Coach - A city-to-city bus (à la Greyhound). You may be fooled by your guidebook into taking an overnight coach to, say, Edinburgh, Scotland instead of a train because it is a bit cheaper.

There is a reason it is cheaper.

Coaches are not meant for sleeping. For one thing, the heating and cooling system doesn't work. You either sit there, freezing to death under a pile of all the clothes you brought with you, or you complain to the stewardess and subsequently get hot air blasted into your face until you can't breathe. Also, they tend to overbook the coaches, selling more tickets than, strictly in a technical sense, there are on the bus. This, of course, is not something that would ever happen in America, especially not as reputable a line as, oh, I don't know, say...Greyhound. I gave up traveling in America by bus a long time ago. My only mistake in England was not realizing that America inherited more from its colonizers than just the language, customs, and an overly enthusiastic zeal for gossip-ridden, tabloid news stories. You will often sit at the coach station for over an hour waiting for four cockney guys in matching beatnik leather jackets argue with the conductor about the fact that there are not enough seats for them on the bus while you're busy bargaining with the woman in the seat behind you to buy her extra blanket.

Another thing, the seats on an overnight coach were designed by expatriate Nazi S.S. torture experts at the request of masochistic aliens with a very non-terrestrial body-type to provide the utmost discomfort possible. These seats are carefully calibrated so that they will dump you repeatedly onto the the floor. If the delicate sensors register that you are about to drift off the sleep, your feet will begin slipping on whatever it is on the floor that makes it so slippery (I don't wanna know), the seat begins to dump you off at a precise angle calculated so that your head will conk against the window as you slide like a wet noodle to the floor and you suddenly discover just exactly what it is that makes the very large person wedged into his seat next to you smell so very, very bad.

Platform - A train station track number, as in "Which platform for the train to Dover?" (if you think about it, this makes more sense than "track," because, as a person who does not want to be run over by a train, you really do want to know which platform you need to be on, not which track.)

Queuing - This is a word the British invented so they could laugh at anyone else trying to spell it. It means "Standing in a line" (they call it a queue). like the one at the "Victoria Information" booth at the Victoria train station. At this booth, the only information they are allowed to give, by law, out is the locations of the other, equally highly-specialized information booths located throughout the station. If you pester them enough, they might be convinced to surrender a little map of the Underground, but they won't be happy about it. They are probably lobbying right now for a separate "Little Maps of the Underground Information Booth" to be created so as to relieve this onerous burden from their poor, overworked, informational shoulders. If we are at all lucky, they will install this new booth in the store niche currently occupied by "Casey Jones' Burgers," which serves what is quite possibly the worst food in the face of the Earth. It makes pub grub look like steak tartar with caviar on the side.

Left Luggage - You will find these little offices in train stations and airports. Now I know this sounds like a lost and found, but in England it is where you leave your luggage on purpose and pay large sums of money so that surly station employees-who are trained professionals at this-will do you the honour of manhandling your personal belongings in ways you never dreamed possible (they have contests to see how many souvenirs they can break by playing rugby with your day pack).

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