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Christmas. To the Liverpool City Region and back.
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I commend to you the lovely pubs of the Georgian Quarter, but maybe we’re twats for being so easily impressed by all of Rob Gutmann’s stag’s heads and antique bedpans.
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It’s become a tradition that I return home with a big bag of empty plastic yoghurt pots, because Liverpool City Council won’t recycle them but my local council will. I know it’s not normal, and they probably all get dumped in the sea anyway. It’s good that the Simpler Recyling legislation will soon mean I don’t need to bother.
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The train from Leeds to Peterborough. It was an older train, superior in some ways to the newer trains. Due to split ticketing, at Doncaster I had to move seats, and I didn’t want to confront the person sitting in my reserved seat, so I sat opposite a sour-faced woman and her sleeping large adult son (I guess). After a while he woke up, drank some cider, and was a bit arsey to her as she struggled to move so he could go to the toilet.
Later, it was time for us all to get off the train. The announcement that “we’ll shortly be arriving” tends to be a bit early, and no matter how chill and unhurried I am I still end up standing for a while waiting to actually arrive. After all that standing, upon stepping off the train the woman went all floppy and collapsed on the platform edge in front of me. Remarkably, I’d just read something about reisting the urge to help so I felt OK about
kicking her out of the wayletting all the other capable people around help instead.(I wondered if the newer trains have a more accessible platform-train interface, i.e. a shallower step down from the train to the platform, but apparently they don’t.)
Then I had to catch a bus. There was a bus waiting outside the station, but its rear destination display was blank and I’d lost track of time so I assumed it was an earlier bus that had broken down or something. It’s a credit to First Eastern Counties that my brain couldn’t believe the display was simply broken, but of course it actually was and the bus pulled away before I could run after it. So how mildly interesting that I’d been visited by the ghosts of both level boarding and PSVAR in the space of a few minutes.
Anyway, I got to spend an hour in Peterborough, where I bought a lemon squeezer and tried unsuccessfully to photograph a Christmas tree–shaped display of bubbly water in the entrance to Waitrose, so I am the real winner.