Travel disasters: on being more adult

Happy New Year Readers! (clock check – 23:26 – still have time for the customary New Years Post!)

In the ongoing battle to recognise my self-proclaimed quirks for the limiting flaws that they are, I continue to go through the traditional cycles of high octane, adrenaline pumping giddiness and systematic self-loathing. Yet I know, ultimately, that my desperate teenage instincts need to be flattened if I am ever to make the transition from precocious child to wise adult. For if I fail in this endeavour, I have failed humanity as barely honed wit, hardly contained ego and an admittedly natural way with words is really all I have to offer.

Circle Of Friends – a tiny group of swindled individuals who believe that some part of this emotional bond must be worth it – tend to refer to my routine journeys between London and my parents house as excellent entertainment fodder, lovingly titled the Travel Disasters. I recently embarked upon and completed one of these in a truly terrific journey spanning the cosiness of the parental home to the equally cosy and somewhat more familiar confinements of the closet I call my bedroom. It was a whirlwind journey of showing up 90 minutes early for a train that I was meant to catch in Doncaster, not Leeds as I had wrongly suspected, leading to me begging Lovely Information Desk Man for much needed assistance. I managed to cry blubber beg talk my way to being exempted from that  rambunctious travel law of You Were Wrong So Buy a New Ticket And Give Us That Spare Kidney, which led to a further one hour wait for the next train to London.

Of course in this time I was spared no chiding. Lovely Information Desk Man provided me with the customary raised eyebrows, slight head shake and Illegible Angry Note for Train Conductor Lady that I deserved. I humbly accepted all he had to say. I did realise later that the ticket had been misprinted so the chiding was more for not checking this beforehand as I was getting the journey I had paid for…

Next came Parental Worry. That bastion of goodwill all parents possess in their guilt ammunition stores. Did I mention that Grandfather is staying with my parents? Oh yes, the Parental Worry crossed generations this time around. How foolish of a young lady like myself to book a ticket after 4 pm in the middle of winter. I mean that sincerely. Knowing my parents, I was bloody asking for it. Luckily, no direct conversations were had as Older Brother played ambassador in these difficult and disturbing times. Through a series of texts and phone calls with him, however, I felt quite betrayed as my ambassador committed treason among siblings, piling on the cross-generational worry along with his added Older Sibling Rebuke in a succinct 5 minute phone call. The summary of which also includes the finer points of the aforementioned chiding by Lovely Information Desk Man.

As you can imagine, I entered my much delayed train journey feeling quite glum. I decided to watch the Gravity Falls shorts to cheer myself up. The Universe was having none of it as motion sickness managed to set in before the train had even slithered its way out of the station. I spent the remainder of my journey asleep with a hood over my face and crying in my dreams.

However, as it is wont to do, my subconscious set to work sifting through this new barrage of character critiques, foolish mistakes and glum isolation in order to determine whether a Lesson existed somewhere among the horror.

There was. It had been told to me quite directly in the traitorous phone call. I need to Be More Adult. I was asked after the fireworks by a visiting relative what my New Year’s Resolutions were… ‘Write More’ was last years. ‘Write Regularly’ shall be this years. Of course, this extends to my blog posts. I shall at first endeavour to have 2 posts a month and, assuming I can deliver this for 3 months, increase this to a possible weekly thing. If I cannot deliver this then I shall… probably just write another blog post with the word ‘adult’ in the title and hope the message sinks into my soft, slippery brain.

A glum beginning to the new year, made even worse by the fact that I return to work tomorrow… and so the anguish continues.

But there is a part of me that is excited. Odd number years are good years. This bit of superstition is one I both invented – for ego-driven purposes as I was born on an odd day, in an odd month, within an odd year and happen to be, on the authority of many accounts including Mothers, an odd person – and stick by. Yay me!

And yay you Reader! Have a Happy New Year!!

Time check: 23:57 Yessss!!

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