Off, out, away!

Up at 5, at Oxford station by 6.10 and at St Pancras before 8 to find vast milling hordes of people and heaps of baggage. It seems the 5am train had set off, broken down and come back. Announcements were telling people to go to the website to rebook but it looked like at least a trainload were waiting - surprisingly good-naturedly I thought - to speak to a real person.

Access to officials wasn’t helped by Eurostar‘s perplexing change to the way it issues tickets: instead of just holding a QR code over a scanner to get into departures, as in the past, we had to queue for window 4 so that an employee could look at our home-printed ticket-for-five and issue five magnetised boarding cards. Not a step forward for humankind.

Belgian railways in Brussels were little better with surly officials sending us up, then down, then up the platform, oh, and then down again, to find a door where we were allowed to board the next train.

Finally Bonn, where we've been invited to sing with one of our twin choirs comprising 70 German schoolchildren and associated adults. At this evening’s rehearsal one of my six fellow-Brits complained endlessly that the conductor was giving instructions only in German so we had difficulty knowing where to come in. Eventually I cracked and told her it was probably a salutary experience for monoglot Brits to be treated as we have treated the rest of the world for so long.

Late and tired by the end but at least the time is an hour ahead here so we could pretend we’d got up an hour later this morning.