“Sorry, you’ve just missed that train, but don’t worry – there’ll be
another one in an hour.”
These are never the words you want to hear after a long and busy day,
so when the station manager said, “but you could get the next train and
change”, I felt my spirits rise. For a
fleeting moment, I remembered the words from our favourite Christmas film The Polar Express: “The thing about
trains … it doesn’t matter where they’re going.
What matters is deciding to get on” but that sentiment could have sent
me anywhere and not necessarily in the right direction, so I headed back to the
information board. There was indeed
another train due in just ten minutes that would mean an extra change but given
the choice between sitting on a cold platform for an hour or sitting on a warm
train that going in the general direction that I wanted to go in, I decided to
get on the next train.