Travel Sick
Everyone misses their train from time to time, don’t they? Or is late for a flight, or has to run for the bus. To me it’s always just been one of lifes small inconveniences but I’ve realised that I need to face facts and make some changes before my tardiness and disorganisation rub-off irreversibly onto my children.
It hit me this morning after a phone and WhatsApp exchange with my distressed eldest daughter; she’d been stopped from boarding a train because she couldn’t show the discount card that had been used to purchase her valid season ticket. Some might argue that the ticket inspector was being overly officious, having already seen the ticket and supporting rail ID card, while others could say she should have kept all the tickets together rather than putting the season ticket in her phone case, ID in her bag and the 16-17 discount e-ticket in a phone app. I’m to blame though because it was me who stood at the station ticket office on the morning of the first day of term only to realise the discount card had to be purchased online. I was the one who hurriedly downloaded the app, bought the ticket and bustled her onto the waiting train rather than organising it the week before. I’m the one who has set a poor example again and again and she’s been there to witness it.
When she was about 4, my husband wanted to take me to Paris for my birthday. We didn’t have anyone to look after our two children for the weekend (or I couldn’t bear to leave them with anyone for a weekend) so I suggested we go as a family for the day instead. At the time we lived on the outskirts of London so caught an early train and were there just after breakfast. We had a wonderful day, crammed in all the sights and then decided to get something to eat before catching our 8:15pm train home. We found a lovely little restaurant not far from the Gare Du Nord (according to our map) but after dinner, realising we weren’t as close as we’d believed and unable to find a taxi, my husband and I had to run - he carried our son while I pushed our daughter in her pushchair - to the station. We must have been quite a sight, running up the street with our children, bags and my enormous belly (did I mention I was 7 months pregnant?). We arrived, puffing and sweating, at the concourse barrier where we were asked to show our tickets. While the guard checked them we watched in horror as our train slowly started to pull away - we had missed it by seconds. Then the guard shook his head and explained that we’d missed our train. Not the one we’d watched pull away moments before but the train we were booked onto two hours earlier at 18:15! As I began to plead for us to be allowed onto the next train, he shook his head again; apparently the train that had just left was the last one of the day. I summoned up the last of my energy, held tight to my childrens’ hands and did what any heavily pregnant mother stranded at a foreign train station would do…I burst into tears! The rest of the story, involving a dodgy pay-per-hour hotel and my husband’s dilemma between sharing a street with local ladies-of-the-night or a room with his angry and hormonal wife, is for another time. Suffice to say, all’s well that ends well and the kind guard managed to get us seats on the first train out the next morning. I have learned to make back-up plans for my travel plans and triple check train times, although I have since missed three flights (two on purpose and one by a couple of days). I’m working on it!