By the way | Greenwich mediation time

I’m not great at mornings. In fact, that is something of an understatement. I enjoy my sleep and am rudely wrenched from it every working day by a rather obnoxious alarm clock.

You can imagine my dismay when a recent mediation in Cardiff was timetabled for an 11am start. I have travelled there by rail before, and do not recall the journey with any fondness. It is a small local train despite the mammoth trip, and one is lucky to spot a drinks trolley throughout its three and a half hour duration. It does make you realise that with the Virgin Trains West Coast service from Manchester to London, Mr Branson has been rather spoiling us.

I bumped into a friend in the 6am queue to collect tickets from the train station machine. She was rather earlier and more organised than myself, and had some time to kill before her London train departed from the same platform. Her husband was coincidentally also travelling to Cardiff that day, and had been complaining bitterly the evening before that there was no first class carriage. She could not contain guffaws of laughter as the provincial-looking engine clunked into the station, with her sleek and elegant Pendolino gliding in just behind it. I text her part of the way through my journey to find out how she was enjoying first class luxury and received a somewhat delayed response as she’d been happily catching up on some sleep en route.

Cardiff to Crewe

I arrived just as the claimant’s solicitors were starting a telephone conference with the court ahead of the trial which was scheduled to start in six weeks if we did not arrive at a settlement today, so no pressure. From my side, the conference call was being handled back in the office.

The mediation itself began towards 12pm in the end. I began by setting out our stall in terms of last train departure times as I have always found that mediations tend to fill their allotted time slot, no matter how long that is

I did nevertheless still wind up having to call my husband about an hour before I absolutely had to leave the building to sound out how he would manage with childcare and the school drop-off if I was forced to stay over in Cardiff. He responded by pointing out in no uncertain terms that I had no such option. He was getting up at 5am the following day to drive to Newcastle for a meeting which had already been postponed twice due to the torrential rainfall up there. He then researched the train times for me only to announce that the last one which I could sensibly catch had already left, as there were engineering works which meant that the last train would terminate at Crewe. This was unhelpful news, as my car was parked 40 miles away, in Stockport.

As I had, somewhat negatively, predicted at the start of the day, reaching an agree-ment took every minute of the time allowed and I was willing the traffic lights to be kind in the taxi to the station which the mediator shared with me (after he’d checked that the claimant’s solicitors had ?no objection to that) because his last train home was due to depart around 10 minutes after mine.

Unsung hero

We fortuitously made the station with around three minutes to spare and I thanked the taxi driver and the mediator over my shoulder as I ran up the stairs to my platform, where the train was waiting. I probably had around 90 seconds to spare before the doors closed, which was just enough time to dwell on the fact that I’d not eaten an awful lot during the course of the day and that it would have been ideal to have had enough time to go via a station food outlet.

I optimistically imagined that there might be a food and drinks trolley on board, as there had been that morning. It was not to be, however. The conductor informed me that the refreshments trolley had alighted at Cardiff just before I’d gotten on, as it didn’t run on the last service. I did not even have a bottle of water stashed in my bag.

My husband and my boss stepped in to save the day in terms of the disastrous journey’s end by respectively suggesting and approving that I take a taxi home from Crewe directly, and collect my car from Stockport the following day, which meant that I got home at midnight rather than 1am. My husband was in fact my hero for the day as he booked the taxi for me and even researched the location of the cash point in Crewe station, because I am much like the Queen in that I never carry real money. It made the end of a long but rewarding day infinitely less stressful.

I learned later, however, that the unsung hero of the day was the mediator, who unbeknown to me had dashed after me into the station and bought two baguettes and two cups of hot tea before sprinting onto my platform only to watch my train pull away. Now that’s what I call added ?value service.