I first began to conceive of this column three and a half hours before typing these words, as I stood with my wife and children in an impossibly long queue for the Eurostar, snaking across Gare du Nord in 35C heat. The problem was not the delay, but the discomfort, the anxiety and the uncertainty. It was impossible to read or even think because the queue moved and bunched; it was dammed and redirected at unpredictable points for unknown reasons. There was nearly a nasty accident as an escalator pumped people into a space that was already crowded.
It was not the most delayed I’ve ever been, not by a long way. Thanks to an unpronounceable Icelandic volcano, I was once five days late for my wife’s birthday. But the Eurostar experience somehow packed a season of stress into a few hours.
It was a fitting climax to a less-than-smooth attempt to tour the sights of Europe by train. Our train from Garmisch-Partenkirchen to Innsbruck was replaced by two bus journeys. The train from Innsbruck to Verona was late and, despite booking months ago, we weren’t given seat reservations. We spent an hour in a 40C waiting room at Verona, watching as our train to Milan was repeatedly postponed: just another 15 minutes, the departure board promised, over and over again. And the journey from Milan to Paris was threatened by a cancelled connection, giving us a couple of hours to fret over whether or not we’d be allowed on the later train. I love the idea of rail travel, but reality sometimes disappoints.