Plans

Robbie likes to plan – I guess that is why he is a train planner! His kind of planning is not the casual sort of planning that most of us would consider normal, it is a detailed and obsessive sort of planning. His train to work has been re-timed and the new timetable came into force on Monday. I would just make a mental note to be well organised and to be fractionally earlier getting to the station, but it wouldn't be a big deal for me. Robbie is different, he has talked for weeks about the change of timetable, he has re-timed his entire morning schedule and checked obsessively to make sure that there would be no last minute alterations. It seems a bit excessive to me, after all the train time has not altered significantly, it no leaves one minute earlier! On Monday I woke up exhausted, as the alarm clock went off yet again, it felt as if he'd had his alarm on the snooze setting all night! Robbie got up, made a drink and set about his morning routine with a new sense of urgency, by the time I got downstairs he was discussing train times with the cat while he made the drink for his flask. Oddly the cat didn't seem very interested! Half an hour later I had an incoherent phone call from Robbie, after a flurry of expletives he managed to tell me that no trains had left to go north that morning and he was just getting on a replacement coach. Network Rail strikes again! He got to work eventually, but his day had been ruined. Now he is focussed on his next big planning challenge – the best way to get from North Walsham to Wolverhampton.