The girls have been ganging up on me - nothing unusual there! They claim that I am being unfair to Robbie on the blog. No, I haven't exaggerated his idiosyncrasies, he really is like that, what I have apparently failed to admit is that I am weird to - according to them! Well, I suppose I need to be a bit unusual to fit in to this family.
When, I asked what they would like me to own up to, the first item on their list was my peculiar taste in men - but since I can't see what the problem is someone else will have to write about that. The next item on their list was watching train DVD's and I freely admit to that. I am interested in history, so I particularly enjoy watching old film footage. I like watching footage of routes that I am interested in too, and I find railway buildings fascinating.
Since Robbie and I have been together we have found that his passion for trains fits very well with my interest in history and photography. My own liking for trains began in childhood, long before I met Robbie. I spent my first six years as an only child living close enough to Castle Station to hear the trains. At night when I went to bed I listened to the familiar railway sounds and like so many other children I enjoyed the Rev Awdry's railway stories. I loved to go to the park with my grandma and my favourite spot was not the playground or the stream, it was the special high bench in the far corner of the park. It enabled me to look across the river to the railway line, and I would sit there for hours watching trains. In those days there was much more traffic on the line, a child doing the same thing today would die of boredom! Steam was already a rarity, I did see a few and I was just as happy to watch what my grandma called the 'smelly old diesels'. I liked them, and even as a little girl I loved the freight trains. I used to walk across Westbridge a couple of times each week on the way to my aunt's house. She would let me scramble up and look down over the wall at the station below, there was always something to see, I loved the sounds and the smells of the railway. I miss that, the smells have more or less gone and the sounds are different now.
When I went to college in London I found myself living right opposite a station and the sound of the railway became as familiar as my own heartbeat, and travelling by train and tube was an ordinary part of life. So it is not really surprising that Robbie's obsession with all things railway has rekindled my own interest in trains.
