Oh dear, I’m in a pub again, and at lunchtime too. However, the Tite & Locke bar is newly opened, on platform 3 of Lancaster station, a place I pass through reasonably often, and usually with Clare, who is not averse herself to the occasional beer. I think I will be coming back here: it certainly made a good first impression (unpaid advertisement).
Christ Almighty you have no idea about the shite that is the local train service. Don’t think that the one you see here is pictired trundling happily onto the platform — instead it is hanging there, just for arbitrary reasons. Not only that, but it’s the first train out of Hebden into Manchester for some hours. The giuy’s face says it all. In the end I didn’t even bother.
This being one of the world’s great party cities, I am sure there were a reasonable number of Berliners who were comfortably still on their Saturday night out at 7.35am: but I will never be a person like that again. Personally, I was on the way to the airport. It’s been a good and potentially transfomative trip.
Second photo in a row of the next person along the platform, but this was an utterly random moment that could not be resisted. Somehow this bodes well for the rest of the week. The blog’s second, and my third, trip to Berlin.
Like, I am guessing, everyone else in this picture I was waiting for the arrival of a train that was due to comprise the 9.45 service from Leeds to London King’s Cross. But sadly we all drew the card that says “Cancelled!” in the regular UK Public Transport Lottery. Not only was our train never to arrive but this vanishing act just prefigured a state of affairs that lasted all day. All this on the first full day of the football season, too. I gave up and went home.
At least I could rearrange my weekend’s hotel room without penalty — others will not have been so blessed. Hundreds of people, not just here but up and down the eastern half of the country, with plans wrecked, because the Powers That Be can’t be bothered to maintain their infrastructrure or design a system that has just those crucial little extra bits of redundancy and fail-safe. Up yours, peasants! Of course this will all change now we have a new government *cough*.
There are some days when I really can’t think of any caption or explanation for posting a photo beyond the fact that I just quite like it. Daisy Hill is a place (in the Wigan-Bolton hinterland) with a cute rustic name, but its railway station doesn’t follow this lead — at least, not while some renovations are going on.
Another railway station, the third in nine days, and two of them have both been here, Leeds: the second-busiest station in the country outside London, apparently (after Birmingham New Street, which has also been on here a couple of times). It spits us out at the start of the day and sucks us back in at the end. Not that I use this for my work commute any more, though I did, up until 2005. But I seem to end up here often enough regardless.
I should have returned home after yesterday’s walk, and that I didn’t was evidence of quite how dreadful the buses were in the Lake District yesterday; also that I am lucky I could stay with the in-laws in Morecambe, otherwise I might have been sleeping in Lancaster station overnight. Like everywhere else at the moment, it is a building work-in-progress. I like the blues on this shot.
And so, the journey back, via Brighton, St Pancras, King’s Cross, Leeds and Hebden Bridge stations. Pictured — the fourth of these. It’s now time to find inspiration at home for a while, in various senses.
A metaphor of some kind? Quite possibly. We are all waiting for something. But at least the sun was shining on Hebden Bridge station this morning.
Being 42 