Goodness, last night turned into an adventure.
I wrote in these pages fairly early in the evening. Fondly I had imagined that I would get home, perhaps a little later than expected, and not need to worry about recording my adventures but tootle about unpacking and getting ready for bed.
Readers, we finally staggered across our threshold at half past two in the morning.
This was considerably later than our projected arrival time of half past nine.
It was not the finest of journeys.
As perhaps you remember, a truck had hit a railway bridge causing delays. This meant that our train was unavoidably filled up with all of the riff-raff from other trains, who spilled into the corridors and two of whom actually finished up sitting on the floor of the first class carriage, much to the irritation of the train manager, but since there wasn’t even standing room in any other carriage, there wasn’t much she could do about it.
Anyway, they both got off at Coventry.
We sat in expensively comfortable tranquillity and ate our dinners and drank our drinks.
Then the train stopped for ages and ages.
Another train had dragged down the overhead power lines, and all electricity had gone off. The train could go no further.
Our lights were on, although our power supplies, for recharging mobile phones and laptops, had gone off, and the helpful waiter began to flap about a bit because he was running out of freshly-ground coffee and could not boil a kettle to make any more.
In the end the train went backward, for a very long way, to divert to Milton Keynes and go up a different railway line.
We had to wait in Milton Keynes for ages as well.
They served us gin and tonics to make up for the lack of coffee. Then they served water, and chocolate, and biscuits, and more gin, and eventually the power came back.
After that we were in all of the wrong places because of it being a different railway. All sorts of trains had diverted all over the place and so we had to wait in queues of trains in order to go anywhere.
They served us coffee, because the power was working again, and then more gin and biscuits.
It was getting very late.
Somehow this did not matter very much in First Class, especially as the gin took hold, and we were all becoming very sociable and friendly. The train staff kept us liberally supplied with all of our little wants, and kept the doors firmly blockaded against all of the increasingly sardine-shaped oiks in the economy carriages.
Then we looked at our newly powered mobile telephones and discovered that the train was going to terminate in Preston instead of taking us home to the Lake District.
We asked the waiter if it was true, but he didn’t know. Then we asked the train manager, who was called Jane and who occasionally appeared in First Class to make reassuring noises, and she didn’t know either. The driver, she explained, would run out of his train-tachograph hours and would have to stop, but they might be able to get another driver, or even another train, and she would keep us informed as soon as they knew.
It was almost midnight before they knew. The train would indeed stop at Preston, and there would be a bus from there.
We would have to finish the journey by bus.
I had thought I might mind about this because there is no First Class on a bus, but I was so tired by then that I didn’t care, and when we got to Preston there wasn’t a bus anyway, but dozens and dozens of taxis.
There were hundreds and hundreds of people. The economy carriages must have been unspeakably horrible. Certainly the people crowding out of them and on to the platform looked white, exhausted and defeated.
We weren’t, although we were a bit merrily intoxicated.
They loaded us into taxis. First, and into the biggest taxis, went the people who were going to Glasgow, then the ones to Carlisle, and then us.
There were four of us going to Windermere.
As it happened one of the other Windermere passengers used to be the bank manager when Windermere had a bank, and we passed the journey in happy reminiscences. There had been the day when Oliver opened his first bank account, warned to strictest secrecy about his PIN because the manager knew perfectly well that some things should not be confided in one’s impecunious mother. There had once been a very happy evening of drinking which had resulted in the bank’s employees being banned from socialising with me on weeknights for ever afterwards.
We missed the bank, we said, a little regretfully.
As if the journey had not been bad enough already, the motorway was closed as well.
The taxi had to go a very long way round.
Oliver was still up and waiting for us when we got home.
We collapsed into the house, exhausted and thoroughly tired of adventure, but nevertheless feeling more profoundly relieved than ever that we had decided to splash out on upmarket tickets.
Let this be a warning to anybody who might ever consider travelling in Economy Class. It is all very well when you are an extra in an advertisement for British Rail. You can smile and eat your picnic whilst playing jolly games with your children under those circumstances.
Real life is not like that.
It would be better if they had all walked.
