Back in Britain

The eagle has landed: I am back in good old Blighty. Air Canada was not the most luxury of experiences, but they got us in half an hour early. Oh but it was lovely to be on British soil again. I sailed through immigration at Heathrow (a first) and profusely thanked the passport man, whose flat London vowels sounded like music to my ears (I think he was a little confused by such effusiveness combined with an English accent). It was all so wonderfully, familiarly home – posters advertising things I had actually heard of, a WH Smith, a Boots! So comforting after Barnes & Noble and Walgreens. Heathrow was looking beautifully clean, and I jumped on the tube and steamed through the western suburbs of Greater London, feeling nostalgic as I saw terraced houses glide by. On an impulse I hopped off in Knightsbride – I had time to spare, and ended up having an impromptu lunch with an old girlfriend. I have known her since she was a gawky 11-year old with braces on her teeth; now she is impossibly glamorous and does a very worthy job raising money for the Royal Marsden. Refreshed, and in possession of an enormous pile of magazines and papers to read on the train, I hopped back on the tube and headed on up to Kings Cross, where I was catching a train to York, near where I grew up and where my parents still live.

Unfortunately, I had forgotten about the utter, pettifogging smallmindedness of British officialdom, a concept I was swiftly reminded of when I got to Kings Cross. In a fit of organisation, and an attempt to avoid the exorbitant costs of the East Coast mainline, I had booked my train ticket months ago. Because of Air Canada’s efficiency, I still had an hour to spare despite the impromptu lunch, so thought I would try and change my ticket to an earlier train. A mistake, as it turned out. I queued, reached the front, and was told to go and collect my ticket from the machine and then bring it back to them. Off I went. I put in my credit card, carefully punched in my reference number and...nothing. The bank, a while ago, cancelled my card because of fraud, so the numbers didn’t match up. Back I went to the queue. Got to the front, told the man what had happened. He told me I had to call East Coast and explain the situation. I got hold of a nice Geordie girl, who said that, just this once, she would put a note on the system to allow me to collect the ticket I had already paid for, “as a goodwill gesture”. If there is anything guaranteed to get my blood boiling, it is that phrase. I told her, very politely and assuring her that i knew it was not her fault, that this was ridiculous. Surely people must change their cards all the time? What would happen to them? There was an option on the web page to make changes if that happened, she explained. But what about me – who’s been living in America, landed this morning, has no immediate access to the internet and now just wants to collect a ticket? She had nothing to say to that. Eventually, I managed to get hold of the damn thing. I decided not to change to the earlier train, which would have cost me an extra £56, even with my railcard. The whole procedure took me 45 minutes. Good thing I wasn’t in a rush. I am resolved to write a letter of complaint.

The whole experience recalled a similar incident in America recently, which happened with very different outcomes. The Major had to fly unexpectedly up to Wyoming, to rescue his parents. They are out on holiday, and had gone up to Yellowstone, experimented with horseriding and fallen off. My father in law spent several days in hospital with a few cracked ribs and a very bruised hip, and both p's-in-law were rather shaken. Valiantly, the Major volunteered to fly up and drive them in their hire car back down to Kansas so they could recuperate at our house. I took him to the airport, where we stopped off at the car rental office to add him onto the insurance. We explained the situation to the kind man in the parking booth, who took us straight to the front of the queue to talk to the supervisor. “I’m not really supposed to add you on without the main driver present,” she told us confidentially. “But I’m going to do it anyway. Clearly you need to be up there and sometimes the rules need to be broken.” Quite.

British trains are much smaller than America trains. We took the train to St Louis once; it took five and a half creaking, whistling hours with many stops, but the seats were as wide as armchairs and there was plenty of room, because no-one with any sense travels by train in America – to drive the same distance to St Louis, for example, takes a mere four hours in the air conditioned comfort of your own car. East Coast trains are invariably packed to the gnunwhales, no matter what day of the week or time of day, and I’m typing this on a fold out table that’s smaller than my (very miniscule) laptop, elbows tucked in. They’re also prohibitively expensive – if it was £56 to change my ticket with a railcard (Forces, there are some benefits to being an Army wife), goodness knows how much it is if you don’t have one. The whole notion of flexibility comes at a cost. But for all their faults, the trains do run regularly, travel swiftly, and are generally roughly on time. Of course you have to put up with the overheard conversations of your fellow passengers – at the moment I am listening to an old man in a tweed cap twittering (not in the telephonic sense) about his journey to his hapless seat mate. Mine is due to get on at Peterborough – selfishly I hope he or she misses the train so I get the whole seat to myself. In a mere two hours I will have completed my epic journey (Kansas to Toronto, Toronto to London, London to York) and already America seems like a million miles away (which I suppose it is, but I mean metaphorically as well as physically). I feel as if I have woken up from a dream and it's wonderful. Whether I will be ready to get back after two weeks I'm not sure. I'll keep you posted.