I caught the train yesterday. 9 quid. That’s 45 quid per week, as far as I can see there are no discounts for buying weeklies, or even monthlies.

Benefits:

• Reliable (?) 30 min train + 10 min walk (car is 45 mins at best at our usual leaving time, and often hits 60 minutes).
• Can read and even use laptop on train.
• Train doesn’t stress me out.
• Don’t have to worry about being killed by an idiot driver (no level crossings, btw).
• Follow my own schedule, can catch a 07:00 train, be at work by 07:45 and leave work before 18:00.
• More time with Kathlene in the evenings.

Costs:

• 25 Great British Pounds per week (driving 5 times in 3 weeks works out as about 20 quid of fuel per week).
• That’s ~£1200 per year (assuming I’m stuck in this place for time measurable in “years”, I hope not).
• And ~£2160 per year counting the full £45 fare, a rather distressing % of income.

It’s a question some money versus a lot of positives. But we operate on a rather tight budget at the moment and this “little bit” of money means removing something else from the budget sheet. Maybe eating out once a month instead of twice, scrapping the usual bottles of wine we get weekly, and a few other frills. Context: if we buy 3 bottles of decent red wine in a week we’ll pay about 15 quid, add in a few bottles of decent beer and we’ll hit 20 quid. So, in England the weekly cost of catching the train (£45 for a half hour trip) relative to the local cost of alcohol is significantly higher than in Sydney (where a weekly ticket for a 30 minute journey will cost at most 2 bottles of wine of similar quality).

Everything will be easier when I finally get our visas sorted out and Kathlene doesn’t face the impossible task of getting a developer job while on a Working Holiday visa. I’d drink to that day, but toasting isn’t quite the same with a glass of water.

We do a lot of good work towards the betterment of mousekind, I sometimes wonder if we really are their subservient drones. Very often I read stories about how scientists somewhere think they have cured cancer in mice, made them live longer or simply worked out how to grow a fashionably decorative ear on their backs. Do a mouse a good turn today, give it a hearty meal of red wine, grapes and nuts and then put it in the fridge.

These are truly exciting days to be a mouse.