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Grumpy's day out...

Gee whiz, we created a bit of a stir the other night - old Malarkey and me. We were out on the town and after a beaut dinner of delicious flathead tails, oysters and prawns - washed down by a rather pleasant bottle or two of champagne.

Now I realize we shouldn't have done it, but we were feeling rather... bold ... shall I put it, and we lurched down to Melbourne's Spencer St station to get the train home.

It could have been the bubbly, but we seem to have misread our platform details and ended up way the hang out at woop-woop in a place called Broadmeadows.

We managed to get off the train and then found to our horror that there were no scheduled trains for the rest of the evening.

So we set our befuddled minds (well, more befuddled than usual) to the problem of getting home.

Now, being an old train buff for some decades, I have always wanted to be a train driver, and there just so happened to have been a beautiful, shiny silver piece of rolling stock just sitting in a side track.

Some duffer had left the engine running and so we hopped on board and started fiddling with the buttons. Much to our inebriated delight we managed to get the brakes off and then started heading off back to Melbourne.

We then discovered that by pushing a certain lever we could accelerate, and at one stage we were zipping along at about 100kph.

Again, fuelled by Moet-courage, we decided that this just wasn't quite fun enough so tried a bit of train surfing on the roof.

Before we tried, however, we thought we'd better let the train officials know that there was a beastie hurtling along some 17 kilometres of track right in towards the centre of Melbourne. We used the mobiles but were told by the nong on the other end of the line that we were drunk and to stop making prank phone calls...

Anyway, it was a bugga getting the wheelchairs up onto the roof and there were snowstorm clouds of dandruff flying out of old Malarkey's hair - but what an experience. This, by the way, should not be tried by anyone under 100 years old!

Anyway, along we were zooming having the times of our lives when the train took a corner too quickly and we rolled off the roof and into the Yarra River. Safe but slightly embarrassed we got out, hailed a cab and were taken home.

It wasn't until I woke up this morning that I discovered our little choo-choo ended up collecting a stationary train waiting to head the other way.

Just goes to show there's a bit of devil in us all - and I just want to gently chastise the train company for leaving such a tempting mode of transport within easy reach of a couple of rat-arsed old buggers.

Gotta go, there are blue lights flashing in the carpark.

If there is something that has really got up your nose, let Grumpy Old Coot know at grumpy@webwombat.com