreat back to the hotel for the night.