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A couple of Saturdays ago I was in Newark in Nottinghamshire watching Callum play football on a Saturday morning (losing again). 

I rushed back at lunchtime to then pick up Louis to take him to his first cross-country race of the year at Markeaton Park in Derby. 

I’ve never been to a cross country event like this before and I was certainly not a cross-country runner but that is quite an extraordinary tribe of people. 

You turn up at this massive park and there’s a 2.5km loop marked out through the park with little flags that you’re trusted to stay within. 

The races go off in age groups or abilities and there are literally thousands of people rolling through there on a Saturday afternoon to fit into their little slot and race their little race. 

Louis was racing in the seniors race which was the last one of the day so, by the time we got there most of the people had been and gone but there were still masses of people around. 

Every running club that participated in the midlands in cross country had a gazebo and a flag that people could congregate from that club and leave their bag and trust the people who were there because they were part of the same tribe. 

Everybody broke into their little tribes and groups and although people from within tribes knew each other they congregated in the same colour, the same uniform, in the same language, in their own little places. 

The gun went off and maybe 3 or 4 hundred guys ran past me in Louis’s senior race and everybody settled in to cheer the runners with the right colours on from their group. 

Before the race started though there was about 30 minutes of Louis warming up and I just wandered up the path in the park and stumbled upon a model railway centre in an old building beside the car park.

It was £2.50 to go in and it looked like it was staffed by people that had been involved in model railways for a long time. 

I used to have a little train set in the loft at my mum and dads house when I was growing up and it just brought back fabulous memories of childhood and of those times and so, in I went. Card at the ready for the £2.50 transaction. 

The chap on the door taking the money must have been at least 85 years old and was wrestling with an iPhone based contactless card reader which he managed to get working to take my money off me, only to give me the ticket that you see as the picture for this blog. 

And so, I entered into a small little world that I’d never seen before and in all likelihood will never see again. 

There were model trains everywhere and villages and Harry Potter exhibits and all types of locomotives and modern trains and big trains and small trains and lots of guys who, to be honest, looked like they were part of a model railway club. 

It was truly beautiful. 

It was absolutely the same as the tribe of people running around the park, only with slightly different uniforms and slightly different mannerisms. 

It was a group of people congregated together for a shared interest, trying to maintain their passion and hopefully to spread it to a few other people. 

As I left the place having had a great look and been lost in my own little world for a few minutes, one of the attendants came up to me and asked “are you into your modelling?”. 

So many possible answers to that which would have been funny but in the end I just explained to him that I used to have a train set when I was a little boy and my father in law who is stuck in his house adores trains and particularly steam-trains and I promised him that I would try to bring him along if ever I could get him there. 

That’s all we want isn’t it? 

To be part of a tribe and to have some other people listen to what our tribe has to say in the hope that we can influence them and make the world a little bit better or a little bit happier. 

It is quite simple really. 

 Blog Post Number - 2895