I forget how many trillions of pounds are ‘wasted’ every year as a result of the chronic state of the transport infrastructure, but my experience this morning reminded me of a train ride from Lodz to Warsaw in the dark days of the mid 1980s.

After getting up at 5.30am I got to Newcastle at 7am with plenty of time to spare for the 7.39am which was late and then got to the station and then we all got on, and then it was cancelled at about 9am and then the next train came in and everyone dived on. It left with people’s faces pressed into strange shapes against the glass of the windows and the doors. I couldn’t get on it. La la la, the next train was late, had to wait, slowed down, stopped at Welwyn Garden City, got stuck in a tunnel. Wow, got to Kings Cross at 1.30pm. Managed to miss a meeting I’ve been preparing for for about six weeks which had some important people I wanted to see who might have given me some work. Tough.

Oh yeah, this post was about efficiencies wasn’t it? I can’t even begin to calculate the negative impact all this has cost me - because I don’t know what might have been. I might just have missed two months work. But I will now never know.