Day of the Train

Dearie me, I feel as though I have been flattened by a train.

It has been a day bursting with trains, and now that I have got to this end of it I am quite derailed.

It was Oliver’s last day.

That is to say, yesterday was his last day really, and today was the day of his return to school. He did all the usual boy-polishing things last night, the shower and ear-poking-and-nail-clipping stuff, and when we got up this morning the day’s project was to get him back across the distant mountains and into the frozen North.

Being on an economy drive we did not feel that we could justify taking a couple of days away from the endless cash-generation project that normally occupies our lives. Also the camper van is not exactly a gift to the environment in the fuel-consumption department, it has all the streamlining features of a drunkenly-hurled brick.

This meant that he had to go on the train.

Actually he had to go on several trains. There was one from Kendal to Edinburgh, another from Edinburgh to Aberdeen, and a final one from Aberdeen to Elgin, with a taxi booked to collect him from the station.

To top all of that he was not due to arrive at school until after dinner, so I ordered a pizza from Elgin that he could collect on his way past.

Oliver is a bit of a novice in the travelling department. He has done trains before, but never such a major journey with so many changes. He had a massive suitcase, weighing almost as much as he did, stuffed to bursting with everything that after half a term at a new school, we now knew that he needed.

He got up when we did, which was early because of Mark going to work. This was tiresome because of course we had been late going to bed. We had all sat in the kitchen after work, talking and making the most of the last hours together, until Mark fell asleep and we had to desist.

Once Mark had gone off to work, Oliver and I had a last walk up the fell with the dogs. I get terribly worried about being late for things, and had timetabled the day down to the last minute, and we set an alarm for the dreaded moment when we had to turn round and set off back.

We had almost reached the lone tree on the fellside when the alarm went off, so we carried on and walked round it and came home, which took an extra few minutes.

Then Oliver had to change his trousers. He is responsible for Roger’s ball, which meant that his trousers had a rather splendid collection of muddy paw prints.

We were only a little late, and we had plenty of time, so it was all fine until Cumbria County Council chose today to cone off a long section of the road and put traffic lights at either end.

I do not know why they did this, other than perhaps as a training scheme for newly-employed Traffic Cone Distributors, because when I came home again later they were collecting them back in again, with no evidence of any other activity in between.

This meant that we had to sit in a long queue of traffic for ages, after which we were getting quite late.

We had to go to Asda first, because I had not replaced his tuck.

We rushed round Asda, hastily slinging armfuls of Maltesers and Jaffa Cakes into the trolley, and then got stuck at the DIY tills behind an elderly inefficient man and a short-sighted Asda Colleague who was not quite sure how the till worked.

Oliver said that if anything in life could give you an embittered attitude, it would be getting up every morning and being obliged to put on a jacket that said: I’m Here To Help.

We made it to the station with minutes to spare, only to discover that his train was late.

We trailed up on to the platform and waited.

After some considerable waiting it became quite clear that the train was so late he would miss all of his connections.

We started trying to work out what he would do.

I said that I would go home and look it up.

In the end the train thundered unrepentantly into the station, and we hugged one another goodbye, and he was gone.

I went back to Asda for the things I had forgotten, and then home, to plot out the revised route.

I texted it to him.

Then I called school to tell them he would be late. I called the taxi company and changed the taxi, and called the pizza house to rearrange the pizza.

I made sure everything was reorganised to my satisfaction and went to the bank.

On my way to the bank, just as a sort of subsidiary adventure, I ran across an old acquaintance whom I was surprised to see, because she had been diagnosed with a brain tumour and given a year to live.

I was both delighted and horrified by the resulting story. She explained that the diagnosis had turned out to be wrong, which was a bit of a mixed blessing as she had sold her flat and booked herself into Dignitas in the meantime.

Fortunately the correct diagnosis had turned up at the eleventh hour, and so she had decided not to avail herself of the services of Dignitas after all, and now she was trying to buy another flat. This was not easy as she had already given away most of the proceeds from the first.

I thought that perhaps we ought to let people save Dignitas until they are really absolutely dying. It is a bit rubbish to insist they can only go whilst they are perfectly well enough to book their own plane tickets and flag down a taxi. Allowing people have some assistance to get there at the end might help to avoid this sort of misadventure.

I said that  was very pleased about it anyway, because it is better to be alive and renting a temporary flat than dead in a Dutch mortuary. I like her and was very glad indeed that she was not dead.

I was just contemplating this when the phone rang, and it was Oliver, who was in an awful flap, because he had finished up on the wrong station.

This was my fault as I had not realised that Edinburgh had two stations.

There followed an anxious three-way conversation between me, and Oliver, and a Scotrail employee with an impenetrable accent although kindly tones. In the end Oliver was directed to a platform for an Aberdeen train and told not to move, not even to visit the bathroom, until the train arrived.

He caught it and went to Aberdeen.

Regular updates followed.

I followed his progress anxiously, through the whole train-and-taxi-and-pizza-and-school adventure.

Even getting to school was shockingly problematic, because all of his things had been packed away for the holidays. He could not just collapse on his bed, which did not even have sheets on it, but had to start on a whole life reorganisation.

I did  not breathe comfortably until the housemaster rang to tell me that he was in bed and asleep.

I wish that I was doing that.