Nearly Paris

It was only three days, but it seemed like quite a lot happened to me.

On Thursday I still hadn't heard from Kipper, so I sent a slightly desparate e-mail.

As everyone knows I have problems with public transport at the best of times (sober, in an English-speaking country I know, going somewhere I recognise), so when she said she’d meet me at the bus station I didn’t exactly panic (that will no doubt come later), but warning flags were raised. They turned red yesterday when she hadn’t replied to my e-mail ("Errr... I'm arriving tomorrow evening; you're going to be on a train from Lille. Could I please get single syllable instructions for getting to said bus station to meet you, given that I struggle with public transport in English? Oh, and maybe your phone number?").

In fact it must have been preying on my mind, because I woke up an hour before my alarm on Friday, looked at the time, and went back to sleep. I dreamt that I was meeting someone else in New Zealand, and I had to take a bus. There were about 20 possibilities for me to catch: any bus but the number 9. So I stand at the bus stop, and finally a bus arrives. I can’t see its number, because it’s obscured by a large tree. It’s a cool open top one, though, so I get on. Of course, it turns out to be the number 9, and stops are about every twenty miles, so I stay on, feeling more and more stupid. I would text the person I was supposed to meet, but my phone has turned into a brick (kind of like a calculator) and half the keys are broken off, so they don't work (even though I try using a ballpoint pen). (The scenery is gorgeous though – a bit like the West Coast, but with sun.)

I told Lara about my dream that morning, and she was completely unsympathetic. She laughed at me, and told me that it was Paris, and of course I’d find my way around. She doesn’t understand how these things just happen to me. I was telling my team about my dream, and Lara’s reaction to it, and Bronagh said to me that she and her husband always take public transport when they go overseas, and that they had massive problems finding the bus that they needed from Charles de Gaulle airport, and it added about an hour to their trip. This, needless to say, filled me with confidence. She mentioned afterwards that they may have been marginally under the influence at the time. Damn it – I have a half day, and I was planning on a liquid lunch as a means of dusting off my 13 year old French...