the train to Holyhead will leave from platform 7...

so many journeys along the North Wales coast line from Euston...yet the one to the speed course was the first time alone on a train in so long...

remembering the journeys....heading home from first trip abroad, hiking with Girl Guides in Switzerland, a mammoth train and boat journey...seeing the sea along the North Wales coast through the dark...

heading home from a summer language refresher course in london age 18, fresh from teenage romps in regents park with a public school boy - the first i met (and maybe the last?) - catching the sun set as the train heads west and seeing the sea again....

heading home, many times, as a student from uni in London, nursing the hangovers and all-night-party headache...sitting in corridors on rucksacks...

heading home on the train from three months study in Leningrad in the Soviet Union in 1985, eyes and brain swimming with the culture shock, the colours, the adverts, the availability of "stuff"...

heading home from Mexico after a post grad year there teaching English, lurching to the British Rail toilet every half hour, belly swollen with what later proved to be a large intestinal worm...or worms, plus who knows what other parasites...

heading "home" - now, home has changed...I am a mother so is my mother and father's home still "home"?

i have a newborn son, three weeks old, his dad has gone off with work to United States so i head "home" to mum with small baby.

to make a point, she provides a cardboard box lined with old blankets - "it is all they need"... he feeds, on and off, a lot..."not a problem so long as he is putting on weight" says mum.

but he is not...the health visitor has told me to get him weighed while in wales...i don't....i have niggling doubts, this is not as it should be...

now, years later, trips to north wales have been in the car, with one child, with two, with three...more often than not without their dad who is "too busy working", and later he is an ex so doesn't come..

so now, returning home to London on the train ex-Holyhead to Euston which I have picked up in Chester...

filling in the survey form about my child's use of a voice output communication device...that baby who was not feeding well turned out to have so many issues....

tick the boxes:

does the VOCA improve your child's life - yes

family situation - has having a disabled child affected your relationship - tick, yes

married, separated, single.... tick, separated.

it has been a long journey, many journeys...but now I am going home to my complex, complicated wonderful son, my two argumentative, clever, funny daughters, my life....

more journeys to follow, tracks travelled before, repeating that journey to North Wales with the children, even by car the first views of the North Wales coast still have that tug - see, the sea! the first glimpse as you speed (well not actually speeding obviously..) down the A55...which wasn't there on those first train journeys, it was a long and winding coast road then....the sea view never fails to disappoint....

today, new tracks to find and follow...seeing the girls begin that journey of life, see them begining to discover, to plan their futures; seeing my son grow physically into an adolescent teenager, planning (for him) his journey into adulthood...

there is comfort in knowing that the ritual of journeys to North Wales will continue for some time...