Shock to the system

Brought to you from the 1619 (delayed) GNER service frm Peterborough to Kings Cross.

Yes, we are very sadly on our way home. When I was a child, my parents had a set of very modern fab and groovy Mappin and Webb stainless steel cutlery. The thing about it was that the handles were hollow, so it was relatively lightweight, but we never noticed because we were used to it. Well, we never noticed except when we came back from holiday (Guernsey, ten days, twice a year from birth to 1975), when we would go to have our dinner and find our cutlery hands sailing into the air. The moral of this tale (which I absorbed at a very early age) is that when you go into a new environment you subconsciously expect everything to be different, so it doesn't strike you as strange; it's when you return, expecting things to be familiar, that they strike you as different.

Which may be why Peterborough station seemed so utterly, utterly horrible this afternoon - the cars, the bus and coach smells, the crowds of people. The stuff of everyday life (I work in London, for heaven's sake) rendered completely alien by a month away from it.