Platform Four
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Scarborough to York
On appearances Scarborough sunshine could easily be mistaken for a carbon monoxide leak; folk sunbathe where they fall – on roofs, in car-parks, beside benches. Wherever the sun wins out over the light sea breeze, cerise bodies lie beached and motionless. Outside the station a trio of taxi drivers each tear through Cornettos with the sort of reckless abandon they would normally reserve for narrow residential side-streets. Continue reading
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It’s raining. Again. It has been raining constantly for the best part of a fortnight, so long that I have long begun to suspect I am inadvertently starring in a 1950s detective novel. So heavy and so hard is the rain that it would render Peter Kay too sodden to come up with a reasonable anecdote about its density. Continue reading
“It’s not like it was in my day,” pensioners are fond of saying, which is lucky for them, because if it were, they would be dead. Folk, you see, are living longer. And whilst this increase in OAPs may explain the resurgence in popularity of Spam, and enable the owners of the nation’s tea-rooms and bingo halls to swim around in their takings like Scrooge McDuck, it also places a hugely expensive burden on services such as healthcare. Whilst the Government ponders solving this problem by further raising the retirement age Manchester, I note, has adopted a different approach; it’s tram network. At regular intervals throughout the day streetcars are despatched by the city to roam its pedestrianised streets and mow down any old folk not nimble enough to avoid their silent metal assassins. It is a sort of Mancunian Logan’s Run for octogenarians. Continue reading
I hold a love hate relationship with London. I love its diversity, the tolerance, the multiculturalism born of so many nationalities descending on one city. We simply don’t have that in my part of the world. The closest I’ve come to being part of a multicultural society in Doncaster was when I caught a bus to Harworth and happened to be the only one of its five passengers not of Chinese origin. A rare occurrence, although let’s face it, still technically only duoculturalism at best. Continue reading
The departures board has hypnotic powers. A dozen people stand frozen beneath it trapped under its spell, necks craned upwards, locked in a stare-out battle with the names of Midland towns. Nottingham station is appropriately subdued for midday on a lazy summer Sunday. The air is still, the trains are too, and the people reflect the spirit of the morning after the night before; sunglasses over tired eyes, comfortable clothes and unkempt hair, Sunday papers and energy drinks. Continue reading
