The stages involved in booking a ticket online in the UK from Brighton to Bath:

- find out cheapest fare and best times on www.nationalrail.co.uk

- find out after you've found the perfect journey that you can't actually purchase ticket from www.nationrail.co.uk and are redirected to other private rail-ticket providers

- re-enter the journey details on www.southwesttrains.co.uk/SWTrains only to find there are various trains missing from the results you swear you saw on www.nationalrail.co.uk

- go back to www.nationalrail.co.uk and re-enter the details to check you've not lost your fine-tuned memory

- find out that you were right and try another private rail-ticket provider

- re-enter the journey details on www.virgintrains.co.uk to find that your return train exists but your outbound one doesn't.

- re-enter details on all other private rail-ticket providers' websites and encounter the same and different non-existent trains. Also face new problems e.g. no online facility to book a bike space.

- realise a whole working day's afternoon has disappeared and you haven't been paid for it. Also you are considerably more irritable then you were four hours ago.

- spend fourty minutes the next day having lunch and walking with your girlfriend in the sunshine to the train station. Speak to a friendly member of staff who sorts out your requested journey in five minutes with their evidently superior computerised booking system.

- spend ten minutes the next day writing this anecdote