Planes, Trains, No Automobiles

Albrighton was a proper English village.  Everything about it glistened with history and middle-class privilege, right from the proper Victorian station building.

Sadly it's no longer in use for railway purposes.  Looking through the window I saw a vacated office space, power cables laying across the floor, empty tables pushed up against the wall.  I followed a man with an adorable excited Golden Retriever puppy down the path to the street which was, of course, called Station Road.

Neat houses sat behind lengths of mown lawn.  I passed behind two elderly men, trim and spry with white hair, one of whom said, "I'll tell you what really gets my goat..." but he paused as I approached so I'll never know.  There were Neighbourhood Watch signs on the lamp posts and benches on the verges.  A mother pointed out the leaves on the bushes to her toddler and explained what they were, letting her rub her thumb over the surface, but stopping her when she tried to pick one,

As I neared the village centre, an old lady got out of her car and looked, puzzled, at a piece of plastic on a garden wall.  She held it up to me.  It was a winding knob, attached to a long metal screw.

"I recognise this," she said to me.  "It's from my daughter's wheelchair.  She went past here yesterday - I'll take it home to her."

"I hope it wasn't anything vital," I replied.

That perverted, inverted snob inside of me wanted to hate Albrighton for its adherence to the middle-class ideal.  For being quite so perfect.  I couldn't.  It had a tidy little centre around a green, with shops and cafes.  A library.  People sitting on benches, chatting, heading into coffee shops.  It seemed like a lovely place to live.

It seemed everyone else thought the same, which was why there was a banner hanging on the green saying No! To Overdevelopment.  A proposal was in to build 800 new homes, a surgery, a park and ride and a secondary school on fields outside the village; the Albrighton Village Action Group naturally opposed it, demanding that the council Save Our Green Belt.  Newsflash: you haven't got a Green Belt.  You've got fields round your village, but that's not a green belt.  That's just what happens when you live in the countryside.  

As I walked out of the village again, I thought about the disingenuousness of that "over" in "overdevelopment".  As though they'd be ok with 600 houses, or 400.  It was just 800 that would destroy the village forever.  I passed homes that were obviously built in the last thirty years; cul-de-sacs of 1970s semis; a block of 21st century sheltered accomodation.  Presumably these were all ok?  Or are those residents exempted from an opinion, as they're not part of the historic village.  It's a good, decent place to live with convenient transport links and plenty of space to build on.  If you don't grow, you die, as nobody can afford to move into your village.  All those lovely convenient businesses you enjoy will close down because there's nobody to run them.

At the bypass, the road was blocked by a load of construction traffic.  I approached a workman - a boy in a hard hat that made him look like a kid playing dress-up - to get permission to walk through.  He lifted his walkie-talkie: "there's a man walking through now."  I don't know why, but him calling me a "man" rankled.  It made me feel old.  One step away from "gentleman", which really is the tin hat on you being a pensioner.  Yes, I was definitely old enough to be this boy's dad, but that's not the point.  Call me "lad" or something to massage my bruised ego.

The bypass curled round the back of RAF Cosford; through the wire fence I saw the service homes, uniform, identical.  There was a ginger cat in the long grass but he ignored my psss-psss-psss noises; he was focussed on something, and I think it was about to die.  At the crossroads I turned to walk on the public road that ran between the two halves of the airbase.

I was doing nothing illegal, of course.  This was a through route for pedestrians and drivers.  Nonetheless, I felt I had to hurry on.  I didn't feel comfortable loitering, as though an MP would come out on a jeep and shoot me in the chin as a possible terrorist.  ("I thought he was wearing a suicide belt, your honour, but when we examined the corpse it turned out he was just a fat bastard.")

I walked past the railway station because I was headed for a museum.  RAF Cosford is home to the midlands branch of the RAF Museum, and I thought I'd visit since I was in the area.  It's not really been built for walkers.  The assumption is clearly that you'll drive, which is why the route from the station is a long straight road with no pavement.

Drivers beware, however.  The museum is free, and they're very proud of that fact, but parking is seven pounds fifty.  That is, quite frankly, taking the mick.  I strolled past the ticket machine feeling a little smug that they wouldn't be getting any of my cash that day.

The museum is spread across a campus of vast hangars filled with aircraft.  It's a little overwhelming when you first walk in; the sight of these huge machines stacked on one another, springing out of the floor and the ceiling.  

I'm not a plane nerd.  I can appreciate them as pieces of machinery, and I wouldn't fancy travelling to America without one, but they don't trigger the synapses in me.  My best friend at primary school, Mark, was very much into aeroplanes, and for one of his birthdays we went to the Shuttleworth Collection in Biggleswade (I thought it was very funny that it was in Biggleswade; he was entirely unbothered).  He wandered from aircraft to aircraft in raptures and I nodded and smiled.  It was alright, I suppose, and it was nice to have a day out, but I never felt the urge to go back.

The museum's greatest asset is its Cold War exhibition, which covers the period from the end of the Second World War to the early 90s, when all tensions ceased and the world became universally peaceful.  It's a sort of "here's all the things that could have killed you" exhibition, with a heavy emphasis on the many weapons of mass destruction the world powers pointed at one another.

There's something intensely sobering about looking at a device, then turning to the information board and learning it was a Polaris missile.  Being a child of the 80s, nuclear destruction was one of those things that registered at the back of my head as a constant possibility.  I couldn't really think about it because down that way madness lay, but it was always there; Sue Lawley talking about the latest US-USSR summit, images of Greenham Common and the Berlin Wall, grimy footage of vehicles being driven by the camera with their payloads badly hidden by tarpaulins.

On the other hand, I thought a nuclear holocaust would be thrilling.  This is entirely the fault of the James Bond films. where every other movie included an atomic device.  I was delighted to see a Vulcan bomber have pride of place, the same aircraft that is stolen with two nuclear missiles in Thunderball; looking at its payload I couldn't see the words Handle like Eggs printed on the bombs, which was disappointing.

We live in dangerous times.  As I type, the Middle East is a powder keg, a mess of tit for tat airstrikes mobilised by leaders with varying degrees of sanity.  Russia and Ukraine continue to war with one another, and the threat of terrorism never goes away.  At least in the Cold War you knew who the enemy was - it was the people behind the Iron Curtain.  Now it could be anyone, anywhere.  When the Berlin Wall fell it smashed the world into a thousand different pieces, all of whom seem to hate one another.

I had a wander round the museum shop, which was very much aimed at people for who aeroplanes were a very big deal.  There was a lot of Airfix and historical books with titles like Operation Kandy Heart and The Fulbright Offensive.  (I've made those up, but you totally believed they could be real, didn't you?).  And look, I know Lenin is a demonised figure to many, and capitalism won out over communism in the end, but making him the symbol of the shop and putting a bag in his hand is just disrespectful.

The final hangar was filled with more aeroplanes, but without the thematic link, I was a bit bored.  I will say it is absolutely impossible to take a bad photo of an aircraft.  Every angle made them look dynamic and exciting and dangerous.

I decided I'd had enough, and walked out the hangar, ignoring the touch pad begging for a five pound donation to keep the museum running.  With all due respect, I feel like the Great British Taxpayer has contributed quite enough to that museum.  It wouldn't have a single aeroplane without us, and every time I buy a cup of coffee, a little bit more of my cash goes to make future exhibits.  Perhaps take a fiver off my bit of Trident and give it to the museum instead.

There was a light drizzle as I walked back down the long road to the railway station.  Cosford holds an air show every year, and I can only imagine the crush of crowds along the road.  I wondered why there wasn't a back entrance, closer to the museum, with ramps for disabled access.  Instead it was steps up to the platform.

If you're wondering why I look even sweatier than usual in the sign pic, it's because I realised halfway down my gentle stroll to the station that if I got a wriggle on I could get the next train.  I did something I very rarely do, and ran, and my body went into a kind of shock.  

On the plus side, Cosford has a sort of sub-ALF.

My last station of the day was Shifnal, which wins points for being a little bit weird.  At platform level, it looks like any other railway station.

Getting out of it and into the town centre, however, means a long walk down a covered ramp, one with two 90 degree turns and a set of steps.  It's a long blank corridor that, after a while, has you wondering if you're going the right way; I half expected to step out into the staff mess room or possibly Wolverhampton city centre.  I wouldn't fancy walking this way to the platform as a lone woman after dark.

I was dropped into the very heart of Shifnal.  Sometimes you go to a town and it's like stepping into the past.  The UK is a very historic nation and you can't wander down a High Street without encountering some half-timbered pub or hotel where Queen Anne stayed or a Georgian terrace.  It's easy to convince yourself that you've time travelled.

Shifnal, though, felt like a town from a much more recent past.  The Seventies and Eighties, to be precise.  Something about its scruffy, sort-of tidied up main drag echoed with my childhood.  The shops were ordinary, plain, not glistening with neon and LED screens.  There were hardware stores and hairdressers and chemists and it all seemed small and contained.  A town that knew itself and was contented. 

I am, for example, obsessed with this shop, which looks like it was set up by Mr Rumbold after he retired from Grace Brothers.  Its stock was very much of the comfy slacks and neat sweater variety, and I wondered what will happen to it when its clientele die off and are replaced by men who wear jeans and hoodies.  Will it change or will it die?

There was a more historic Shifnal, but even that seemed to come with a slice of Princess Di-era goodness; one old building was a wine bar/bistro.  It reminded me of that mad plotline in Eighties EastEnders where Kathy ran a wine bar out of the cafe in the evenings, as though you'd ever get the smell of grease and chip fat out of the walls of that place.  "Bistro" has fallen out of favour, but "wine bar" has fallen even further.

I walked up and down the main street, looking in shop windows and trying to earwig on interesting conversations.  A sticker on the traffic light control box encouraged me to read The Light Paper; this turns out to be a remarkable source for every conspiracy theory you could possibly want, and some you didn't know you needed.  It had David Icke as an advertiser, for pity's sake, plugging his newest tour and sadly not those shell suits he used to wear that he reckoned gave him positive energy.  Being one of the lizard people illuminati, I of course dismissed it all as insane nonsense, but you may not be as much of a sucker for the MSM's agenda as me.

Fortunately I had a pint of beer to help me forget the reams of bollocks I'd accidentally consumed.  That one pint turned into a second, until finally I rolled out of the pub and back to that long corridor for my train home.

Fury Road

 

What's this?  A slightly moist railway station in the West Midlands on a weekday?  Are we back?

We are.

This is Bilbrook, on the line between Wolverhampton and Shrewsbury, and twenty four hours later trains would be unable to run on this route because the tracks at Wellington were flooded after torrential rain.  For me, it was just a little damp, a bit soggy almost, as I went up to the road and took the sign selfie.

Some towns are, let's be honest, overburdened with assets.  I don't want to say they should have them taken away, but I'm not entirely sure why Bilbrook station exists.  It's less than a mile from Codsall, and simply serves the eastern side of a perfectly ordinary Staffordshire village.  There are entire towns in Greater Manchester that haven't got that concentration of convenient transport facilities.  

It was nice enough, of course, with a strip of shops and a Co-op and a Costa, but it wasn't a throbbing metropolis.  There wasn't even a car park for the station, which would've sort of justified its existence as a park and ride.  No, it was simply that the people of Codsall were blessed with two stations instead of one.

Look, I'm going to be honest: I don't think it'll rival the Eras tour for record-breaking.  Boundary changes meant that Codsall's old seat of South Staffordshire was reformed into a new one, inherited by Mike Wood; the old MP was Gavin Williamson, and he moved across to a new seat vacated by the retirement of Bill Cash.  If you looked at that list of politicians and shuddered, I'm right with you.  Also note that even after the 2024 election - and indeed, the previous 14 years of Tory rule - this area remained very blue indeed.  We were definitely out of the West Midlands conurbation here.

I walked along the Wolverhampton Road in a state of pent up, overwhelming frustration.  Occupying the pavement ahead of me was a lady, of a certain age and of a certain physicality, who was having a lovely little stroll.  Which is fine, of course; not everyone power walks through their life like me.  What was irritating though was that she weaved all over the pavement, seemingly oblivious to anyone behind her, occupying a large portion of the walkway and stopping me from getting by.  I hated that woman.  I hated her passionately and irrationally.  

I finally managed to get by her, then waited at a pelican crossing for the green man.  That Bloody Woman appeared behind me and walked straight across the road, blithely ignoring all the traffic and the signals, and therefore put herself and her turtle speed in front of me again.  I wondered what the penalty for manslaughter was.  I got by, in the end, and she continued on her merry way, completely unaware that she could've been horribly murdered if I'd had to stare at her Sainsbury's carrier bag for one more minute.

There were a lot of semis and nice big houses, a few older, but most mid-20th century.  A field was posted with a notice asking you to clean up after your dog, and then I was entering Codsall properly, a village that really, really likes pretzels.

Before you get in the comments, I am of course aware that it is actually the Stafford Knot, the symbol of the county.  The village marker was erected to mark the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, and I realised that the nation had very different Jubilees according to where they lived.  I can't remember it featuring in my life at all; I don't remember street parties or local events with dignitaries and commemorative plaques.  2012 was the Olympic year, as far as I'm concerned, and very little else happened (until Skyfall was released in the autumn, obviously).

Codsall had a lovely little high street, with pubs and shops and a small square that was being picked over by landscapers from the council.  One of the pubs was advertising its Festive Feasts menu and we'll say no more about that, thank you very much; let's get Hallowe'en out the way first.  There was a closed restaurant called The Meat House which is a really unappetising name for an eatery.  I found myself imagining them plonking massive hunks of meat on your table without vegetables or sauces, like a Brazilian rodizio restaurant without any elegance.

I went in the Coop (the one in Bilbrook has the blue Co-op branding while the one in Codsall has the green Coop logo used by the Midcounties and abroad; the lack of a hyphen means I read it differently) and I found the staff hovering in the doorway.  They were looking out over the car park at one particular car and, especially, how it had been left.  I will present this car to you now.

The debate was - and I think it's a reasonable one - what the hell happened here?  Had someone experienced a medical emergency?  Had they broken down?  Was it abandoned, perhaps by a scally joy rider?  I bought my bottle of water and walked back out and they were still there.  "Perhaps it's stuck in a pothole?" one of the staff was saying.

Fortunately, I got the answer, because the person leaving the store not long after me was the driver.  She was a woman in her fifties carrying a small bag of shopping; she got in the car and drove away.  It seemed there was no emergency, no problem at all.  She'd simply decided to leave her car there while she went in the shop.  Human beings really are awful sometimes.

I was at the southerly end of the shopping precinct now, by the Greggs and a wine bar and a vape-slash-coffee shop; I can only imagine what the breath of the people who uses that smells like.  I went to use the pelican, again pushing the button, because am a good well-brought up boy and I know my Green Cross Code; again someone shot straight across the street without pausing for the signal.  This time it was an elderly lady on crutches, who limped across the road and forced the cars to stop to let her slow-moving body by.  If only there were some device that would have done this for her automatically and without making her risk her life!

Good lord, this is a grumpy post, isn't it?  I don't think there was a single person that day I had any time for.  I'm thinking of that maxim: if you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you're the asshole.  I'm wondering if all these ladies I've bitched about went home to their husbands and complained about the astonishingly rude fat bloke they ran into in town.  I should say all my anger and frustration and contempt for humanity was entirely inside my own head.  I didn't say a word to the people who crossed me.  I wasn't crashing round Codsall smacking old ladies in the head and screaming obscenities.    

I could've actually drowned my sorrows at Codsall station.  The ticket office has been converted into a pub, and it was open at 11:30 in the morning.  I hovered outside; I had half an hour before my train.  However, drinking a pint before twelve o'clock felt like the top of a very slippery slope, and it looked like the kind of pub where they'd look at you with disdain if you ordered something non-alcoholic, so instead I sat on the platform and ate my sandwich and drank my fizzy water.

Codsall's footbridge looks authentically old, and it sort of is.  The listed feature had sat happily across the tracks for over a century and a half when, in 2005, a road/rail crane smashed into it and effectively destroyed it.

It caused a debate: restore what was left of the original, or build a new one.  Heritage won out, and they scraped together whatever bits of cast iron they could from the wreck and incorporated them into a new structure.  It's not entirely identical - it's slightly higher, to reflect changing construction standards on the railway and presumably to avoid passing cranes - but if you didn't know the story behind it, you'd never know.

I went to three more stations that day, plus a museum and a pub, but I think I should probably write about that in another post.  This one has come across as so ill-tempered even I'm surprised.  I'll come back when I'm a bit less furious.