… once famously said – “there’s one thing that I want to tell you, man, and that it’s goof to be back home”.
Mind you, I nearly didn’t make it, because I didn’t have a very good day.
Sherlock Holmes – or rather Arthur Wontner – did the trick last night. I managed about 2 minutes of the film before I was away with the fairies. All of my walking – 155% of my daily exercise – had seen to that.
Mind you – if I do lay my hands on the person who decided that it would be fun to slam all of the doors in the building at 04:18 this morning he would be someone else who will be drinking soup through a straw for the foreseeable future.
None of that prevented me from going off on my travels though. I was in some kind of warehouse plece with a few other people chasing after a long-haired cat – a black mangy type of animal – with the intention of stroking it. But it disappeared from my view and I couldn’t remember what it was that I was supposed to be chasing and found myself chasing after a large wasp. Just imagine trying to give that a stroke!
This morning I wasn’t feeling so good. I had a bad attack of nausea that made me quite unsteady on my feet. But I managed to calm myself down intime to go searching for a bakkerei. I trawled the streets for 15 minutes before I found a supermarket, and only realised on the way back that had I turned right out of the alley instead of left, the first door in that direction would have sold me a baguette.
I made my butties for the journey but had run out of time so no shower – I can wait until I return home for that.
The train to Brussels was pretty uneventful but the bad news there was that to catch the earlier train would have cost me an extra €46:00. That’s not part of the plan at all so I sat down quietly in a very cold, draughty waiting area and read my book for a while.
The Thalys was one of the older generation of trains with everything manual and I couldn’t make the wi-fi work. But that’s not the end of the world at all really. I have plenty of other things to do.
Apart from visiting the bathroom I slept almost all of the way to Paris, and then I managed to cross Paris on the metro without any incident – and isn’t that a change for just recently?
The walk down the platform to Vaugirard was pretty uneventful, except that some woman was urging her mother on, in the most ungracious terms, to hurry for the train. Mummy was about 80 and so this situation brought back some memories from a previous existence.
They missed their train but there was another one in half an hour so they had to run all the way back to the ticket office to swap tickets and then run all the way back.
The look of despair on this old woman’s face was something that I shan’t ever forget.
But Vaugirard was packed out completely. I’ve never seen it so busy. Apparently it’s school holidays starting today. I grabbed a seat in the waiting room next to a nice girl who was going to Granville from Martinique for Christmas – the last seat available. We had quite a chat and I had to fight people out of her seat when she nipped to the bathroom.
The train was packed to the gunwhales with people and once again, I slept most of the way back. But on the station I bumped into my girl from the waiting room and I wished her a Merry .
Then began the long trudge back here.
It was cold in here, which is no surprise, but I had the heating on full blast while I watched Bangor City beat Cefn Druids on the laptop. The little laptop because the big one decided that it would do an upgrade as soon as I switched it on, and that took hours.
Tea was once more out of a tin, and then I went for a walk – for no good reason other than the fact that I was at 89% of my daily activity. I might as well wind it up to 100% – as it has been for every day this week.
Now it’s an early night. i’ll watch a film too. That seems to be working well right now.
