"Sybiiill...!!!"

Someone once said that a little knowledge can be dangerous. As from today, I and the others in the class have the piece of paper as proof of that. Having passed the final assessment for the "Introduction to Rules" course, our little knowledge and us are being allowed to progress to the next phase of the training.

The next stage is three weeks of 'front-end turns', where we will each shadow a driver to see how the basic theory we have learned is carried out in practice. In some respects I'm quite hoping that the network will fall flat on it's face at least once so that I can see things like signals being passed at danger (with authority, naturally) and assisting failed trains. It would be quite dull to spend the whole three weeks just shuttling up and down on greens the whole time and never seeing what happens when the excrement hits the fan.

Today also marks the last day for us in civvies, as we have finally taken delivery of our uniforms. Some of it is OK, but I've got a particular bugbear with the shirts that we've been issued. At first glance they have the sheen of fair quality kit, but on closer inspection this sheen is revealed as only superficial. The shirts are truly awful. Had it been my own money they would have been straight back to the shop to be exchanged. I spent two and a half tortuous hours trying to iron my six shirts, none of which appear to have a straight seam between them. (Before anyone comments, I'm actually a bit of a Domestic God and a dab hand at ironing shirts.) And as for the sleeves...!! By the time I'd got to the last one, I'd been reduced to a Basil Fawlty-esque rage and had more than once bent double over the offending garment in a rictus of fury, silently shaking my fist at it as if daring it to crease in the wrong place. At the least my wife had the decency not to disolve into gales of laughter.

Well, not quite.