travel calamity

(post written earlier on the train)

Well folks as I write this I am sitting on a train in my way to Cardiff for the tail end of halfterm! I've found a table on the train with of all things a plug socket so whilst I wait for my iphone to charge up again so that I can watch either Someone Like You or When Harry met Sally which I painstakingly downloaded last night for my viewing pleasure on the bus. Oh yes people you read correctly! I was meant to be on a bus. A bus that would probably be arriving in Cardiff as I write this still a couple of hours away from my destination! Why are you on a train then Gemma? I hear you all plaintively cry. Well that is a long story that involves much stupidity on my part. 

I was at my train station having just bought my ticket into Victoria so that I could go and catch the bus. I got on the train and thought I would have a quick sort out of my handbag so that I could find things a little more easily when ARRRRGHHHHHH no wallet. Chance would also have it that I was on a fast train with very few stops. A great thing when you want to get somewhere, not so great when you are desperate to get off and go back to where you started! So, I started ringing various British Rail outposts trying to find the phone number for my local station. Phoning various friends who I thought might be in the village to see if they could run to the station. 

Would you believe that stations in England no longer publish their own phone numbers? You can't actually get through to your own local station and speak to the station master! Instead you have to go all around the houses speaking to a variety of machines and idiotic people who don't seem to quite understand the urgency of a lost wallet and aren't prepared to wait on the end of a ringing phone for someone to answer. 

Forty minutes after the discovery of the missing wallet I was on a train from Clapham Junction back to my original starting point and on my tenth phone call to the central phone number I finally managed to get hold of a sweet girl who understood my situation. The fact that I was hysterically crying on the other end of the phone might have helped her to understand quite how desperate I was! She spoke to the nice station manager who kindly wandered over to the London bound platform and found my wallet, intact and unscathed. At which point I started crying hysterically again. I could have kissed the man if he hadn't been encased behind a barrier of perspex!

So seeing as I was supposed to be on the bus in twenty minutes and that certainly wasn't going to happen G started phoning the bus company to see if I could swap my ticket for a later one. Of course sir, no problem sir. Turns out it was a problem sir as all the buses were booked solid. So, my Mother in Law very kindly offered to pay for the cost of my train ticket to Cardiff so that I could come this evening rather than slinking back to my house and spending the evening depressed and crying in front of The Notebook. (I was in a Notebook kind of a mood. A wallowing self pitying kind of a mood.)

After spending the better part of an hour and a half glued to my phone, calling British Rail, calling G, calling friends, calling the bus company, twittering so M & Bro would know what was going on my poor little phone was nearly out of juice. Certainly not enough power to last a film and the phone calls I will no doubt have to make when the train gets delayed! So I fell upon the plug socket with joy and thought, well while I am here I may as well play on the laptop at the same time. Fill out an application form for a teaching assistant role at G's school being one of the things on my to do list! A part time job which isn't terribly well paid but if I think about the future it's certainly a place I'd like to be. I'm also considering finishing my degree. Part time, possibly Open University from home, but I'm considering it. And a part time job would be most hopeful in achieving that goal I can say!

And with that rambling over, my phone is now at 95% so I am going to chance a film! And I can always plug it back in if I need too!

One final thing, can you believe that there are only three days left of Blogtober Fest!!! This last week seems to have run like the clappers! Although I suspect some of you will be somewhat relieved that I am no longer going to be clogging up your feed readers!