Edinburgh blog #1 3rd Aug

The day is finally here! I’m in Edinburgh! 2 days earlier than truly necessary but I don’t know if I could have sat at home for two more days without being incredibly bad company. Today (and by today I mean yesterday as I’m posting this tomorrow. Confused? I am) was a little bit stressful. I had a relatively early night as my mum, my brother and I were catching the 7 o’clock train from Kings Cross to Edinburgh. Very early but it meant we had a good amount of time in Edinburgh once we got there. We mean to use the extra two days to actually see Edinburgh rather than it being a blur either side of us while we are rushing from one show to another. So we got to the station in plenty of time, got on the train, had space for our bags and sat down in our reserved seats 47, 49 and 50, round a table, waiting for the train to leave. It was all going very smoothly. After a while a man got on the train and told me I was in his seat. We got the tickets out and it seems we had been double booked.

Never mind, there’s loads of spaces and we’ll just argue with the ticket man when he comes around.

The man was very friendly. We left the tickets on the table. The train left the station. We were on our way with only a fairly minor hiccup. I glanced at the ticket, wondering how they managed to double book us. We hadn’t been double booked. The friendly man was right. I was sat in his seat. I was sat in his seat because we had got on the wrong train. We were on the wrong train because the train we were booked onto was leaving an hour later from Kings Cross. My mother had decided to assume that we were supposed to be on the 7 o’clock train instead of doing what any other normal person would do and checking the ticket (it’s not the first time and I’m sure it won’t be the last).

Ok. Calm down. The next stop is Stevenage which isn’t that far away. If we can get to Stevenage before the ticket man comes along then we might get away with not having to pay the whole train fare again. Let the friendly man know we were wrong and he was right.

We got to Stevenage before the ticket man got to us.

Phew. Get off the train, all we have to do is sit on the platform for an hour and wait for the next train. Simple. Just to be on the safe side lets ask the man if the train we are supposed to be on goes from the same platform.

He was another friendly and helpful man.

He doesn’t know, it’s only his first week but he’ll go and ask someone if it goes from here and if we have to do anything else. He comes back and tells us that we might have to pay the fare from London to here but he won’t tell if we don’t. All we want to know is if the train we’re supposed to be on goes from this platform. He assures us it does, wishes us a nice day and gets on with his day.

At this point I was laughing about it. I had to laugh otherwise a stream of obscenities would have erupted from my mouth.

The friendly man comes back with a little book full of train times. He is making sure that our train is definitely coming to this platform.

As I said, he was very friendly and helpful.

Ah, the train we are supposed to be on doesn’t stop at this platform, in fact it doesn’t stop in Stevenage at all. It stops at Peterborough. The next train to Peterborough is at 7.46 from this platform. It is now 7.38. It’ll take about 30 to 35 minutes and the train we’re supposed to be on leaves Peterborough at 8.46. We should have plenty of time. Thank you very much friendly, helpful man.

I am not laughing at this point. So we got to Peterborough with about 12 minutes to spare. We were feeling slightly awkward at the prospect of having to kick people out of our seats seeing as we fucked up. We decided mum could do the evicting, after all, it was her fault. I had been quite stressed for quite a while and it wasn’t easing at all. I was imagining all the other things that could go wrong with this journey. The train pulled up. We got on, dumped our bags on the ever growing pile of suitcases and headed for our seats. Sure enough, there were people sitting there.

Mum is telling them that they are in our seats. They are looking puzzled, not what we expected. They pull out their tickets and tell us that they have booked these seats, 47, 49 and 50, round a table. The first thing mum does is check the time of their train, 8 o’clock, as it should be. Oh dear.

The problem was that they were 24 hours early, they had booked for the 4th, not the third. I began to feel a little better about our fuck up. At least we’d got the right day. They got out of our seats which I felt a little bad about although by this point I was pretty sure that they were doomed seats and didn’t want much to do with them.

You’ll be pleased to know the rest of the journey went smoothly. We got to the apartment fine, got a bit of shopping, I unpacked and all three of us then had a nap. We were all completely wiped out by the stress of the morning. We’ve just got back from having a Chinese meal and I’m planning on going to bed pretty soon after I’ve finished this. I aim to blog everyday although knowing me there will probably be a few gaps but I’m hoping by telling you that this is what I aim to do, I will feel obliged. Hopefully, my following blogs won’t be as stressful and will be about joyful thing, late nights, good comedy and interesting people. Fingers crossed.