Home!

I am home and most* things seem to have survived four weeks absence.

Committing to travel was ridiculously last minute. We'd decided I'd try to get home Wednesday as that works best for cheap fares and availability of my brother-in-law for lifts to the station, but my sister couldn't get hold of her school's head to confirm she could attend the meeting I'll be back up for in late May as she wasn't in school on Monday. In the end we decided I'd just take the risk. I decided against booking online and picking up tickets at Darlington station (Bishop Auckland station doesn't have the needed machine) as I'd either have a ridiculously short time (10 minutes) to find the machine, get my ticket out of it and confirm that passenger assistance were ready with the ramp to get me on the train, or be sitting about for potentially an hour and a half. Trains from Bishop arrive at Darlington at 51 minutes past the hour, the online system would sell me a ticket on the 12:01 from Darlington if I booked from Bishop, but only on the 12:31 if I booked from Darlo - computers!.

So my brother-in-law ran me down on Tuesday lunchtime to get my hair cut and buy the ticket directly. Haircut was simple, it's not as if I have a lot any more, but it had reached the point I was having to consider combing it - the horror! "Number 2, all over" soon sorted that, and for half the price I pay in Rochester. So a quick lunch at  a local cafe - sausage sandwich, a plateful of chips and a coffee, £5:40 for both of us - and then we whizzed over to the station. I popped into the bank, conveniently co-located, then over to the station, thinking "Do they normally have the shutters down like that?" only to find a notice on the doorway "Closed due to bereavement between 1:30 and 3PM. It was, of couse, 1:50PM.

You could still access the platform if you needed to catch a train, but the waiting room and booking office were shut. Ironically the guys who run it may have been at the same funeral for a friend of my dad's that my mother was attending. So we had to head home for an hour, then come back later, at which point I was finally able to buy my ticket, and as an added bonus reserve the wheelchair space without any fuss - the last time I tried that in person it caused the guy at Chatham station so much cognitive dissonance that I was trying to book the wheelchair space while not actually in a wheelchair (I was using crutches) that he almost refused to sell me the ticket and I gave up buying face to face. But the instant I told this guy I'd be travelling by chair when he asked about seat reservations he was "Right, let me book you the wheelchair space". As an added bonus that meant the phone call to Virgin East Coast to arrange passenger assistance at Darlington and Kings Cross was over and done with in a couple of minutes, where normally having to book the wheelchair space via them (you can't do it online) takes ages as they wait to log in to the booking system. So I finally had everything sorted barely 16 hours before I was due to travel. Which isn't exactly my favourite way to arrange things.

The journey itself was almost an anti-climax, everything worked as it should. I was chatting with the woman doing passenger assistance at Darlo while we waited for the train and she checked if I'd need a hand to get up the ramp (which is pretty steep).

Me: "Yes, I might just make it up with nothing on the chair, but not with my luggage on it."
Her: "Most people need a hand, though Tanni Grey-Thompson gets up on her own"

Well yes, but unlike TGT I'm not a ex-paralympian wheelchair racer!

There was a young woman with a sub-1yo sitting on the opposite side of the carriage and facing me for most of the trip, he was doing the wide-eyes looking at everything around him thing, so I got a big stare when I wheeled in, and a smile when I waved at him, but otherwise she kept him entertained constantly - singing, reading, chatting (not always in English, possibly Polish). I was impressed at her energy, it was like being in the next room to a channel tuned to children's TV!

(And while we're on the subject of unbearably cute, I looked out onto the school field on Monday, and spotted a teacher doing their "forest school" thing with a class of 5yos, all in matching waterproofs and wellies, d'aw!)

I was finally home by 16:30, which was exactly on schedule, though I thought for a minute I was going to have to change taxi as fitting my chair in the first one in the rank's boot looked extremely dodgy, even with wheels off. He finally managed to squeeze it in, just - I'm convinced other people with the same model have given up before now. And the only problem after that was forcing the front door open past the snowdrift of mail that had built up.

My sister rang last night to confirm that she has the meeting date confirmed, so now I get to book to do it all over again in about four weeks! And, just to prove the CCG hasn't had a sudden outbreak of competence, to ask me what she should do about the fact they still apparently have a meeting scheduled in for today - that would be the same meeting we've rearranged for four weeks time {sigh}.

*Most because four weeks without watering meant the money tree on the back bedroom window shed a large branch and the one on the front bedroom window lots of little ones. The one in the kitchen survived, probably because it's on the window over the sink and gets watered more frequently than the others. At one point years ago these were all one money tree with a huge spread (approaching a metre), unfortunately it outgrew the kitchen windowsill and didn't survive a move that put it beside a radiator, meaning I ended up with several branches, all of which which survived repotting. There's a reason all my house plants are succulents!