The Illusion of Having Control

💌 Also... Men in Shorts in December. Why?

Dear Powells,

Last weekend Stefan and I went to London. We caught the 6.08pm train after work on Friday and we prepared to leave with military precision and control. We packed light, each carrying a single rucksack with no overspill of belongings into tote bags - by far my greatest achievement of the year. I took it a step further and distilled the contents of my rucksack into 3 zip bags of decreasing sizes: large for clothes, medium for toiletries, small for make-up. I de-iced the car with de-icer ten minutes before our scheduled departure time, rather than with a credit card ten minutes after our scheduled departure time, as is my usual practice. We left the house on schedule, feeling in control of life.

On the way we encountered a driver who mistook the clearly marked 50mph sign for 25mph but as we had contingency, we were able to moan about them the whole way, without descending into panic that they would make us late. We arrived at the station 38 minutes before our train, admittedly that was a little too early, but it gave us time to pop to Stefan’s favourite eatery second to Waitrose (Greggs) and purchase hot beverages. We were still in control of life.

Then my phone malfunctioned: No signal. No Wi-Fi. No 4G. No 3G. Not even an E! In the space of a millisecond, it changed from being my most useful travel companion into a heavy, oversized, germ infested, grubby mirror. I completely lost my senses. The weekend flashed before my eyes: how was I to manage?! I would have to revert to skills previously known but long forgotten: orientation using street maps, asking humans for directions, using pay phones, scrawling friends numbers onto scraps of paper and clinging to them as fiercely as Kate Winslet’s character Rose did to that floating wooden door. I would have to entertain myself on public transport - look out of the window, for example, read a book. Good god. How pre-historic. I was on the verge of tears. Stefan silently judged me. Possibly considered whether he had made the right choice. I didn’t care. I was bereft. Things were slipping out of control.

Then the trainman required us to show our TwoTogether Railcard to prove – despite us sitting together and being legally bound by marriage – that we were in fact together. Stefan is in control of the railcard, just like he is control of the bins and recycling. But he did not have the card to hand: He had deleted the app that contained the card thinking the app was useless not realising the app was the only thing stopping us from being fined and thrown in jail. We were hurtling out of control now, like Keanu and Sandra on that bus.

Distressed, I tried to lie my head down on the pull-down table of the seat in front – impossible to do without breaking your neck – so I remained distressed in an upright position. A frantic 20 minutes ensued. Stefan re-downloaded the app but it loaded so slowly I thought I might reach my 100th birthday and receive a letter from the King before it finished. We couldn’t remember the log in. A password reminder was sent by email that took so long to arrive we had almost reached London. The train man kept walking past to remind us of his commitment to have eyes on the railcard.

We invented a new temporary password, I say temporary because we forgot it immediately, and then, with obvious relief, our railcard was found. We produced it for inspection, it was inspected and accepted. Jail time avoided… until we next travel together again. We were wrestling our bus back under control.

If these are your legs… please explain yourself.

Then as we were making our way across London, there in the top right corner of my phone, returned the joyous 4G symbol and two bars blinking at me. My phone had sprung back to life, possibly resuscitated by the shock of seeing men in shorts in December in freezing temperatures. I sucked up the tears that had been poised to fall back into my tear ducts. Life was under control again.

London was enjoyable until it became un-enjoyable. One moment, I was skipping through the city seeing friends, laughing gaily whilst eating sourdough and admiring festive decorations, my heart warmed by the Christmas shoppers and mulled wine. The next, I was silently cursing the overcrowded pavements and the family who chose to stop for selfies in the exit of the tube, unaware they were forcing everyone into a concertina behind them. The slow serving woman that moved as if through treacle – despite the urgency being silently emitted from my eyes like invisible lasers – incensed me. And the hot sauce spilt on the floor, in the exact place Stefan placed his bag, was the last straw. My 48-hour love affair with London ended at 12.32pm on Sunday December 3rd, conveniently 30 minutes before my train was due to depart.

I made my way to the upper floor of Kings Cross with 15 minutes to spare, my standard pre-train contingency that inwardly makes me feel in control of life but outwardly gives the impression I’m totally cool about catching trains. Arriving any more than 15 minutes early for a train, I feel absurd and irrational, arriving with less than 15 minutes to spare is wild and borders on anarchic.

On reaching the upper floor I was met with a confusing 3-queue system, managed by  over-jealous EMR staff who herded us into a line depending on our destination and then propelled us forward in batches, to board our designated train in an orderly fashion. This was working well until, cued by an overhead announcement at 1pm saying the train was departing in 2 minutes, they realised they’d mistimed the batches. Forced to abandon all protocol, they released the remaining few hundred people – me included – in one large batch and advised us to ‘Run… if you don’t want to miss it’. Things had got Out. Of. Control.

And that is how I found myself, with one minute to spare, running – in a most disorderly fashion and feeling as though I were going into battle – towards the nearest available train door as it started to beep shut, with hundreds of other humans.

I was one of the lucky ones. Possibly because I had packed light and was not dragging an unruly trolley case behind me that wanted to go in a different direction or trying to keep control of several tote bags filled with overspill, I boarded the train. I even managed to win the game of musical chairs I played with several other passengers, but I was not rewarded with my usual cup of tea and shortbread biscuit from the trolley because the train resembled a impenetrable cattle shed.

I alighted in Derby to thick snow which I had not been aware was coming and was therefore unprepared for. After digging my car out with a deodorant can and scraping the ice off my windscreen with a credit card, I drove at 25mph back to my cave. I have been reflecting ever since on how futile it is to think we have any control over anything, ever, and how really we are just on a big ball in space with more questions than answers, the most pressing of which is: Why do men wear shorts in December?

Yours, pretending to be in control,

Powell x