OKAY. So here's the thing. I'm on a train. It is the 11.15pm from Manchester to Blackpool via Bolton on a Friday night. I've had more than a few glasses of white wine and want my bed.

My usual trick on the last train is to read a book, not an easy task when you're seeing double but definitely preferable to eye-contact or conversation with the dribbling, lager-fuelled fellows around me whom I imagine to be violent types, just waiting for an eleventh hour punch-up.

Three chapters on and we don't appear to have moved. Occasionally it had seemed to me that we were moving but it appears that was simply a combination of other trains passing us going the other way and the power of wishful thinking. And wine.

Looking around, no-one seems to be perturbed, nor even to have noticed. Slightly bemused, I return to my book.

An hour later not only haven't we moved from the station but we have no idea why. The tannoy is sporadically uttering words such as 'train' and 'delay', all of which I had managed to work out for myself, yet we're still none the wiser as to what is causing the hold-up. Cows on the line perhaps, or has the driver spontaneously combusted?

Still, no-one is complaining. All my life I have been led to believe that alcohol is an aggressant and while it certainly seemed to be having that effect on me, elsewhere you'd have thought the passengers were enjoying a leisurely cruise down the Nile, so sanguine were they.

I can only imagine that they were so drunk that they believed themselves to be already at home, in bed, and having a particularly boring dream.

I felt particularly sorry for the man next to me who, having fallen asleep two seconds after he boarded, now woke up, brushed himself down and made his way off the train, no doubt believing he had arrived in Blackpool.

Possibly he is still wandering down the canal bank wondering where the big wheel has gone.

Finally an insanely cheery train guard popped in to say that there was no progress on the problem so far, then popped out again.

At 1.05am we are still in Manchester. Still no-one has held the cheery guard hostage and demanded that we be helicoptered home, or at the very least that we are given a cup of tea and a custard cream for our troubles.

While the episode has decreased my faith in public transport (which was at zero anyway, so now I'm into minus figures) it has significantly increased my admiration for your average drunk whose patience and capacity for forgiveness would challenge that of Gandhi.

Eventually, just as I'm considering hauling myself into the front carriage and driving the thing myself, a la Keanu Reeves in 'Speed', cheery man comes along and, still grinning, tells us that a hundred taxis have been ordered to take everyone home as the train track is a no-go.

The problem? A train on the line. Amazing. Mind you, makes a change from leaves, I suppose