I’ve been racking my brain for all the things that have ever gone wrong, in the history of teenage train travel between me and my sister, because all our offspring are going to France. Between us, we have a huge amount of experience in the matters of missing trains, missing connections, losing passports, and arriving with the wrong passport, but all of that is too annoying to be said, apparently. The kids think that the most competent person in the group sets the tempo, so that its combined efficacy races to the top. I know for a fact that the opposite is true, but this too has been filed under “a wrong thing that old people think”.
I’ve also got loads of embedded knowledge that has just been obviated by progress: when to sign a traveller’s cheque; what a traveller’s cheque is; how to ask for directions to the Pompidou Centre; how to make a reverse-charge call in a foreign phone box; what protocol to enact when one of you gets off the train, but the others don’t. None of these situations would even send a ripple across their untroubled pool of cortisol.
In the end, I came up with one cautionary tale. My sister and I were on a train from Switzerland to Calais; I guess we were 15 and 17. We assumed there’d be a buffet trolley, given that, come on, surely the Swiss invented the word buffet? There was not, and the journey took for ever – a week? A month? By hour two, we were about to perish from hunger, and that was when the woman opposite us started on her pack of madeleines. After what felt like two or three days of watching her making her way, daintily, through a million cakes, she still had half of them left, and then she got off, leaving the packet.
So we crammed them all into our mouths, except she hadn’t got off, she’d just gone to the loo. When she got back, she had zero cakes, we were both sat there with bulging cheeks, like incredibly guilty chipmunks, and my sister nearly choked, trying to break down matter without using her teeth.
“What’s the lesson, there?” my son asked. “Don’t steal cake?” “No, idiot, check whether there’s a trolley. If you’re hungry, you should always steal cake.”
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
