I’m back
I got back from the Lakes today, and have been sitting here reading the blogs and catching up on the news since, oh, Sunday when I last got access to a computer. Insha Allah I intend to post something about the Pope, being a news-aware ex-Catholic. I’m just too tired to compose anything of that nature right now, having travelled 300 miles today.
The journey itself was pretty uneventful. We left the house in the village just after 10am, went to some shops in Penrith and had some coffee, and I got my train which pulled in a few minutes late. The train was one of these nice new Italian “Pendolino” trains which the Virgin rail company (yes, Richard Branson’s Virgin empire) uses for its trains out of London. They tilt, sort of like a motorbike, on lines which have been modified (with enormous cost and disruption) to allow them to tilt without bumping into each other.
Actually, the first tilting train was developed in Britain – you can actually see it when you pass through Crewe which is on the line I took. It was called the Advanced Passenger Train (APT), and they took a load of people out on one test run and had them puking. And they scrapped it. The Italians took up the idea, fixed the problem which gave everyone such an awful ride, and now we’re playing catch-up with them.
On this particular journey, we got to London in just over 4 hours. It would not have been that long had we not got stuck just outside Tamworth due to some “members of the public” (they can’t call them morons over the PA system, of course) trespassing on the line. We also had to put up with some inconsiderate man with his insufferable dance “music” on his not-so-personal stereo. But that was only for the last hundred miles or so. I sort-of enjoyed the journey apart from that. The trains are comfortable, and fast (ma sha Allah).
My Mum and Dad, and aunt and cousin who arrived in Cumbria yesterday, themselves went out to Keswick for another hill-walking trip today after leaving me at the station in Penrith. (No, Penrith isn’t ugly – it’s actually a reasonably pleasant small town, but the first thing I looked for was internet access, and couldn’t find it at just after 4pm on a Saturday afternoon. Perhaps that’s because it’s a locals’ town, unlike Keswick which caters for townies like me who go there on holiday.) Yesterday the three of us went out on a 60-mile round car journey to Hadrian’s Wall (a defensive wall built by the Roman emperor of that name to keep the marauding Picts and Scots out) and back through the Pennines, which made for a really spectacular journey. It’s meant to be one of the ten best car journeys in the world, or something like that.
Something I found interesting on this trip up north was that two of the small towns we visited – Penrith and Brampton – had health food shops. Independent ones, not branches of Holland & Barrett or some other chain. Brampton is really small – much smaller than Penrith. My Mum (who has trouble with wheat) bought some sprouted rye bread, which I tried yesterday evening – it was yummy (ma sha Allah). Very soft and sweet – you wouldn’t think it was 100% rye, or perhaps I just don’t know what rye tastes like because I’ve not had much of it. But I wouldn’t have expected to find a health-food or whole-food shop in such a small town, which just goes to show how much the trend has caught on.
