More train of thought

First, I’ll answer a couple of questions left in the comments of the last post. One reader was puzzled by how I wrote a blog post without a laptop or computer. I use the mind-write gadget. You’ll find it under ‘settings’. It’s one of the reasons I like Blogger. Takes a bit of getting used to, but once you have, it’s very liberating. You simply think about the post you’d like to write, run the sentences through your head, and it appears in draft format for you to fine-tune, next time you log in. Before I discovered mind-write, if I wanted to blog on a train journey, I’d write it down with good old pen and paper, and then type it up later. But that’s sooooo 20th century.

Then the question of what you do with your clicky key fob if you have to visit the immigration section of the US embassy in London. Before my own visit, I’d have said “you have to leave it at home, which means that if you have a car which only has clicky key fobs, then you have to get your mother-in-law to give you a lift to the station, as Husband had to do on his last trip”. But during my visit last week, I discovered that there’s a chemist five minutes’ walk from the embassy which runs an enterprising holding service. For 3 quid, you can leave your clicky key fobs, your memory sticks, your mobile phones, your bomb detonators, any other electrical item, or even an entire suitcase with them. They give you a numbered ticket, and you can reclaim your items after your embassy visit. This is brilliant. It’s just a shame the embassy doesn’t tell you about it in the instructions you receive when you book your appointment. What the instructions say is “Consider checking [these items] at a transport station or leaving them behind.” Yeah. Because “transport stations” in London have plenty of left luggage facilities these days. I suppose it wouldn’t sound very official to say “there’s an entrepreneurial chemist on North Audley Street…”.

I’ll also just tell you that I couldn’t put down The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I don’t think it’s a brilliant book, but it’s very gripping, and clever, and once you’re embroiled in it, it’s hard not to keep on reading. So yes, I’m in the “couldn’t put it down” camp.

Now then, Bloggy Friends. Bloggy Peeps. When I left you, I was all chipper and happy and looking forward to my day out in London. But it didn’t work out very well. I wrote about it on the way home. This is what I wrote.

Oh alas. Tail between legs. I’d been looking forward to my day. Two long train trips, the slight nuisance of the trip to the embassy, but lunch and an afternoon to myself in London. What a treat.

Oh alas. I did my dodgy hip in, running for the train in Malton in unsuitable flat pumps this morning. I made it worse by pounding the London streets. Aren’t I too young to have a dodgy hip that can’t cope with pavements?

I’m not going to recount the tedium and anxiety that accompany anything to do with a visa-related embassy visit. To sum up, I was there from 10.15 to 1.45, and it was horrible, and I failed to accomplish the task. Won’t go into details (it wasn’t the bad hair or the lack of a shower), and you’ll just have to believe me when I say that we have had more than our fair share of hurdles to jump over (and pay for) on visa stuff. We truly have. I’m not a great believer in complaining about the system. I get that it’s about a country protecting the interests of its own citizens. I get that it’s not designed with customer service at its heart (unlike pretty much everything else in the US). I get that I’m a supplicant, and hold no cards. I’m sure it’s no easier, and probably harder, to go through the equivalent British system. So I’m not complaining. But I will confess that, when the embassy finally spewed me out, unsuccessful and therefore facing two weeks of hassle and anxiety if we are to be able to use our flights a fortnight hence, with failure a very real option, I took my over-priced sandwich into Grosvenor Square Gardens, and I sat on a bench, and I shed a tear or two of sheer frustration. I felt like a performing dog, who one day, takes a look at the out-held hoop, and says to itself “One too many. This one is one too many. To heck with the jumping, even if I starve as a result.”

It’s not the first time I’ve shed tears in a London square garden. If you’ve got tears to shed in London, then I’ve found squares are a pretty good place to do it. Squares or parks. That’s the Iota hot tip for tear-shedding in London. Location, location, location.

So I had a curtailed afternoon, with no heart to do very much. I ate a scone in Selfridge’s. And then I suddenly remembered The Wallace Collection, and went and looked at the Laughing Cavalier.


Isn’t it wonderful that museums and galleries are free? I didn’t have time for a full visit, and certainly wouldn’t have been in the mood to pay for a quick drop-in. The information pointed out that he isn’t laughing and he isn’t a cavalier. I love that. Quite an achievement to be famous down the centuries for two things you are not. I guess the Smirking Man doesn’t have the same ring to it. I wonder if I would like to be preserved for generations in a smirking pose. It felt appropriate for the afternoon. Smirking at the US immigration process, though at its crushing mercy, seemed a small triumph. Better than total defeat, at any rate. The Dunsmirk spirit.

It was truly an awful afternoon, and – insult to injury – even the train ride back is horrid. There’s no air-conditioning, and it's very hot. They’ve come round with free bottles of water and apologies, but it’s vey unpleasant really. Especially for the unshowered amongst us.

That is what I wrote, on the 16.50 from London to York. Things have worked out (with, as I anticipated, much hassle and anxiety). Our way is cleared back into the US. The passports and necessary permissions arrived this morning. We fly on Friday.

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