Happy to report we have all six of us at home though it was touch and go at the end of last week. Can’t remember if I told you but Bob had been allowed to head off to London to stay with a friend which then mutated into a trip to a party in Shrewsbury wherever that is. Miles away anyway. That I knew. He claims to have got a return ticket for £23 though from what I found out on-line a single at short notice was £130 so definitely something dodgy went on. Anyway, they got there and the following day, by his own admission “not feeling that great” he and his friend were dropped off at Stafford where they caught a train at just about the same time as I managed to get him on the phone when I was assured all was well. We exchanged details of possible train times to get him to Newmarket after he had made it to London. Then his phone battery expired and we were left incommunicado. Subsequently I learnt he was kicked off the train by an over-zealous ticket inspector, at some random station in the middle of nowhere, as they were on a “Super Off Peak” ticket. With an hour to kill they walked a mile and a half into the nearest town and found a much needed fish and chip shop. Down in London the two parted ways. Neither had any money. Bobs friend, a music scholar at Rugby, apparently contemplated busking on a piano in Euston Station to raise the necessary £3 tube fare but decided instead just to walk to Notting Hill. Bob headed for Kings Cross and caught a train to Newmarket. Just a little nonplussed, though goodness knows why because his mother had been frantic in her efforts to track him down, at the fact that there was no one there to meet him at the station he set off to walk the seven miles from Newmarket to home, nailing five of them by hitching a lift with some random guy heading in roughly the right direction. And so it was that Sophie, driving down a quiet country lane to take Lottie to her 5.30pm extra-Maths lesson in a neighbouring village, was mightily relieved though not particularly surprised, to come across Bob walking up a hill in the pitch black on the final two miles of his adventure.
Talking of adventures I have stumbled on a blog written by the son a friend of mine from our Hong Kong days. His Dad was a Cathay pilot and flew me into Bangkok when we moved to live there in 1996 allowing me in the jump-seat as it happens. The boy, even at 4 years old when I think I last saw him, called himself “Big Al” and is, as I write this, somewhere in Iran on a bike ride from Istanbul to HK. If you have a quiet moment and do not have a son like Bob then you might like to read it. I am both terrified and transfixed.
http://wheelsbelowzero.blogspot.co.uk/
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