Platform Four

Train tickets are over-priced. We know this because every so often commuters on leafy suburban platforms appear on television news to tell us so. Telling us how hard it is getting for them to travel from their detached houses in Kent and Surrey into Central London offices. Must be awful for them. Don’t the train companies realise these people have au pairs to pay and country club fees to upkeep? Continue reading »

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 »

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 »

London St Pancras as it stands today is a phenomenal building, a testament to mid-Victorian gothic architecture and early 21^st century renovation. “The most romantic place to meet, drink and dine in London” is how St Pancras’ own website describes the building, and as I stood and ate my overpriced Ploughman’s sandwich outside the newsagents I’d purchased it from whilst watching a family almost come to blows over a torn, and subsequently spilled, shopping bag it was hard not to agree. Nothing quite puts you in mind of the romantic works of Wordsworth, Blake and Keats like a parent yelling “Pick that fucking shit up, or Santa aint coming to our house!” Continue reading »