International traveller...

I’ve gone from the incredible faceless woman to the incredibly stupid one… all in the space of a few days.

This is what I looked like on the aeroplane with my face and eye masks. We landed and had a couple of days to recover, see my folks and visit the opticians etc before it was off to the Novel Racer weekend. The meeting was in Birmingham on Saturday but Spiral Jen and I were travelling north to stay with a writing friend for the weekend.

I shall leave out the heart stopping phone call that morning from a medical centre in Canary Wharf “Mrs B? We’ve got your husband here and we’re just transferring him to the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel…” Obviously I cancelled my w/end plans and rushed over to RLH at Whitechapel. It was only after the doctors diagnosed ‘Man Pain’ did I reconfirm my weekend plans.

Because of the above, Jen and I missed lunch; instead we rearranged to meet at the impressive and shiny St Pancras in time for our train to Derby. That’s “IN TIME FOR OUR TRAIN, SPIRAL JEN…” There were a series of progressively panicky phone calls and texts from me, and eventually Jen came huffing into view. By this time I had checked which platform the Derby train went from, but with only three minutes to departure Jen, who’d booked the tickets, had about 42 identical looking train tickets to sift through and of course the buggering barriers needed the right one not just any old one. Just in time, we got through the ticket machines, jumped onto the train and began walking down the train to Coach E where our reservations were.

Funny; we ran out of coaches at D. Then it went something like this:
“Can we go through that door?” I said to the ticket man.
“Nope.”
The doors shut, in preparation for departure.
“Oh. How do we get to coach E then?”
“Let’s have a look at your tickets, love.”
I heard whistles blowing in the distance.
“Is this where you’re going?”
“Derby yes.” Why would I have a ticket for a destination I’m not going to?
“This is the train to Fife, love.”

I can’t remember much of what happened at this point… some squealing, possibly, about whether he could let us off before we began moving…He was only too delighted to lose us. Anyway a kind man on the platform sorted us out for new route with a change at Leicester.

We had the loveliest weekend with lots of laugher, gorgeous food and chatter. It was brilliant to meet up with more Novel Racers in Birmingham, and then all too soon it was Sunday and time to go. Our friend dropped us at Derby train station. “Look,” she said, “It goes from Platform Six, and there isn’t another one on there. (The air was heavy with the unsaid ‘Surely even you two can manage the right train this time…’)

Of course we could. The trained arrived; we checked the displays for coach numbers and boarded. The train slid out of the station. Our reservations were C19A and C20A so we were bit confused: should we be in coach C or A? I left Jen with the bags and went off to find out.

I found a nice man who told me “This is the train to Edinburgh, love.”

I wish I could tell you I was joking but I’m not. We had to get out at Chesterfield and catch another train; one that was actually going to London.

See, I’ve thought about this a lot. I think to catch one wrong train is probably stupidity; to do it twice … means your brain is concerned with loftier thoughts.