Missing Pat's 80th Birthday Bash

I stayed in the UK over the extra weekend in order to attend my mothers sister Pat's 80th surprise Birthday Party, which her daughter Ali had arranged at her house in Southampton for the Saturday night.

Looking at the train timetable, taking a trip down to Southampton from Kettering for the surprise dinner and then coming back up to London for the night before flying home was doable (just). So I decided this was one of those things you just do since it wasn't going to happen again and got a lift from my Dad down to the train station around 3:15pm on the Saturday afternoon.

Alas, this year travel has not been one of the luckiest pastimes I have indulged in, and shortly before I arrived at the station some inconsiderate Git threw himself in front of a train between Kettering and Wellingborough, closing the line in both directions.

This of course threw a spanner in the works completely. It appears that East Midlands Trains (the company the manages this particular line and Railtrack/Network Rail or whatever it's called this week, weren't used to this kind of event despite the ever spiraling travel costs. They were completely unable to implement any kind of coherent plan to get passengers to their destination or if there was a plan they utterly failed to communicate it to their staff- despite all the mod cons of email, txting, cellphones, electronic notice boards etc.

The Kettering Station staff told the passengers stranded at Kettering that coaches were coming from Leicester, some 25 miles away in another county to take them to Wellingborough where they could join London trains that were being turned around.

My father gave me a lift to Wellingborough where the Wellingborough Station staff told me they weren't turning the London trains around at all and there were no trains to London, just a coach to Bedford further down the line, where there would indeed be trains to London.

I took the coach which gently meandered its way through the rural countryside of Northamptonshire and Bedfordshire (well at least I think it did- it was pitch black at the time) and eventually arrived at Bedford Station just in time for one of the trains to London to leave the platform, since there was no co-ordination between the coach and the train.

Feeling like a wooden character in "Thomas the Tank Engine and Berty the Bus have a race." I stood around in the cold until another train arrived: A very crowded train that had come from Wellingborough and contained the passengers who had been stranded at Kettering who had taken the coaches from Leicester... etc. etc. I was less than amused.

I finally arrived in London around 7:00pm nearly 4 hours after I had started out. I decided to take the tube over to Waterloo and see what my options were for getting to Southampton late.
Changing tubes at Oxford Circus I was regaled with the following announcement "Waterloo station on the Bakerloo line is closed until further notice."

At this point I began to feel that in some way I had offended the Greek God of travel and he or she was sitting up on a cloud having a good laugh at my puny efforts to get to my aunts party. I finally decided enough was enough and went off to my hotel near Hyde Park and spent the evening in a local pub reading the paper.