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.
