William and I went to the cinema all by ourselves in Luton, without Tilly because she was at a sleepover at her friend’s. We got there on the train, which was scary because I was sick that morning and I didn’t want to be sick in the middle of nowhere! But how ever much I worried, I wasn’t, so that was good.
Mummy both wrote us down on a little slip of paper the code for our tickets, and then we raced up the escolater both with a slip in our hand. We found two ticket machines, right next to each other (that way we could see what the other person is doing) and started clicking on all the option buttons. That, of course, was not a good idea.
First we clicked on the biggest button, filling up the whole screen. This one said ‘What Film?’ or something along the lines of that. We found our film and started clicking frantically onto it, but we couldn’t find how to get our tickets! We clicked ‘back!’ at the same time, but William found the ‘Submit your Tickets’ or something like that button, and clicked on it first. I glanced over my shoulder and clicked on that one too. But just as I had finished my code and clicked ‘Submit’, I read and read and it said, “We are sorry, but your code does not match your tickets.’ Now I knew that William had printed them out first. The race was over!
When we got into the Screen 1 room, almost the whole cinema was empty! There was nobody at all on the right-hand side, and only about three on the left. So we galloped to the right, with our booster seats in our hands, just in case somebody tall came and sat bang in front of us. “They won’t do that,” Mummy told us, but we kept them anyways. “The whole cinema is empty and they wouldn’t just sit right ahead of two little kids. Come on, they have everywhere to go!” We put them in front of our feet and used them as foot-stools. Then Mummy left just as a couple and their baby and toddler came into the room. It was obvious they were going to walk past us.
But they didn’t! We were absolutely bemused. The lady propped up her perambulator with her baby in it right in the middle of the stairs. Her partner sat two seats away from the pram, and the little boy to the right of him. Luckily this man wasn’t very tall, so William could still see fine, even though he was in front of him. Just when we thought that we would be okay, the lady in the couple sat down smack bang! in front of me. When I squinted to see the screen as the adverts played, I saw the oval shape of the top of her head in the very middle of it. Great.
So, just as these crazy people sat in front of us and not in the hundreds of seats they could have done, we picked up our booster seats and put them onto our seats. They were a good foot up from where we were. So we hoisted ourselves up and sat on them – but they were too narrow for us! They hurt our hips. We then decided to budge a couple of seats to the right.
The film we were watching was called The Iron Giant. It was a cartoon about a little boy called Hogarth who befriended a huge metal robot from Space. It was very good, but very loud, so for the first half of it, I was sitting with my elbows on my thighs with my fingers in my ears until I got used to it. Finally, I sat back and sat on my hands so I might get into the jist of it. But ah well. It was a brilliant film! My review of it is here: The Iron Giant.
After the cinema, when the film had ended and it was (already!) luncheon time, we walked outside and hurried to the shopping centre. There were loads of shops in there, and we went to Primark and all sorts of places. We had lunch there, too, a bit of a mish-mash one. It was biscuits, pesto pasta salad, tomatoes, cucumber, and a couple more bits and bobs. Then we wandered down to the library, where I finished a whole book in one hour! Finally, at about four thirty, we ran down to the train station.
It so happened to be that there was no train to our house.
There had been a huge delay where one of the trains had just stopped working in the middle of the line. All the other trains, including that one, of course, were cancelled in case they bashed into that one. And the train to our town just happened to be one of them. So, instead of waiting for an hour whilst the poor passengers on board that train found a safe way out, we took the train in a different direction, hoping that then we could get the train from there to our town. But when we got there, and were just reading the sign to which train we could get back again, they were cancelled too! Darn those silly train railways – how would we get back home safely?
William offered walking, but that would take about four or five hours. It would have been a late night, alright, but too late. So we decided to wait just an hour for the next one to arrive. Luckily for us, since there were about twenty other people waiting to get to our same town, the railway people let our train come early, and we hopped on and were back home at half six!