Daddy's Birthday Present (Part 1)

Things didn't exactly start well after we left the train. A week or so before our trip we realised that taxis licensed by Durham City were not obliged to provide car seats for their toddler-aged passengers. (Shocking!) Little Miss would have to sit on our laps if we decided to take a taxi. (Gasp!) Being Good Parents, we didn't want to risk our daughter's life for the sake of a five minute taxi trip. (Very Wise!)

So Mrs K got into a taxi with the luggage, leaving the rest of us to walk. The taxi driver gamely tried to describe the way to our hotel. Unfortunately my eyes had glazed over long before he had even said the words 'Walk down the hill and take the first left...' No matter, I thought. I've lived here five years. I know this place. I'll find the hotel. Mrs K waved from the taxi, and then we were alone.

Little Miss did not like this one bit. It was pitiful. Her big round eyes filled with water and she yelled in her most plaintive voice 'MUMMY! GONE!' half a dozen times. The waiting taxi drivers glared at the Bad Daddy in front of them. Bad, Nasty Daddy then tried to reassure Poor Little Miss that we would see her Mummy again soon. 'MUMMY! GONE!' she continued to yell. Bad, Nasty and Evil Daddy then started walking down the hill to the city centre with Poor, Woe-begotten Little Miss wailing from the comfort of her pushchair. Meanwhile the taxi drivers were still sharpening their pitchforks and lighting their torches. A lucky escape, I think.

Now the damnedest thing about living in a place for any period of time and then coming back to it many years later is that everything looks familiar but all the buildings have somehow switched places. Within five minutes we were standing in an oddly familiar yet unfamiliar high street with no idea where we were going. I asked a couple of locals for directions. No-one I spoke to had any idea where to find the hotel.

And could we find somewhere that could sell us an A-Z? What do you think?

Ten minutes later we lost our Durham taxi cherry. And for some bizarre reason, every single person we met after this time knew exactly where to find our hotel and every single shop we went into sold street maps of Durham.

Spooky.

****************

I loved Durham as a student. I still do. Bill Bryson summed it up best:

Why, it's a perfect little city. If you have never been to Durham, go there at once. Take my car. It's wonderful.

At the risk of sounding like a stooge of the Durham City Tourist Board, I have to agree with our Bill. It is a beautiful, historic place and I would recommend anyone older than Little Miss to make a visit. Better still, you could do a degree there and really get to know the place. The University is pretty good by all accounts. Including mine. Ahem.

(Hopefully that will help my case when the Chancellorship at the University becomes available again. Being nice about the place certainly didn't hurt Bill's chances.)

Now imagine this idyll from Little Miss K's perspective.

1) It's Cold
Compared to sub-tropical Hampshire, Durham is practically in the Arctic Circle. From mid-October to April, you simply have to wear a thick coat, a woolly hat and gloves. Some of the braver locals and students are still running around in short sleeved t-shirts well into November, but us lesser mortals need to wrap up warm.

2) It's Hilly
Durham is very, very hilly. It's not a place you'd want to live if you are only 80cm tall and have only been walking for just over ten months. More pertinently, your hotel is on the side of one of the steepest hills in the city. To go back to the hotel you need to walk up this hill, get a ride on the Daddy Express (a.k.a. the pushchair) or whine and whine until your poor parents are practically in tears and they hail a taxicab. The driver of which will then moan that 'It's not that far, love. Can't you walk?'

3) There's Nothing To Do (Bar The Ducks)
Your historic castles and cathedrals mean nothing to your average toddler. Is there a soft play area in the City Centre? No. Are there any parks with swings and slides? No. Would your parents allow you to play outside in the freezing rain and howling wind if there were? No. Are there any hungry water fowl that need feeding / harassing? Yes. H'mmm. Good thing there are two bakeries close to the river then.

4) You’ll Have To Walk
Your parents thought that they could hire a car with an appropriate car seat for you. They thought wrong. Silly parents.

5) It’s Not Like Home
For five days your loving parents are going to take you away from 99% of your toys, 95% of your books and your comfy bed. You will have to share a room with your parents (or, more acutely, your parents will have to share a room with you...). The television in the hotel room does not, repeat does not, have the CBeebies channel and your parents have 'forgot' your Teletubbies DVDs. So that means no CBeebies, no Teletubbies, no Tweenies and no Josie Jump.

For five whole days.

If Little Miss had known what we had planned we would have had a mutiny on our hands.

Thinking about it, we did have one.

It lasted five whole days.

The Train

11.05 am, 26th October 2006.
Carriage C of the 8.47am train from Basingstoke to Durham.

'Beebies Stickers!'
'Sorry my love, you've used all of them. What about those car stickers?'
'No?'
'Or perhaps the ones with the butterflies on them.'
'No?'
'Why don't we draw a picture?'
'No?'
'Alright. Let's read a book'.

Silence. Ladies and gentlemen, we may have a winner.

'How about 'Baa Moo, What Will We Do'?'
'No?'
'Elmer?'
'No?'
'I know, 'Aaaaaargghhh, Spider'.'

Silence. Finally. We've found something she wants to do.

'It's really lonely being a spider. I want to be a family pet. This family's pet...'
'DOWN!'

Little Miss wrestles herself free and makes a break for the carriage exit, with her Daddy in close pursuit.

How did we find ourselves in this predicament?

My birthday was almost two months ago. After struggling to find me something for several weeks, Mrs Koinuchan had a brilliant idea. We should go on a little nostalgia trip back to Durham. I was a lowly post-graduate student at Durham University when we met, and she thought that seeing all our old haunts would be a pleasant and fun thing to do. We could pretend that we were still young and carefree (albeit with a two year old in tow). We could have delicious pub grub in the Court Inn, walk along the river, feed the ducks and be like we were Back In The Day.

Getting to Durham posed a problem. Should we fly? This would involve getting to Heathrow (train? taxi?), getting though check-in, boarding a plane, flying to Newcastle, catching a train down to Durham and then catching a taxi to our hotel. This might be feasible when you are a young, energetic student; it is utterly daunting when you are on a journey with the most reluctant traveller ever to grace this planet.

If taking the plane is not a possibility, why not drive? It is 281 miles between our house in Basingstoke and our hotel in Durham. Assuming that our average journey speed would be about 55 miles an hour (allowing for traffic) that means that I would have to listen to Josie Jump asking us to 'jump a little higher' approximately eighty-four times door to door. I'd rather gnaw my left leg off.

National Express? See above, minus the in car entertainment and with considerably less leg room. My right leg would be a goner too.

Since teleportation is an appealing but scientifically impossible option, this left The Train. It didn't seem such a bad idea. Little Miss would have plenty of room to wander around and we would be able to book a seat with a table, allowing her to play with her stickers and do some drawing. She even seemed excited by the idea when we were waiting on platform 4 of Basingstoke railway station.

The true nature of our situation only became apparent one and half hours into the six hour journey. This was when Little Miss realised that we had a limited number of stickers and apparently none of her favourite picture books. (This preferred reading list changes hour to hour and will never include anything that you might have brought). This was compounded by the problem of finding her something to eat from the cornucopia of culinary delights available in the buffet car. Difficult enough when you are a hungry, unfussy adult; damn near impossible when you are a picky toddler.

By the time we got to Leeds, we had reached crisis point. The train was running half an hour late. Little Miss was supposed to have started her afternoon nap two hours ago. She had eaten the fruit bars, bread sticks and apples we had brought for her. Our sandwiches were deemed inedible due to their minimal cheese content. Polly (her rag doll) had been consigned to Daddy's rucksack. The grandmotherly type that Little Miss K had charmed three hours ago was now looking murderously at her and her parents. It was time for drastic action...

It's a little known fact outside of parenting circles, but mummies have mystical and wonderful super powers. For example, a mother can calm their screaming child to sleep just by holding them close to their breast. I've tried it, but I always end up with a mild case of tinnitus and an angrier and more miserable child than when I started. Mrs K can achieve the impossible within three minutes flat.

Mrs K did her thing and Little Miss fell asleep. The silence was wonderful. No, more than that. It was beyond superlatives. The half-deafened denizens of the carriage went back to their sudoku and crosswords. I slept; Mrs K read.

As we pulled into Durham, Little Miss' eyes popped open and she started to grin.

'Bye bye, train. All done!' she giggled. And she scuttled off after her mother.