Yesterday, while we were walking in the park, T called me to say she had missed her train from Leicester, back to Uni, and what should she do. It was late afternoon, and the journey can take four hours on a Sunday, with multiple changes.
What could she do? I told her to take an earlier train next time, and learn from the experience, and to let her friends and tutor know that she wouldn't be back until Monday, so nobody would worry.
And today, she is back safely, although shattered because she had to get up so early. And she had to cart her massive bags to and fro(of course, you need so much for a weekend), making two more unnecessary trips. I am hoping that not having me there to pick up the pieces will make her more responsible, and that she will begin to understand that her actions have consequences. I think she is learning valuable life lessons (although she has always been quite resilient), and thank goodness that she is learning them more safely than I did. I have told her that she isn't the first person to ever have missed a train.
Take me for instance. When I was at Uni (in those days we called it 'college'), my friend Caz and I went to the Bierkeller in Manchester. We travelled there by train from Crewe, and bought return tickets, truly believing that we would leave the bar in plenty of time to catch the last train home. Of course we didn't. We drank far too much, deliberately missed the last train and then (details here are hazy, due purely to fading memory), we were going to sleep outside the train station and catch the first train home in the morning. I might actually have run off in a strop and made friends with some other rough sleepers, while Caz was trying to do the right thing; she did have a bit more sense than me. However, I/we were tracked down by friends and taken back to somebody's sister's house in Moss Side and given a sofa to sleep on for the night. It was quite grim, and I would have been very scared if it hadn't been for the bier still coursing through my veins. And to make matters worse, we had visited a Barber's in Crewe on the way to the train station and had our helixes pierced, so once the alcohol had worn off, I couldn't sleep anyway because of the excruciating pain.
We did catch the first train home in the morning, and arrived feeling very sorry for ourselves. But that is the last time I missed a train, or had a piercing.
Did I learn my lesson? Only until the next time I went on an outing with Caz, and ended up swimming fully clothed in the sea at Blackpool in November!
We are planning on catching up again very soon, what's the worse that can happen? Whatever, I know she will still look after me, like she always did. And I know that T has definitely learned this lesson very quickly, and that she and her new friends are already all looking out for each other, even this early in the term.
Resilience and good friends, what more could she need? It got me through this far!
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