Tuesday, 20th February, 2007

0715, Platform 2

random train journey

Calling at:

Lancaster

You know those little momentary confusions you get just after you first wake up? My mobile was spewing out birdsong and it was dark when I first hit the Snooze Button. The last remnants of alcohol were filtering their way through my liver (?) as I flipped in and out of a drowsy state.

"Ack, a few more Snoozes", I thought, before the disatrous truth dawned on me. "CRAP. I'm getting the train today."

I don't quite know why really — it seemed like a good idea the other day I guess. M has a full house tonight, so there's no room in Harrogate, and even though I could most likely tug at the heart-strings of someone else over there and kip on their floor, it seemed sensible to reignite my old habits of getting this rickety excuse for a train, at this rickety excuse for a Sensible Time In The Morning™

I think, also, there's an intent in my head somewhere to go to the pub after work with the rest of them without the usual incuberment of having to drive.

And I'm not skint, so I just might be able to buy a round

...

Just as an aside, I'm pretty sure that the clock on the Priory is at least five minutes fast. Can someone fix that please?

...

It's weird, I guess, thinking that I might be leaving this city sometime soon(ish). After a while you become entrenched in a place — you identify yourself as 'belonging' somewhere, and you identify that 'somewhere' as 'belonging' to you.

When I first came here in 1990, I hated the place. The rustic charms and grey-slated cottagey idyll of Ambleside had lured me into a romantic mindset, and the brutalism of Lancaster (huge! monstrous! architecture!) had bitch-slapped me one afternoon and left me tearsome and lusting to hold onto my pseudo Beatrix Potter life.

But now, it's like I feel that there's some core part of the city called "Siobhan", and even though I hardly ever venture up Castle Hill into the throng of ex-hippies and chavs, I still identify myself as belonging.

Carnforth

I'm sure at one point it must have seemed like the centre of the universe. The celebrity buzz of Noel Coward faded a long time ago though, and there's only a slight whiff of celuloid and glamour in amongst the grey portakabins and detrital-crap that litters the side of the tracks.

There's something wrong about Carnforth — something that epitomises the uPVC windowed and recently sandblasted sandstone vision of the North West that I loathe.

Nowhere on the station platform is anyone likely to get a speck of coal in their eye, and the chances of it being taken care of by a dashing young doctor with whom you could start an illicit affair are as bleak as the plywood-boarded windows of the working-man's-club by the tracks.

...

Part of me wants to catch a few more moments of sleep, but the uprightness of the seats is undoing all the good that Isobel's fingers did to my back yesterday, and the nattering trivialities of old women out on a day-trip is piercing the once-beautiful silence.

In an ideal world, I'd happily get the train to Leeds every day. Sometimes I'll stand at the platform at the end of this line and look with envy at the luscious new trains that go to (and stop at) Ilkley and other — more affluent — parts of West Yorkshire, only to trudge onto the decades-old boneshakers that dare to cross the border into Lancashire.

"Cool", I'd thought, yesterday, when making this decision to adopt a more 'community-driven' decision to take public transport to work. "I'll be coming back the same day, so I can get a cheaper ticket".

"That's nineteen pounds" said the guy behind the glass half an hour ago. Nineteen pounds. That's fucking ridiculous. Nineteen pounds for the pleasure of having my back distorted by relentless cosetting (is that a word?). Nineteen pounds to endure the unearthly hour of 6am and chilly breeze that's eminating somewhere from down near my feet.

Nineteen pounds to find myself jumping through hoops to get a connection back some time this evening — since some genius has decided that the only people likely to be travelling back to Lancaster can probably leave work well in time to be at Leeds station just before 5pm.

If this journey cost a tenner, was comfortable, and had even slightly more sensible return times, I'd take it every day and not give a shit about moving to Leeds.

But it doesn't, it isn't, and it hasn't. And people wonder why I take the car all the time?

...

Ah, Nicorette Gum — my trusty travelling companion. What would I do without you eh? How would I cope with the slow draining of my addiction-of-choice from my system over the course of two hours? How ironic that you're intended to help people stop, while I use you to keep my dirty-little habit going.

Wennington

Wennington is notable in my head for about four reasons:

1. It has those two bends in the road which I love to fling my car around on the way home each week.

2. The houses are very old. Early 1700s I think

3. Two of the houses are so close together that the road narrows to a single track at one point.

4. The deserted and ruined house that provided my Ex and I with an afternoon's adventure in finding it is nearby.

There are probably other things about Wennington that are of interest, but I'm not a tourist information blog, so nyah.

Bentham

The sun is starting to cast a yellowy light across the landscape. There's a wet dog looking forelornly at a reversing white van that's only missing the words "clean me" scrawled by some wag to complete the picture.

There's something deeply depressing (I find) about the wet stone of back yards. I've always been struck by the small terrace that backs onto Bentham station, how dead the space between their back walls is. I can never quite picture the owners indulging in that tried-and-trusted British pastime of "having a barbeque" in the yard on one of the few summery days that we get each year.

All I can picture them doing is tossing a slightly bulging, slightly dam, and slightly torn bin-liner out, to get picked up on an unspecified morning after having been pecked-at by crows.

...

It really does feel like February today. Aside from the 19th (for obvious reasons), I really hate this month. True, I have a sense of 'loyalty' to it — I mean, if anyone's going to like February, it's going to be me huh? — but it's the embodiment of "winter".

Not the nice winter of furry hats and snowballs and nights spent cuddling in front of a roaring fire, the British winter of rain, and salted roads, and damp trees, and chillblaines.

Clapham

Ha ha! See? It's funny because there's a place in London called the same! How the locals must laugh themselve pissless when their mail ends up two hundred and fifty miles away.

If only there was a 'junction' here too, my mirthical life would be complete.

...

I often wonder, you know — vain that I am — whether people see me sitting on trains with a posh laptop and ponder what I'm up to.

I bet they don't.

...

Giggleswick

...which I still find funny. Because I'm childish that way.

Is it true that farmers put paint on the underside of boy sheep so that they can tell which boy sheep have shagged which girl sheep by the coloured marks on girl sheep's backs?

If it is, I've just seen a right floozy with loads of paint all over her. Some kind of sheep-based bukkake-session seems to have gone on.

"Baaaaa"

"Oh yeah baby, talk dirty to me"

"Baaaaaa"

Meanwhile, horses in coats look on with disgust.

That bloke that used to do Countdown — Richard Whitely — came from here didn't he? I'm surprised they haven't taken Morecambe's lead and erected a ludicrous statue of him in his trademark pose somewhere nearby. Or a big clock cast in brass, that only goes half the way round.

I liked that guy. I remember him once trying to persuade Carol Voorderman to wear a tie for the next show one afternoon. I made sure I tuned in the next day, but she didn't.

Damm her and her uncanny witchy-ways with numbers.

...

Now that the sun's up, it looks like it's going to be a nice day. Which is OK I suppose, but I can't help but feel a slight pang of annoyance that yesterday was so poo and grey. You'd have though, what with Me Being A Princess™ and all that, that the weather would make a special effort on my birthday, rather than the days surrounding it.

Eh?

Long Preston

There used to be a hand-made sign on the road coming into Long Preston as you approached it from the other way, that implored drivers to slow down. "We have to live here" (I recall) is the particular heart-string it tugged on.

"No you don't, you stuck up bastards" I used to think. "You could move out of your posh mansions and get a council house in Helifield if the traffic annoys you that much".

There's something deeply unsettling (I find) about small rural communities. Something 'disproportionate', perhaps. The issues and concerns that occupy them as a group seem always to be wildly seperated from the rest of the world.

I remember once being at a hog-roast somewhere in the Cotswolds, and the entire gathered assembly (in between pork-munching) were deriding the (newly elected) Labour Government for the impending threat to their way of life.

As I looked around the toffee-nosed pricks, longing for a blue-return to the House of Commons so that they could rip small woodland creatures to bits to their hearts' content, I wondered if they had any perception that the rest of the country had been suffering for years at the selfish whims of their Tory-friends, and that maybe their cherished way of life wasn't worth a toss compared to the plight of pverty-stricken inner-city children?

It's not the seemingly barbaric slaughter of cutesy animals that I object to. It's a class thing. I probably don't know all the facts, and I'm probably wildy stereotyping and over-generalising, but hey. I'm allowed to have a couple of prejudices am I not?

Yes?

Helifield

I hate Helifield. I have no idea why. Maybe it's a class thing too? Maybe despite my Wolfie-Smith-like rhetoric, I'm just a tedious middle-class bore with a chip on her shoulder.

Speaking of chips — one minute in the microwave isn't enough. But they were still yum.

...

I'm very wary of insinuating that whatever the 2.0 de jour web service of choise is is having an effect on my everyday behaviour — loathing as I do the incessant "I'm addicted!" cries of millions of people after spending fifteen seconds uploading a photo or tweaking their avatar — but I have found myself prefixing many thoughts recently with a strange, disembodied 'third person' narrative...

is in Gargrave

See? My worst experience of it recently was lying in bed at 4am last week (I forget which day) while things like "can't get herself to sleep" and "is struck with insomnia" kept rattling through my mind.

The other thing that seems to be happening is a peculiar intention to direct particular thoughts towards particular people...

@Skipton

I'm pretty sure that all the ironwork at Skipton station used to be painted red. Today though, it appears to be an insipid "blue traped in a green's body". It's hardly inspiring — hardly the sort of thing that jolts your brain alive at 8.30 in the morning and thrusts you up the jacksy with a bolt of motivational juice.

Perhas there should be some kind of national campaign to spruce up railway stations? Maybe we should all take an initiative and trot ourselves down to B&Q to stock up on vivid orange gloss paint (or something), and wipe away the gravity-stricken downturned faces of morning communters with swathes of bright colours.

Perhaps not.

Keithley

This part of the journey is always a conflict for me. In equal parts, it feels much faster, yet less 'enjoyable' that the trickle-through countryside delights of the first half.

I imagine that if I did this every day (or even every week — like I used to), I'd soon grow tired and bored with the Lancaster -> Skipton bit, and long for the speedy 'not stopping at every tiny little village' part.

But it's as if this train goes through some kind of metamorphisis as soon as it gets past Skipton — it stops being a ramshackle-yet-charming countryside curiosity, and mogrifies itself into Yet Another Commuter Cattle Truck™.

I think it's the Metro newspaper that marks the point where the switch happens. When paperbacks give way to gratis tabloids, and the exteriorly wandering eyes of solitary passengers are replaced with minds embedded in free (yet opinionated) gumpf about the trivialities of celebrities that have been gobbled up by hacks and shat out by editors, you know you're on your way to work.

Bingley

I'd hate for this to become routine. I do realise, sometimes, even though I lament over my lot in life (quite unjustifiably) just how lucky I am to be doing something that I love.

It's the irregularity of things that keeps me perky, I guess. If I had to crow-bar myself into an ill-fitting suit, and shed my sense of identity and become a faceless automaton who pushed a pen around all day, I think I'd slowly lose the will to live.

I did that once before, and it wasn't fun.

Ack — I've probably offended someone somewhere, I'll shut up about that.

Shipley

Now, you see, I could move to somewhere like Shipley I guess. That whole 'Yorkshirey Stoney Oldey Milley Towney' thing has a little apeall to my Lancastrian-based experience. Perhaps.

But I dunno. There's something ever-so-slightly 'municipal' about the view out of the train window — and something unsettling lurking at the back of my mind. Something to do with the BNP I think — something saying "I don't think I'd like it there".

I mean, that's probably a ghastly hatchet-job of what's probably a very nice town. But maybe it's the whiff of February hanging in the air — the skeletal trees offering no protection from the low-hanging drizzle, the adjectives "wet", "dirty" and "cold" being the only three that spring to mind — but I just can't see myself being happy there.

...

Contrary to the downward tones of the above, by the way, I'm actually in a really good mood this morning. I'm not heading straight into work — eschewing the "Free City Bus", because I got it the other day and it doesn't half take a long-winded route to get to Uni. Several times, in fact, I've walked up from the station to Woodhouse Lane and got there before the bus that left the same time as me did.

Nope — not going straight into work. I'm going to pop into Maplins first, and restock-up on all the fiddly little connectors that have somehow managed to find their way out of my room over the course of the year, and (I presume) into the bags of techie-minded students.

I seem to spend too much time running around our studios looking for the last few remaining jack-to-phono adaptors and VGA leads, so I'm going to replace them all (and keep the receipt)

Anyway, on that fascinating tidbit of daily ephemera...

Leeds

I Think I'll Keep Schtum

blog work web2.0

Just a quickie I'm about to go to a seminar here called "Beyond Wikis and Blogs" which promises to "examine the phenomena referred to in popular media as Web 2.0 [...] and how the rise in this kind of technology and practice will impact on higher education"

Sounds interesting, and rather up my street considering what I've been working on lately

This bit, however, slightly worries me...

Delegates will be asked to bring their own experience to bear on potential scenarios for the deployment or adoption of technologies and reflect on what it may mean for practice.

Hmm

It's probably best if I just talk about the stuff I've been doing at work, isn't it?

No, it's definitely five minutes fast. Or it takes me five minutes to get through my door, and there's some kind of backwards-in-time portal surrounding the station.