Due to the 24-hour industrial action on the Tube, the bus stops on Euston Road this morning were like scenes from Dante’s Inferno. The bus advert just adds tragicomedy.
When the 07:42 cattle truck to Manchester turns up half an hour late, like it did this morning, you can be damn sure there’ll be a few people wanting to get on it. Why was I not among them? Because there was another three carriages along three minutes later, with blissful peace on board. Take this picture as an illustration of how humans typically fail to delay gratification.
Did I do punting on the Cam back in January, when I first came to Cambridge? Well, bugger it. I’m depicting it again. There are reasons.
Peterborough becomes the latest station to feature, I don’t know how many different railway stations there have been on here by now but 20 or more seems a reasonable estimate. I spend enough time on trains for this to be an inevitability, but that’s OK, the mixture of people passing through and the general sense of waiting (here for the 18:18 service to Cambridge) makes them interesting to me.
The weather has switched from decency to foulness pretty quickly. Having once more gone into Manchester, this time with Joe to sort him and me out a new phone each, our train journey home was terminated at Todmorden due to flooding on the line somewhere between Hebden Bridge and Sowerby Bridge, so we were on the bus for the last leg of the journey. Dull this picture is, but it epitomises how it’s all suddenly got dark, cold and damp. Welcome to November for real….
Anyone unfamiliar with Manchester might imagine for a moment this pic is Photoshopped, but no, you really can see upward of 11 buses in a row on Oxford Road at certain points in time (not to mention the two or three more that were just to my left as I took this). On the one level this kind of phenomenon amuses me, but on the other hand I can’t help thinking of the other communities out there (like Sabden, Shap) that might benefit from having a spare bus or two now and again.
Another shot of Manchester’s slowly developing transport infrastructure — but I’m in Manchester a lot this month, so get used to it. Anyway, I like this one, particularly as I didn’t have to crop it at all, so got the symmetry just right when the shutter was pressed. A kind of ‘played for and got’ moment.
It really has been a fine run of weather over the last two months and still shows no real signs of becoming unpleasant. My train to Manchester this morning was 15 minutes late and I cared not at all, just 15 minutes longer to hang out in the sunshine and take pictures.
So here we are in this blog’s 26th featured country, the Czech Republic, for a few days. I am here to attend the same conference that got me to Estonia last year and Croatia the year before that. There will be more interesting regions of it to depict between now and Thursday I am sure, but once I arrived at the airport this afternoon I just trundled through suburbia until I got to my hotel then went out with a couple of colleagues and had dinner; so this suburban bus stop is all you get for now. I do like the twenty-feet-high woman on the advertising mural, however. I wonder if I can get one just like her on my house.
Now there’s something you don’t see every day. Anonymous cargo planes (there were two of them), flying very low over Hebden Bridge. What with the daily lunacies pouring out of the Tory party conference at the moment, these are probably just the start of military operations against organic farmers.
Being 42 