This morning I got up very early, about 6:30 am, and I got to the Gare du Nord at about 7:15 - to find that my train had been cancelled, but I could go on one that left at about 7:50. This was fairly good timimg, because the journey is longer at the moment, we waited in Calais for 25 minutes before going into the tunnel, and the tunnel seemed to take much longer than normal. It's all because of the fire in the freight tunnel last week. My poor friend Suzette was going home to London last weekend, but couldn't go, because there were no trains at all on Friday.

I couldn't believe it, but in the row in front of me, which was one with seats facing each other, there were two Australian men, and a whole Lebanese family, husband, wife, and three children who were extremely good at singing. The two Australians and the Lebanese guy had one of these male conversations about everything, and how they were all historians, mathematicians, scientists and economists and knew everything, you know the sort of thing. It was pretty noisy, but I only wanted to kill them all about twice. Once when they started on the problems of the Middle East, and they were all being, frankly, anti-semitic, and the second time when the younger Australian asserted firmly that, before Eurostar used St Pancras, it used Kings Cross. Well, no, it was Waterloo. Not that it's important, but he asserted it so firmly!

Then I got the train to York, whh is only just over two hours from London and does leave from Kings Cross, right next door to St Pancras........... here I am staying at the Novotel, which is not bad (better than French Novotels I have stayed at). I already had a walk around the town today, but plan to see the sights tomorrow and take some pictures. I just had dinner in the hotel, with lamb, mashed potatoes and carrots, and two glasses of Montana Sauvignon Blanc! Hopefully I will sleep well, I am a bit disturbed, because I have had calls from Alec both yesterday and today, so ended up working for a little while before dinner. Thank goodness for wireless connctions and credit cards!