Shoeless

Despite the fact that my younger sister is now a sophisticated young lady in the publishing business, I still like to think of her as my 11 year old, dreamy, hamster obsessed, naive little sis who (in contrast to her bullying, dominating big sister) was incapable of organising her school bag and usually forgot her lunch/PE kit/brain.

However, she still brings me great joy by sporadically regressing back to her dappy days. Recently she was travelling back from Gatwick after a gruelling week in the Netherlands, negotiating with the hardest of Dutch businessmen. As she struggled with her bags to board the Gatwick Express that was about to leave, an unfriendly man behind her hassled her, "For goodness sake hurry up". Flustered, my sister lurched inside the train and in one smooth action lost one of her shoes between the gap and watched it fall onto the rails below the train.

Panicked, rather than get off the train to negotiate shoe removal with the nearest Railtrack employee, she sat in her seat with just the one remaining shoe as the train left the platform.

She then spent the rest of the journey wondering how she was going to get home to south London with one shoe. Pulling herself together (and, bless her, making a phonecall to mum to ask for some kind of help) she got off the train at Victoria and hopped to find a station manager who could help her. One call from the station manager and a return trip to Gatwick she was met again at the other end by a young uniformed man, smirking as he held her shoe in his hand. This would have been a more magical story if he had turned out to be her Prince Charming. Sadly not, but she did get the shoe back in one piece and made me laugh for days at the thought of her hopping across the station concourse.