Here is Jack, hamming it up on our balcony on the last evening. This was a good image to hold on to as we left Paris, because it was a bit of a grim trip back.
People were packed in the stations. This was for two reasons. Firstly, it was the end of the school holidays, and a naturally busy time for the trains. Secondly, that volcano in Iceland had stopped the planes, and every man and his dog wanted to catch a train instead. (Literally, a woman got on the train with her dog at Plymouth, and she was not blind. I don't know how she was allowed.)
We had tickets, praise be, but it was hard enough getting bags and children through customs. The loudspeakers kept telling people who had not booked a seat to go away. Despite this, we noticed several empty seats on the Eurostar. I don't know how this happened.
The real problem was on the London-Liskeard leg of our journey. The station didn't look busy, but the train was packed. The English system is you buy a train journey, but not necessarily a seat. You can reserve seats (for an extra cost), but you don't have a right to one otherwise. We could not book seats in advance for this particular journey, but we thought if we got on early enough, we could grab some unoccupied ones - (not all reserved seats get their passengers, they can opt for a different train on the same day.) Only Eleanor and I managed this trick today. I think I will copy some of Wayne's letter home to describe the rest of this journey:
Our train to Liskeard got called and off we went. The train was absolutely packed! There were no seats and no space.Tensions were running high between some passengers. We got on the train, and I found a slightly out- of -the -way corner in the buffet car to dump the bags and the family. I then explored through the train to see if I could find anywhere to sit. Here, I was a bit clever as I realised that in the reserved seating section some of the seats were only reserved from Reading. So, I told the family where those seats were and they went and sat in them in the hope that the people wouldn't turn up in Reading and all would be well. Meanwhile, I stood with the bags with the other people, packed in amongst the goats and the chickens and the crates....only joking, but it did feel like some sort of refugee train out of Calcutta.
For what it was, my comfortable little corner was some of the best standing space available. It was suitably out of the way of most people, with a couple of places to prop me and some bags up. The train's departure was delayed, which was just what we needed. The tension between passengers had boiled over in the next carriage, and some big bloke had clocked some smaller bloke in the face, for some reason. The smaller bloke was running up and down the train with train staff, screaming for the police to be called. I'm glad Stef and the kids were comfortable and away fom all of that, and didn't see it.
Anyway, eventually the train got going, and I resigned myself to my fate that I was going to be standing up with the luggage for the next four hours. We got to Reading, and fortunately Stef and Eleanor's seats were safe. However, Jack and Annie were kicked out of theirs, so they came back to join me. After some consternation from the kids about the situation, I think I discovered that the main problem was that they were half-way through watching a film on the laptop. Problem solved! We propped the laptop upon the bags, ran it off the battery and continued watching the film. I think quite a few people standing behind joined in watching as well, although they could not hear the film as the kids had their earphones on. It passed the time. Eventually we got back to Liskeard at about 4pm. We did a bit of shopping and arrived home safe and sound. Phew!
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