Long life | 2 July 2015

The Eurostar train descended gently into the Channel Tunnel, went halfway along it, and then stopped. There it remained for what seemed a very long time, the silence broken only occasionally by mumbled announcements in French and English. The speaker was French, and his English was incomprehensible, his French only slightly less so. All that we could gather was that the train was being delayed by some sort of trouble in Calais. Only much later did we learn that migrants from a refugee camp had been swarming on to lorries heading for England and generally creating mayhem. They had even lit a fire on the railway track. Eventually it was announced that we wouldn’t be going to Paris quite yet but would go backwards instead to Ashford in Kent to await the all-clear to resume our journey. So that’s what we did, and at Ashford we waited for another long time until we were finally told that we wouldn’t go to Paris at all but would return to St Pancras station in London, where only an hour or so earlier we had braved security searches before boarding the train with bottles of champagne to get us in the right mood for our trip to the French capital.

‘We’ were the eight members of the Oldie magazine’s editorial and advertising staff going on our annual foreign jaunt. Every year the publisher, James Pembroke, sounds us out on where in Europe we would like to go so that we can live it up together for a couple of days and nights. It’s part treat and part bonding exercise, since the advertising people work in a separate building from the journalists, and we don’t normally see much of each other.