Fire...
'There was a busker at the top of the escalator. I thought of him later and realised he probably died.'

My memories of childhood holidays and days out have a common thread through them - my mother not being able to walk very far at a time, due to being rather large and incredibly unfit, and all the joint problems etc that come with that.
It was bloody frustrating as a child, having to stop for her to sit down when all we wanted to do was run off, but if she'd been a skinny exercise freak in her twenties, I may never have been born.
My parents were in London for a few days, back in the mists of 1987 when I'd never been thought of. My brother (then a year old) had been left at my nana's house while they were away. On their last day there, they left their luggage at Kings Cross while they had a jaunt round town. True to form, my mam got tired and they decided to get a train back an hour earlier than they planned to. Hop back on the tube from wherever they were, collect the bags, on the earlier train, sorted.
By my Wikipedia research (forgive me, my memories are a bit fuzzy, having only been born a little over a year later), that would have been around 6.45pm.
It's about three hours on the train from Kings Cross to Newcastle. Maybe then it was a little more. Maybe the trains were slower, maybe it stopped at more places, who knows. Then once they were back in Newcastle, they had to drive to my nana's house in Sunderland, where they found her frantic and watching news reports of a large fire in King's Cross tube station.
Had they been on the train they'd originally booked on, they'd have been caught in the fire.

My mam is somewhat healthier now, having lost seven stone and taken up exercise, but if I remind her of this, I've got an excuse to bake and feed her cupcakes and pies.
(and now for someone completely different, Tue 24 Aug 2010, 0:01, Reply)