Back 'home'

End of the holidays. A long fast (300km/h) train-ride up from Avignon to Lille, made much shorter by a great conversation with a retired former intelligence-services person who now wanted to write a book on issues around ageing, after caring for her husband in his final illness. A smooth change of train at Lille, complicated only by the fact that the reason why my ticket didn’t work the gate was ‘cos I’d accidentally gone in for the train an hour earlier than the one for which I was booked, but they let me on anyway. 🙂

Everything great – even heading home an hour earlier than expected. Until we got through the Channel Tunnel. At which point we slowed down to a relative crawl – around 100km/h – and then slowed again to a real crawl – sometimes as little as 30km/h – as we plodded our way toward Waterloo in the damp and grey gloom. Into London around half an hour late, and – oh gawd – onto the Tube, with a folded but still heavy folding-bike, a heavy rucksack and a book-laden front-pack for the bike. (Memo to self: don’t do the Waterloo And City line ‘connection’ to the Central line at Bank – with about half a mile [literally] of passages and stairs and more passages and more stairs, it’d be quicker and less painful to walk all the bloomin’ way to Liverpool Street.) And – oh joy – Liverpool Street station (more passages, more stairs), and on to the foyer, with no working train-indicator panels, hence run backwards and forwards between platforms (with aforementioned rucksack, bike-bag and folded-bike merrily unfolding itself and stabbing me in the leg, three times) to find out which bloomin’ train is a) going where I want to go and b) actually running, which half of them weren’t, and off eventually, with more delays and general dysfunctions, into the cold and damp and gloom back ‘home’ to Colchester.

To be greeted this morning by another cold, damp, grey, gloomy day. Welcome back to the joys of Britain, the British weather and the British mindset.

Provence this ain’t.

Oh well. 🙁