Of Sharks and Trains

As mentioned in my last post, driving in the UK is no fun if you’re not keen on roundabouts. So you’d think the busses and trains would be easier, right?

Um.

Okay to be fair, we all went to London for the first trip – meaning Corran was there to help with the girls – and it went fine. But the first time I took Peo and Robin to London on my own, our experience was slightly different.

Peo and I thought things were going well because we got there early and scored the rare seats with room for a stroller beside them. This is important because it means I don’t have to take Robin out and wrestle her for about an hour as she tries to wriggle towards FREEDOM and LICKING ALL THE TRAIN THINGS. So there we were, comfy in our awesome seats, when they started announcing ever-increasing electrical problems with the train. It ended up dying completely, so they transferred everyone from that train to another train that was already full. Further, the first train had no stops between Cambridge and Kings Cross, whereas the new one did.

Because there were no seats, I ended up sitting in the door area with Robin in her stroller over me. As in, my legs were under the stroller and I was effectively pinned there. The other half of the door bay was taken by a guy with a bike, so there was no room to move. Then at the stops, assholes who had been seated comfortably actually swore at me for being in the way, even as I tipped the stroller further onto myself to let them get by. Oh, and there are other doors on the car, so they could have bloody well gone down the car to the other door if it was such a big problem for them.

All of this meant we got to London an hour later than planned, which meant by the time we got to the Natural History Museum the line was up and down the block. We waited nearly half an hour to get in, and then decided not to wait in the estimated hour-plus line to see the dinosaurs. I convinced Peo to skip that line since we’d be going back when school was in (and we have been back since but the dinosaurs are “on holiday”, which is museum code for “OMFG we have to refurbish the dinosaur room after it was mangled all summer by people who lined up for over an hour and then acted like pent-up twerps once they saw the giant things that could have eaten them”).

Anyway, we did some other fun stuff at the museum and then headed home. Our train tickets are off-peak so we either have to make the 4:14 pm train back to Cambridge or wait until 7:14, so we headed back to the Tube with plenty of time to spare. However, it seems that rush hour on the Tube started in 1067 (shortly after William the Conqueror was crowned but in plenty of time to handle the rat traffic needed for the Black Death), because even at 3 pm the thing was jammed full.

Aha, but there were two seats available in those Priority Seats – you know, the ones for people like me who are dealing with a baby and have an actual disabled foot – so I sent Peo to get one and as I was about to sit in the other a woman actually jumped around me to block me and sit beside my own kid, so I had to stand with the stroller.

When an elderly lady got on a couple of stops later I had Peo get up to let her sit (again, this was the Priority Seating area) because nobody else offered a seat, including the spry young men who’d hopped off and on with ease and were joking loudly with each other further down the row. I’ve since been told this is normal in London and our continued experiences bear it out.

Then at King’s Cross we elected to not take the long Cambridge train that was boarding as we arrived, because we figured it’d be full, slow, and the 4:14 direct one would be better anyway. But the 4:14 didn’t list its platform until minutes before leaving, at which point so many people ran for it that they opened the gates and didn’t even check tickets because there was very real danger of a press.

We got a seat by the doors so I could have Robin in her stroller in the door area but still sit somewhat comfortably, so that was lucky. Luckier still was that we weren’t in the car that they mentioned on an announcement that had a “chemical spill” and “was projected to be rather uncomfortable for the duration of the journey” and they were recommending “passengers in that car find elsewhere to sit if possible and if not, we’re sorry for your impending discomfort.” O.o

Then we got on the bus back in Cambridge, and about a third of the way home some idiot pedestrian or cyclist leapt out from the sidewalk in front of the bus, so the bus had to come to a halt sudden enough that everyone on board went flying. Robin’s stroller went over sideways and crashed into the aisle, Peo landed on the floor, I crashed into the bar in front of me. My wrist swelled up and really hurt overnight but recovered by the next day, and I found random bruises on my legs later as well. Robin was fine, but Peo’s knees hurt.

Here’s a screenshot of texts to Corran to indicate what kind of day we were having at that point:

2014-aug29-texts

Then as we were close to home the bus stopped and some folks wanted to get on with two large strollers. I had the stroller spot, and there was a disabled old man in the other accessible spot. I stood up and said to the driver that we were getting off at the next stop anyway so I’d let those other folks have my stroller spot, and I stood in the aisle. And the buggers who got on were snippy about it and didn’t even say thanks. Nice.

Then as I whinged about all of this on G+ that evening, Robin tried to crawl into the fireplace and I complained that she didn’t even have any floo powder and thus was hardly any help at all.

Peo’s blog version of this transportation nightmare is here and contains an appropriate number of exclamation marks given her age and the issues at hand. Pre-teens use exclamation marks, adults like me just swear our fucking heads off.

Anyway, the next time we went to London everything went so much more smoothly that I kept thinking I was merely accumulating negative transportation karmic points and something terrible would happen any second, leading to this text exchange with Corran:

And I know it's not just me suffering from the baby nails.

1) I am a professional writer and can totally spell “deinonychus” and “sharknado”. Really. Yes. 2) “Shatknado” is either really smelly or boldly goes where no Shatknado has gone before. Or both. OMG I never noticed the poop joke in Trek’s tagline until just now. I feel like I missed out on a crucial part of childhood. 3) I know it’s not just me suffering from the baby nails.

I was planning to go to London again today but slept poorly so I’ve put it off to another day. Instead, Peo and I popped out to do some errands and as we walked I updated her on the forecast.  I said, “You know how last night when we looked at the weather it said 60% rain chance on Sunday when we’re in Huntingdon?  Well when I looked a couple of hours later, it was only 20%, but the Friday rain had increased to 80%.  And I said to Daddy that I was afraid to refresh because it was changing so fast, it might get worse.”

Peo asked, “So did you refresh?”

“Yeah, and then Daddy and I laughed because then it changed to predicting thunderstorms for Friday! We agreed we should stop or else it’d update to a SHARKNADO!”

radar image of storms near London

The rare Giant Amoeba Shark descends upon London. Someone call The Doctor. Wait, no, I’m sure London has him on speed-dial.

Then Peo sighed, “I wish I really could see a sharknado.”

I said, “I’ll find the trailer for you when Robin’s napping.”

“Wait – it was a movie?!”

“Yeah, and a really bad one. It’s pretty much only famous because it was such a lame idea, that a tornado would suck up sharks and somehow they’d magically stay alive and fly around eating people.”

sharknado

Contains about as much plausible science as Shark Week.

“OH MY GOD LAND SHARK!” Peo said with a laugh, mostly because we are proper nerd parents who long ago taught her about land sharks. “I thought it was just a tornado made of sharks.”

“No, it’s sharks in a tornado.”

“That’s so much worse,” Peo said. “I still wish I could see one, though.”

“No you don’t. It’d be pretty gory.”

“So we’d just stay inside?”

Yes, oh child of mine. In the event of flying land sharks randomly eating people on the streets of London, we shall stay inside. Mostly because they also probably don’t give up their seats on the Tube.

shark skeleton and Robin

Here you go, Robin. You’re never too young to learn about the impending doom of flying sharks or British rail.

Introduction To The Loo

Let’s go on a magical journey of imagination, shall we?

Imagine you’re a mom to an eight year old and a one year old, and you’re going to go from the USA to England for a year where you’ll be homeschooling the eight year old at myriad museums and historical sites while trying to prevent the one year old from licking the displays. You need to pack up everything you own – and did I mention you and your husband are both hopeless packrats? – from your Austin, TX home into storage, and you’re behind because the eight year old hasn’t been getting her own packing done and the one year old has decided sleep is for the weak.

Now imagine it’s the day of the flight to England. You haven’t packed everything, the air conditioning has been going out most of this week in 41°C/105°F weather, and you’re in the position of deciding what stuff you love enough to make it in the last car run to the storage unit or to be shoved into the garden shed before rushing to the airport. You’ve had less than two hours sleep per night for a week and most of that has been on a broken, lopsided air mattress beside the baby’s crib. Oh, and all of the dust you’ve kicked up has necessitated being on allergy meds that knock you out so you’re completely loopy and you’ve upped the ante to declare that lungs are for the weak.

Now imagine you’re on the flight – which at least is direct since you paid an extra $300 per person to not have to transfer through Newark, NJ in the middle of the night with a baby – and while everyone else has gone to sleep, including the baby, you can’t sleep because your brain is madly going through what you left at home for the cleaners to throw out and you’re wondering just how much you can suck up to your friend with whom you left a key to cram some more stuff into the shed for you.

Now imagine you get to Heathrow, your husband gets the rental car, you all pile in, and you’re driving through the countryside trying to spot the castles and other romantic buildings you’re sure England must be stuffed with because that’s how it looks in all of the brochures, but mostly you just see a highway that is freaking you out because it’s on the wrong side of the road. You drift off a bit, but your brain is still wondering if it was worth it to sacrifice the vacuum back in Austin, not because it was a particularly great vacuum but it will cost a few hundred dollars to replace and the budget is already blown by the discovery of more mold in the front hall closet despite the $4000 you spent two years ago supposedly fixing the mold problem for good. So even though you drift off, you’re not really sleeping so much as experimenting with fun new ways to get neck cramps.

Now imagine you finally get to the Cambridge house you’re renting – which you’ve only seen in a couple of photos from an ad listing – and the landlord is showing you around, speaking what seems like a thousand words a minute because you’re utterly shattered from fatigue and stress and he doesn’t even have the decency to be closed-captioned like all the British people are when you watch Downton Abbey, and the baby is running shrieking through the house because THERE ARE SO MANY NEW THINGS TO LICK, and there’s something about putting salt and rinse aid into the dishwasher and the eight year old is stomping on the loud floor and the car is parked illegally outside and then you turn and see this:

monkey loo

The toilet sees you too.

And you want to ask about the monkey toilet, because it’s a god-damned monkey toilet and there are just so many questions, but you can’t because you have to run after the one year old and the landlord is going upstairs to talk about the weird electric shower and you haven’t slept and you have strange rashes popping up all over your body from all of the stress but there’s a god-damned monkey toilet.

So you go off and do some shopping so the baby has a safe place to sleep and there’s some basic food in the house but every time you come back into the house and go to the kitchen you have to pass the door that leads to the god-damned monkey toilet.

Then the eight year old announces, “I LIKE TO PEE IN THE MONKEY’S FACE.”

And in that instant you know deep in your heart – in that certain way that bypasses all neurological space because your neurons aren’t really functioning properly anymore anyway – that one day there will be a knock at the door and it will be Jane Goodall come to beat the living crap out of you.

So, naturally, you post that to the internet.

Thankfully, none of your friends bother to point out that Jane Goodall works with apes, not monkeys, because then you’d have to punch them (your friends, not the apes or monkeys, because apes and monkeys are really fucking strong and you don’t want to pick a fight with them, especially when you already know at some point you’re going to be answering for the part of the monkey toilet that has the hole blasted through the monkey face which you’ll be punching with your ass for the next year) because you can’t name an actual monkey researcher and besides, Jane Goodall is sweet and adorable so the idea of her maniacally wielding a machete through your house because of a toilet you didn’t even choose is awesome.

Plus, your friends are too busy to be pedantic at you about specific fields of research because they’re laughing at your exhausted rambling and sending you private messages about visiting you so you they too can rack up points in the coming Ultimate Zombie Dian Fossey Death Match between hordes of primates coming to wreak vengeance upon you for daring to shit through a monkey face toilet seat use the monkey loo.

Meanwhile as the first few days of your England adventure pass, you still can’t sleep because you keep mentally going through the Austin house wondering what you’ve lost, sending your poor friend driving down all the way from Pfucking Pflugerville to rescue items for you, and you keep finding the weirdest shit everywhere in this country you always thought of as an ancestral motherland, so somewhere amidst the fear and the fury and the fucking monkey toilet you announce, “I AM GOING TO START A NEW BLOG AND NAME IT AFTER THE LOO.”

And suddenly, it all makes sense. So here it is.