'Suddenly, I am in a film called Coach, Actually...'

He, Richard Curtis and half the cab drivers in London are a big, money-making alliance, duping unsuspecting impressionable youngsters into believing that they are only ever a chance public meeting, kiss in the rain, punch-up in a fountain and last-minute taxi dash to the airport away from living happily ever after in a townhouse with a Smeg fridge and a baby called Kiwi.

Of course, if life were like films it would be potentially disastrous for the economy, because the world's workforce would be too busy being carried out of factories in the arms of naval officers to do anything productive.

Nobody's phone would ever be engaged though, and we'd all be fantastically efficient because we'd be blessed with that super telepathic talent whereby you can arrange to meet someone without actually specifying a date, place or time (I always believe there must be a cursory follow-up text that we don't get to see '“ 'sorry, was so busy being charmingly foppish I forgot to say I'm taking you to Pizza Express with a 2 for 1 coupon I got on the back of a car park receipt').

Most crucially, if life were like a film then I wouldn't have been screwed over by trainline.com this week, and no monotone man in a distant call centre would have had to suffer my stream of expletives.

I wish people wouldn't ever tell me things are easy or painless, because then they invariably turn out to be neither.

Piercings, injections, Jim Carrey films, and now the train website.

If Cheap Advance Fare C is 13 and Cheap Advance Fare B is 16, and they all claim to be completely identical, why the dickens would anyone ever pay 19 for Cheap Advance Fare A?

The whole process is like sitting one of those cognitive ability tests in year eight, where you're never entirely sure that Anne Robinson isn't going to burst forth from the stationery cupboard and reduce you to ash with a cosmic ray gun for thinking that if Suzie is older than Brian, then her height is the square root of Sandeep's father's cat.

And then, oh joy, just as I've confirmed my purchase and repaired the damage to my wall and knuckles, the website has the last laugh.

"Chosen delivery method: pick up from fasticket machine at Euston station".

No. Big, fat no.

Because I definitely ticked the next day delivery box'¦ because getting them from a ticket machine means having the credit card'¦which I don't because it is happily at home in Worthing with its owner, my mother'¦ because I never updated my card from Solo to a grownup one'¦ because (and this seems to be the overriding root of the problem) I'm an idiot.

Which is how I find myself, 45 out of pocket and no longer friends with a couple of nice men in Dehli who refused to refund me or change the order, on a coach from Victoria to Birmingham and back.

They never get coaches in films, either.

Which strikes me as something of a missed opportunity.

The last-minute passionate clinch in an airport departure lounge has been rather overdone now, so it's about time we put Hugh on a National Express trip from Wolverhampton, next to Edna, who wants to show him photos of her grandchildren.

And coaches can be perfect spots for that filmic meeting scene '” I should know, I accidentally lived through someone else's on the way home yesterday.

Despite my normal trick of covering the next seat in assorted rubbish and looking intently psychotic/travelsick, I still ended up with someone sitting next to me.

Except he wasn't someone, he was the leading man in Coach, Actually '“ the perfect three-hour romance under the reading light that never was.

Dior-model handsome, charming, artistic and just downright lovely, he was first-class RomCom fodder'¦but for my friend Tara, not me.

You see, sometimes life can be like a film, but only if we wander into someone else's by accident.

Now I feel guilty for robbing someone of the "we sat next to each other on the 420 from Digbeth and it was love" story by not being single and not being interested.

"I met the love of your life on the coach home," I tell Tara.

"Sorry, I didn't mean to." Which is not something you ever hear Hugh Grant saying.