Us Time?

Robbie wants us to go out and do something special on Saturday, to make up for the weekends when he abandons me and goes off to play trains. I liked the sound of that, but guess what he wants to do – go on a train! He really does have a one track mind. I suggested a couple of other things that we could do, but he said he couldn't possibly miss out on the HST's this summer, so the message is that he wants to spend time with me as long as it doesn't get between him and his trains! Travelling with Robbie is not always a pleasure, in fact it is very similar to travelling alone. I always make sure I have my own tickets and passes because he finds all sorts of reasons to dart off the train when it stops at a station leaving me convinced that he will get left behind, then at the last second he appears. He always meets people he knows and he wanders off to talk to them or to talk to the train staff and he doesn't come back for ages. In the rare moments that he is actually with me, he reads me 'exciting' snippets from his railway magazines, or he gets his quail map out and mutters incoherently to himself. Worse still he gets his notebook out and starts noting down train numbers, and then he tells me in great detail about the last time he saw this or that train. The only good point about Robbie's behaviour is that people don't seem very keen to sit next to us and I like it that way. I will probably go out with him on Saturday as long as he promises to be on his best behaviour!