To London and back

Certainty is such an interesting thing. Just before going to London on Monday I had an online discussion about how long it used to take on the train from London to Newcastle in the 50's. I know there were times when we took the sleeper, so it was quite long. I was saying how great it was now as the train from Berwick-on-Tweed only takes 3 hours and 40 minutes all the way into Kings Cross. How wrong could I have been! A whole 6+ hours after starting out in Berwick, I arrived in London. Apparently there was a tree down somewhere between Darlington and York, but we didn't know this. All the passengers knew was that the train came to a grinding halt in no man's land, buffeted by the high winds, with searing sun coming in and no air con and no windows could be opened. To be fair the guard did keep announcing that help would be arriving, but that took one and a half hours to get to us. The nun in the seat opposite, I noticed, did a lot of praying. We were the last train through from Newcastle that day, so maybe her prayers worked.

I was supposed to be meeting up with Cathy the Bookseller/expert blogger/and all round jolly good person, and in the end she kindly came to Kings Cross and met me there. We adjourned to St Pancras, which is spectacularly beautiful, and sat on the concourse in Carluccio's for food and sustenance. Cathy persuaded me that a g&t would be a good start... and it was. From there we went on to wine, which proved my undoing, and in my lightweight drinking status, 2 wines and I was done for. So much so that Cathy even managed to persuade me to get a Twitter account, so that goes to show just how inebriated I must've been!

I am now the 'proud' owner of @dr_vee11 on Twitter. I've so far managed one post of 11 words. I've worked out that the number of hours it took me to write that is approximately just over three times the word count. Rock on! I can't even remember why Cathy thought it was a good idea I did this, but she is very persuasive.

Meanwhile London was one meeting after the other yesterday, followed by an 'interesting' drinks party with my mother in aid of the Red Cross. I didn't realise that it was the host's 60th birthday. In fact when I saw the napkins I thought someone was trying to be ironic because the host looked at least 75. I only twigged when the birthday cake came out, which he cut with a sword (?!) - luckily I didn't have that much champagne that I said anything of what I was thinking (which has been known in the past) and managed to get away with feeling that I'd lost two hours of my life, but in some ways I think I got off lightly!

Today was another meeting before heading back to Kings Cross for the journey back. My man and dog picked me up in Berwick-on-Tweed a mere 15 minutes or so late. What a relief!