It's been a shambolic start to what should ultimately prove to be a pretty important day. Macro Man normally catches a 6.33 am train from his local station into London Bridge; imagine his horror, therefore, when he opened his eyes this morning to discover the numbers "6:27" on his clock face.

After muttering the obligatory four-letter epithets under his breath, he sprang out of bed and raced through the shower at breakneck speed. If he hurried, he reckoned, he could just about make the 6.46 train which, while slower and considerably more crowded, nevertheless manages him to deposit him at London Bridge 20 minutes later than his normal service.

As he raced to get dressed, however, he heard an ominous rumbling from outside his window. This in turn prompted Mrs. Macro to spring out of bed, offering her own invective; the bins hadn't been put out and the dustmen were already outside. We dressed and jointly raced downstairs, with Macro Man not bothering to tie his shoes before springing out the door....only to find the garbage truck blocking his driveway.

"Which bins?" (recycling or rubbish?) shrieked Mrs Macro.

"Guys can you move I'm late to catch a train and I need to get out of here now!" bellowed Macro Man, in his best stream-of-consciousness technique.

Oh-so-slowly, the rubbish collectors backed the truck up, and Macro Man hopped into his trusty Golf and sped off towards the station, rolling down the window to offer a barely-awake wave to a disheveled Mrs. Macro, who'd managed to get the bins out in time. (Unbeknownst to Macro Man, Macro Boy the younger was, at roughly this time, slamming the door behind his mother, thereby locking her out for ten minutes.)

The station's only a couple of miles away, so after parking up and sprinting (with untied shoes!) to the platform, Macro Man improbably managed to get there at 6.39...enough time to queue for a coffee! In the annals of close morning shaves (in the figurative rather literal sense, naturally), this was close to a record turnaround from the bed to the station.

The rest of the journey, meanwhile, offered its own challenges; the later train is smaller and calls at more stations, so perhaps inevitably, Macro Man got stuck sitting next to some large-boned chap who felt it necessary to hold two large briefcases on his lap rather than stowing them in the luggage racks.