"No one left and no one came on the bare platform" - Edward Thomas

Wednesday 7th August

We had an early start this morning. I don't like being ruled by the clock when we are on holiday, but we planned to visit the North Norfolk Railway and we wanted to get there early so that we could spend the whole day travelling between Holt, Weybourne and Sheringham. 

Surprisingly Robbie didn't make a fuss about getting up early, he got up,shaved showered and ate breakfast without any 'delaying tactics' - almost unheard of even on a work day! I more or less knew the way to Holt but more to prove a point than anything else I decided to use the sat-nav! It decided to take us on a different and rather contorted route via North Walsham so instead of the voice of the sat-nav sighing and saying "recalculating" I had Mr B at the side of me huffing and puffing because he didn't approve of the route and because he couldn't get a good enough phone signal to send an important email to his work. Norfolk is dreadful for phone signals and Internet access, Vodafone is better than 02 but it is still dreadful. If I drive to Stalham and stand on one leg on the middle of the Tesco car park I can usually get an 02 signal of sorts but it is rather hazardous and tends to attract attention!

We got to the North Norfolk Railway soon after 10am, in time to catch the Black 5 to Weybourne. I needed to visit the rather splendid toilets at Weybourne and after the early start I needed a nice cup of tea and a piece of their lovely cherry and walnut shortbread. A Class 31 arrived into Weybourne heading for Holt and I thought Robbie was going to burst with excitement. He was disappointed to find that they planned to swap it for a kettle off the shed at Weybourne on its return journey but at least he had a chance to see and hear it and take some photos. Apparently the kettle (GWR 5619) had failed that morning and the Class 31 had replaced it until the kettle could be coaxed into action. We watched it come off the shed and it didn't sound quite right (to my untrained ear) it was making strange 'trumping' sounds as if it was expelling air, but it looked rather splendid and I was delighted to see a woman in the cab. 

We travelled to Sheringham, had a look at the shop and bought a jigsaw and DVD for Robbie and a few postcards etc for me. then when the next train arrived we got a welcome cup of tea (coffee for Robbie) and travelled all the way back to Holt for a picnic lunch. Robbie positioned us in exactly the right place so that he didn't miss anything and as soon as there was anything to be seen or photographed he dashed over to get a better look.

More trips between the three Stations followed as well as a brief walk into Sheringham (which was horrible because it was far too crowded).For me the highlight of the day was the diesel, it looks amazing and sounds even better. I decided to pass on the very last trip of the day because I wanted to get some film of the train leaving and arriving. I made the right choice I got some really nice photos and video clips but there was something even better than that. I sat on a bench some distance down the platform towards the signal box enjoying the tranquillity and thinking of the poem Adlestrop. In our case the blackbird's song in the poem would have been replaced with the mournful calling of the wood pigeon, but the line "no one went and no one came on the bare platform" seemed to describe the late afternoon tranquillity of Holt station perfectly. I knew that the train wasn't due but I glanced along the line and I saw a slight movement on the other side of the line almost level with the signal box. As I watched a deer came into view and ambled across the line towards the signal box before vanishing into the undergrowth. I was not close enough to take a photo and I didn't have time to think of that anyway. It was one of those special moments that can't be preserved except in memory.

The whole universe is based on rhythms. Everything happens in circles, in spirals - John Hartford

The weekend had slipped past far too quickly, so when we sat down on Sunday evening I wanted to enjoy what was left of the evening. The demands of another week would be upon us all too soon. It is nice to just be together, we don't have to talk all the time - and even Robbie can be quiet sometimes! Unfortunately yesterday wasn't one of his quiet times. I was working on updating the blog layout, but every time I started to concentrate on it Robbie started to talk to me again. Not just normal conversation, it was mostly 'did you know' type questions and a rather too enthusiastic sharing of information from the newspaper.

I thought I had made it clear to Robbie that I was becoming exhausted by too much trivia, but it seems he hadn't got the message. He called my name yet again and asked if I knew that Sainsburys are changing the size of the cardboard tube inside their own brand toilet rolls. I asked him why he would expect me to know that, we don't even shop at Sainsburys! My lack of interest didn't seem to bother him; he went on to tell me the exact dimensions of the new style toilet roll. He seemed disappointed that I still wasn't interested, so he made a final bid for my attention by telling me that there was a circle printed in the paper that we could cut out. With the aid of the circle we could find out if the new style rolls would fit our toilet roll dispenser. He got upset when I told him very bluntly that we don't use that brand of loo roll, we don't even shop in that supermarket so I don't need to know! I know Robbie loves detail, but honestly, that is ridiculous, there isn't enough free space in my memory for all the things I need to remember, I certainly don't have room for nonsense like that. 

Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it. ~Confucius

I don't know if I just have an odd way of thinking or if this sort of thing happens to everyone. Sometimes I spot something seemingly insignificant, but the memory of what I saw stays with me and takes on an unexpected significance. Some years ago I used to work in a village called Long Buckby and the journey between my home and my work took me through what I consider some of the most beautiful countryside in Northamptonshire. One year in January as I drove along a country road I saw some tinsel caught on the hedge. It was a frosty morning and the tinsel looked tawdry in comparison to the natural beauty of the frosty hedge. Yet just weeks before we had been excited by the prospect of Christmas and tinsel just like the piece stuck in the hedge had adorned our Christmas trees and added sparkle to our lives. Even now when I drive along that road I often remember the tinsel in the hedge. There is no man made 'sparkle' that can compare with the natural beauty of the world around us. 

This week I took a close look at my front garden, it looks wintry and bare with just the first hints of life showing through. The trellis next to the front door that is covered in big purple Clematis flowers in May and June, is covered in the pretty yellow flowers of winter Jasmine. Last time I looked the winter Jasmine was in the far corner of the garden, but I guess it had other ideas and now I stop to appreciate it each time I unlock the front door. The green shoots of daffodils have pushed through the soil. They were in the garden when we moved here, for 20 years they have been ignored and neglected yet still they come to brighten the garden each spring. The tubs are empty now, their summer glory long forgotten. The stones around the base of the bedraggled rose bushes looked dull and unattractive. Each one had been lovingly collected by me over the years because I found the colour, shape or something else about the stone attractive, but now they looked dull and boring, a few even had moss growing on them. It looks as if we will need to get the power hose on the stones to restore their sparkle - but I am not sure that I want to arm Robbie with a power hose!


Perhaps this is a good lesson, sea washed stones only look truly beautiful when they are sea washed! Seeing the tinsel in the hedge made me appreciate the natural beauty of the hedge, and it made me see the beauty in the world around me. Perhaps everything (and everyone) has a place where true potential can be seen and appreciated.       

By plucking her petals, you do not gather the beauty of the flower. ~Rabindrath Tagore

Reaching out to the Past

It's official - I am obsessed! This morning I bought a 1980 Model Railway Constructor magazine that I have wanted for ages. This is not something I have bought just to please Robbie, I haven't even told him about it because he would probably tell me to buy a magazine about Deltics instead!

I have been researching my family tree for a number of years and as many of my ancestors lived in and around Northampton I have become fascinated by old photos and old maps of the town. If only we could have street view on old maps, there so many places that I would like to see as they were when my grandparents and great grandparents knew the town. I would like to see where they lived, where they worked and the places that mattered in their lives. Most of all I would like to see the three railway stations in the town as they were then.

We think the world has progressed but in terms of public transport my grandmother's horizons were much wider than my own. She could travel to many towns and villages within the county by train and if she wanted to travel further, the train would take her; and for more local journeys she could rely on the tram. 

The first of our railway stations to close was the most convenient and most beautiful of the three. It was less than a five minute walk from St John's station to the market square. Clearly customer convenience was not a high priority even then - some things never change! Saint John's Station had opened in 1872, it was the northern terminus of the Midland Railway's Bedford to Northampton line. The station was built above street level on red brick arches which carried the line across the road and out of the town on the 21 mile journey to Bedford via Piddington (which in reality was much closer to Horton), Olney and Turvey. It was closed in July 1939 as a cost cutting measure and the services were re-routed to the much less convenient Castle Station.

Now it would take Sherlock Holmes to find any clue that a station ever stood on that spot, the station seems to have been erased from local memory and there are so few photos that you could almost suspect a cover up. So my reason for buying the old magazine was that it contains plans of St Johns and with the help of maps and old photos I can perhaps imagine the station in it's glory days.

Doing Battle

If my brain was like a computer I would be able to erase old files and junk to free up memory space. Instead I find myself struggling to remember what I went to the shop for but still able to remember useless chunks of information from years ago. On Thursday evening I found myself sitting in a parking space at the local Tesco which is attached to a filling station. As I waited for Robbie I glanced up at the signs above the fuel pumps Esso, and suddenly an advertising jingle replayed itself in my head. "The Esso sign means happy motoring, the esso sign means happy motoring, so call on the Esso sign", I dread to think how long that little gem has been lurking in a dusty corner of my brain. I looked it up when I came got home and YouTube alleged that it was from the 1950s, I will admit to being a child of 1960s but I wasn't even a twinkle in the 1950s!

Anyway by the time we got home I had skipped nimbly over the stepping stones of memory and recited a sizeable chunk of a Robert Browning poem to Robbie. I have probably mentioned before that Robbie is a man of varied and surprising tastes, but I may not have  revealed that he likes me to recite poetry to him. For some reason my maternal grandmother cropped up in conversation and I told him that The Pied Piper by Robert Browning was her party piece - she could empty a room with it! For those who are not familiar with it, it is a lovely poem but it is very, very long. She knew the whole poem by heart and as a young child I thought it was the coolest thing to get her to recite it for me, it fees as if I have known that poem for ever. Reciting it brings back many happy memories, but it is no practical use. 


Anyway, back to computers, I have been doing battle with my computer for some time, or to be more accurate, doing battle with the Blogger template I use for the blog. I have tamed most of the gremlins in the system or at least found ways to work around them, but when I wanted to change the layout slightly it started acting the fool. It left my text looking as if it was hanging in mid air, all I wanted to was to have a distinct dark coloured background with light text in my chosen font. It seemed like a fairly simple thing to do, but Blogger wasn't having it. I wasted hours trying every way I could think of to get it to do what I wanted without success. I don't like to be beaten and in the end I found a rather clunky solution, I created what I wanted elsewhere then turned it into a PDF file and imported it. It worked! There should have been a much better way of doing it but at least it is done. 


So now I have my next battle, trying to the make the 'contact me' button work. So far it has led me a merry dance, but if I am capable of keeping Robbie more or less on the straight and narrow, I am certainly not going to be defeated by a contact button!!
 

Forgetful?

I was rather confused this morning when Robbie told me how much he enjoyed last night in bed. I didn't recall anything deep or meaningful, I admit that I have become a bit forgetful since my bump on the head last week, but surely I wouldn't forget something like that? I wasn't sure what to say so I just cuddled up to Robbie and left him to do the talking. It soon became clear that his enjoyment didn't involve me at all. His pleasurable time involved sitting up in bed eating chocolate finger biscuits and reading his new book about Scammell lorries!!

Near Death Experience

Sam's laptop has had a nervous breakdown this evening, it had been asked to do too much, remember too much and store too much – I know exactly how it feels!! The computer just shut down and refused to respond to anyone. Sam was in the lounge sitting next to the computer looking totally distracted and touching the computer from time to time in a forlorn attempt to coax it back to life. Robbie took a different approach he swore at it menacingly until he finally got it to open in safe mode. It took forever but finally the disk clean up announced that there were 7,479993.00 temporary internet files to be deleted! Once that lot was gone the computer was a little more responsive. I had never seen so many programs installed on one computer! Robbie helped Sam to delete all the unnecessary programs, you could almost hear the computer sigh with relief! He still has a massive (and weirdly eclectic) collection of music, 4645 emails to be deleted, and other assorted junk to be tidied up and removed. When you think of it like that it sounds like the virtual version of his bedroom!!

Better News

The news on my step father was a little better yesterday. So far he is recovering well from his surgery, but he seems to be struggling a bit with his short term memory, he was fairly convinced that it was 1998! Visiting hours are from 3pm-8pm so I took my mum and Emily to Oxford and then my brother picked them up later. David was very relieved to see them because he knew that he was in hospital but he couldn't work out why or what had happened to everyone else and he didn't know if anyone knew where he was. Poor David, at least he seems to be on the mend. I hope they will move him back to Northampton soon because it is a horrible journey to Oxford.

Now that we have better news about David I can focus on writing a bit more about my Birthday. I wrote yesterday about a very random present from Robbie, but the weird clock was relatively normal compared to the card he bought me. When he gave it to me he was really excited and when I first looked at it I thought he had made it himself because it was made of felt scraps, but on closer inspection I found it was a Fuzzy Felts card. His reason for buying it was typically Robbie “well, it's retro” it was a nice thought but it didn't have any words in it and I like nice words in a card. I had a number of other lovely cards and Sam bought me a very funny card, it made me laugh out loud. As for Robbie I think I will get hold of a war time recipe book and make him a meal using only what would have been available in the days of rationing – I wonder if he would be so keen on retro then! I'm not really moaning, he may be weird but when it matters he is fantastic, I don't know how I would have coped with all the worry at the weekend without him there to help.

Do You Ever Wonder How Your Mind Works?

Do you ever wonder how your mind works, or whether you think in the same way that other people do. I'm absolutely certain that Robbie's brain works differently - goodness knows what goes on in his head! I used to read the Beezer when I was younger and they had cartoon characters called the Numbskulls who managed the various departments in their man's head. Their antics were always very funny and they often got their human into very embarrassing predicaments. Now that could explain a lot, maybe Robbie has little men in his head!

Anyway, back to the point. Yesterday I was busy working when suddenly I found myself thinking that Rev Awdry (creator of Thomas The Tank Engine) was extremely sexist. Why were all the engines male? Why were the subservient characters and carriages female? and why did he choose such dreadful female names? I wondered what train of thought could possibly have caused those particular thoughts to pop into my head, and I tried hard to think backwards. I had written my blog article much earlier in the day and I had included a photo of the Class 20 from Robbie's trip. I'd noticed that it had a 'face', somehow it reminded me of a character I had seen before, but I couldn't remember who or where. Even when I closed my eyes tightly I couldn't quite make the link so I moved on to other things, but my brain must have continued to work away at the problem. I wrote my other blog about the books I have read and I made a mental note that I still needed to write about the railway history book that I bought last week. After that I got on with my real work and didn't give another conscious thought to trains or books. At lunchtime I was working on something completely unrelated when up popped my thoughts about Rev Awdry and his engine characters. I presume my earlier observation of a 'train with a face' had combined with my thoughts about books and my brain had wandered off at a tangent.

I guess the answer is that the Railway Stories of Rev Awdry are sexist because they reflect the time that they were written when matters of gender, class and even race were treated very differently. I don't know why he chose such dreadful female names, but perhaps it was his revenge on the world for lumbering him with a name like Wilbert! I loved those stories when I was a child and my own children loved Thomas too. I am so glad that times have changed and I it is nice that Thomas has adapted to the modern world.

Eventually I remembered who the Class 20 looked like, it was Rodney Copperbottom from the film Robots. See what you think.