Swimming Upstream: Salmons Brook
Once again it was a privilege to be out early. A privilege too to descend from the former Great Eastern Hotel to the platforms at Liverpool Street for an early train - an experience I've long coveted and was glad to finally manage. The vast building edges Liverpool Street, wrapping a modern, sleek hotel inside a Victorian marvel and losing none of its charm in the process. Somewhere in the core of this network of restaurants, ballrooms and corridors was a hidden Masonic Temple which doubled as a venue. It felt like a strangely magical place, with signs which were...
Growing up in the relatively rural westcountry, there have been few enough occasions where I could open an entry here with a Ballardian broadside. But today I woke up on the tenth floor of the Premier Inn which towers over Westfield. From the narrow window in my eyeline as I oriented myself to where I'd awoken, I could see the truncated bowl of the London Stadium surrounded by precariously slender, nascent towers with cranes still embedded in their steel and concrete cores. The sun was slowly rising behind the hotel, casting a strange shadowy light over the dusty building site...
It had been a troublesome morning... I sometimes wonder if Network Rail can tell when I really need to walk. It had been a difficult week, by turns sad and frustrating, and the opportunity to dispel some cobwebs and get out into London was welcome. As we came to rest in Swindon roughly on time, I somehow knew something wasn't right. I suppose that the ability to sniff out railway trouble is still somehow strong despite my long absence from the rails? In any case, as we finally left an hour later, even this hackneyed old rail traveller was surprised...
It was good to be back on the road. The lead in to this long weekend away had been painful and sad, and there was a point where I feared we wouldn't get away. But as we made progress on the now-familiar stretch of motorway through Somerset and Gloucestershire, it felt surprisingly right to be heading away from home for a few days. This break had been planned for a while, and given how intense my work routine had become lately it felt absolutely necessary to be taking a proper holiday during the summer - something I've rarely ever done....
This year has been full of surprising twists and turns, not all of them for the better. But one perhaps unexpectedly good thing among an oddly bittersweet period is my cautious return to the railways after an economically enforced absence of almost four years. Way back in February I graced a fairly local railtour with my presence, and I had plans to do the unthinkable and join a DMU tour of my own backyard in May - which was sadly eventually cancelled. With nothing else planned, the year could have ended with just one tour under my belt - still...
It's a long time since I visited Cockfosters...
My solitary previous excursion even predates the records I've kept on this venerable website. Back then I have a hazy memory of emerging from Charles Holden's low-slung, futurist station building to find a solitary row of tall redbrick shopfronts across a busy road. In my recollection, there were newsagents, laundrettes, a Chinese takeaway - the familiar constituents of countless similar ranges of small, local stores across the suburbs of London. I'm not sure if that was the exact mix of premises or whether I've projected the many hundreds of similar ranges of...
It felt like a long time since I'd faced the challenge of getting a seat on a CrossCountry Voyager. Oddly, I was feeling really tense about the process. I'd taken all the usual precautions - booked the seats I wanted, located the point the train would stop at, everything short of booking a ridiculously early train which would be empty as per my usual tactics but somewhat unpopular in other quarters! As the unit rolled in, I noted someone in our seats and felt my anger rise. Boy did I need this break. It had been a long, complicated summer...