Rambling Thoughts

Leicester doesn't have the station it deserves.  It's been dealt the misfortune of being on the Midland Main Line, the red-headed stepchild of the British rail network, constantly on the verge of getting electrified but never actually happened.  Oh, they'll announce it, they'll make plans for it, then another branch of Government will turn up and say "this might cost some money - perhaps we could do nothing instead?"  Theoretically it's going to be wired up to Sheffield at some point, but I imagine if you live in Sheffield you're permanently in a Jennifer Lawrence OK GIF state.

Leicester's a horizontal station, spreading across the tracks below, with most of its space devoted to a cab rank.  It's ostentatiously marked ARRIVALS and DEPARTURES and is reasonably attractive.

Not so much inside.  The cab rank has been shortened, taking up only half the space, but the remainder is dominated by stairs and a ramp.  It's a nothing area.  There's a little coffee shack but that's it.  The ticket office, meanwhile, is small and cramped and dark.  And worst of all, there's no station sign on the outside, which seems insane, especially as the area around the station has clearly had a recent makeover.  I was forced to loiter inside, which is disappointing.

I headed down to the platform level.  There are only two islands, with four tracks; it's a through station with no terminating spaces.  It doesn't feel big or busy.  Of course it is - five million passengers a year - but it feels like a pass through place, rather than a destination, or somewhere to change trains.  Sheffield, which has a similar position on the railways, is far more lively and exciting.  There are plans to rebuild it, with a new entrance to the side and a pedestrianised plaza and, yes, a proper station sign, so maybe things are about to change.  (Please see the earlier paragraph about the Midland Main Line).

My plan for the day was to cross off the stations between Leicester and Nuneaton, with a side dish of Atherstone on the Trent Valley Line.  Staying overnight in Leicester meant I could slice them all off the map in one go, rather than getting them piecemeal at the end of a long day of travelling from Merseyside.

My first stop was... hmmm, where was it again?

The platforms at South Wigston are splayed either side of a pedestrian bridge and the walls of it have been painted by a local community group.  It's very "inspiring", very "motivational", with messages about "kindness" and "love" and I'm afraid my cynicism circuits just overloaded.  It's all very nice for the people painting it, I'm sure, but has anyone ever seen one of these murals and thought "I was going to murder someone today, but thanks to that child's picture I've decided to embrace happiness instead".  I suppose it stops the local youths from layering the brickwork with obscene graffiti, so there's that.

The north side of the footbridge was suburbia, semis with cars on the drive, but I headed south, into a tight net of terraced streets.  The corner shops had been converted into houses, and there were an awful lot of Ring doorbells with built-in cameras, but otherwise the houses looked more or less as they had done for a century.

I passed a small municipal car park and was surprised to see that I was now in the Borough of Oadby and Wigston.  Leicester station is actually the only station in the entire city, which seems mad.  The railway is long and straight and goes from one side to the other and they couldn't find space for one or two suburban stops to help commuters?  Even more mad, South Wigston only opened in 1986.  

I turned south, past "The Midlands Friendliest Training Centre" (yes it does need an apostrophe), and turned at the traffic lights to walk out of town.  It was eerily quiet.  Perhaps it was the layer of mist blocking the horizon from sight, but Wigston felt silent.  This was, allegedly, a B road, a major through route, and yet there were hardly any cars, and definitely no pedestrians.  Even a high school seemed deserted.  
 

A sign informed me that I'd entered Glen Parva, which is a magnificent name for a district.  It sounds like a distant Roman outpost for particularly unruly centurions.  This was very much the edge of the village, the southern fringes, with the main body on the other side of the railway line.  That was where the also magnificently named Eyres Monsell estate was, as well as the huge HMP Fosse Way.  Here it was semi-rural, the edge of the city, where you detected there were drab fields hiding behind back gardens.

There was a noticeboard, with photos of the local councillors smiling at the camera in a pub somewhere, and a telephone exchange in grey concrete showing its age.  It looked abandoned so I was surprised to see BT vans parked at the side.  I wondered how much of the exchange was actually in use now we live in an age of digital switching and fibre optics.  A bridge took me across the canal, walking in the opposite direction to a pair of bickering dog walkers, and then the traffic ground to a halt for some roadworks, undertaken by a firm designed to taunt me, specifically.

The firm in question was King Industries, and as you're a normal person and not a 007 obsessive, I should explain that King Industries is also the name of the villain's company in The World Is Not Enough.  They're building an oil pipeline from Azerbaijan to the Mediterranean, and several scenes are set at their worksites and headquarters.  And here's the thing: that's the logo they use in the film.  That one, up there, on the side of that van.  

See?  There's Sophie Marceau being all villainous with the logo right behind her.  It's identical.  I couldn't decide if they were being cheeky and simply copying it (the company was founded in 2008, nine years after The World Is Not Enough was released), or if some graphic designer had charged them good money for something he ripped off a DVD.  Either way, I was incensed.  I felt like phoning Barbara Broccoli to tell her someone was exploiting her intellectual property and she should charge them (she needs the money, you see); at the very least I thought I should warn Leicestershire County Council that their highway works may be a front for a nefarious scheme involving oil rights and King Industries might be about to explode a nuclear bomb underneath Blaby.

Who knew that a blog about railway stations could somehow get even nerdier and more tragic?

I walked through the last dregs of Glen Parva, a road with houses on only one side, a retirement village, then a turn south towards Blaby.  I was mildly intrigued to spot a steam engine on blocks in a field.  Because this is 2024, and everything is on the internet, I can report that it was "WG Bagnall Works 2370 0-6-0F", and therefore sound a little bit like I know what I'm talking about for once.

I enjoyed the detail on that link above that the train was rumoured to be there to support reopening Blaby railway station, only for the owner to say no, I just like it.

The traffic in Blaby was directed down a dual carriageway bypass, but I pushed on, into the town centre itself.  It was spread around a crossroads, with more coffee shops than you'd expect, and not one but two shops named after people called Bott (Bott Handmade Sofas and Barry Bott Jewellers).  There is of course nothing amusing about this whatsoever.

At the centre I turned right, passing a Chinese restaurant called Double Dragon which I assume is full of twins kicking the crap out of each other, and soon found myself back at the bypass.  I managed to get round an oversized roundabout, passed a mobile butcher, then followed Enderby Road and its stream of houses.  A line of traffic queued patiently for the recycling centre but I continued on the narrow pavement.

My plan had been to follow this road all the way to the next station, but my attention was grabbed by a Public Footpath sign pointing across a nearby field.  Not only did it look like a shortcut, slicing the corner off my walk, it also looked a lot more interesting than the current route.  I clambered over the stile and started trudging across the extremely wet and muddy field.  It wasn't the smartest decision in the world, kicking brown sludge over my jeans and stopping myself from sinking too far into the earth.

I was actually walking across the former site of Enderby's water mill, and the stone Packhorse Bridge there dates from the 15th century.  A six hundred year old structure sitting quiet and unnoticed in a field in Leicestershire.  This is why you should always wander off the beaten path.

On the other side I clambered over one of the highest stiles I've ever encountered - I think my leg had to go full can-can to surmount it - and then followed a small alley round the back of some houses.  A thought suddenly popped into my head: what if I get mugged here?  I didn't really know where I was.  I didn't know the area.  It looked like a boring residential district, but who knew - this could be the Leicestershire equivalent of South Central LA, with crack addicts lurking in every nook.  It says something about my complete lack of self-esteem and personal value that my first thought wasn't "what if I'm hurt or killed?" but was instead "what would I do about the blog if they nicked my camera?"  I mean, I'd still have actually visited all these stations.  But without the photographic proof, did it actually count?  Would I have to come back to Leicester and do it all over again?  I made a mild mental note to see if there's such a thing as a camera that constantly backs up to the cloud.

There was a printed notice on a lamp post asking me to Snub the Hub.  This was the third one I'd seen; emotions were obviously running high about something.  A little light Googling reveals that there are plans for a new logistics hub in Enderby and the locals are furious about it.  I thought they might have a point; I imagined that little stone bridge I'd walked across being picked up and replaced by a massive warehouse.  Perhaps they could sell it to an American, like London Bridge?  Looking at the actual proposed site, however, it turns out to be further north, near an existing business centre, next to a park and ride, and backing onto the M1.  It is, in short, exactly where you should put logistics hubs, and I'm afraid I'm unsympathetic that some people are going to have a little less grass to look at.

Walking under the motorway brought me to Narborough, as evidenced by a pretty village sign.

I'm embarrassed to admit that I initially thought those reeds at the bottom were sausages.

Narborough was the most charming of the districts I'd walked through so far; I could see why it had retained its railway station while other towns on the line had lost theirs.  (Actually they did lose it for a couple of years in the sixties, until public pressure forced British Rail to reopen it).  This was a proper little town, with all the amenities you'd expect, and good houses that would appeal to commuters to Birmingham or Leicester or Coventry.  A stone parish church peeped over the rooftops while walkers paused on the pavement to chat.

At the centre, past the village hall and pub, was another crossroads, and then the road lead to a level crossing.  

Narborough station was well cared for.  It had artworks at the entrance to the car park - a multicoloured fibreglass fox as part of the "Foxes Trail" and the rather more classy emblem of the village's French twin town.  The footbridge was clean and brightly painted; there were flower planters on the fences "provided by Narborough Parish Council"; the station building was still in use (though the waiting room was locked up, leading to a teenage girl pushing on the door then pretending she never wanted to go in there anyway).  

I took a seat and quietly picked the mud off my jeans while I waited for the train.  That was the last of the walking really.  From here on I'd be killing time between trains rather than trekking.  I hoped there was a pub.

Notes from Another Time

One of the longest direct train routes from Lime Street is the service to Norwich.  Departing every hour, the train crosses the width of the country, heading from the north west to East Anglia and calling at the likes of Manchester, Sheffield and Nottingham on the way.  Like all travel that doesn't involve heading towards London in the UK, it's a slow, meandering route that doesn't seem to know if it's an intercity or a local.  The trains are diesels, because much of the route isn't electrified, and there's nothing fancy like a shop on board.  

Obviously I was going to have to take this train sometime, and I finally did on the 23rd June 2016.  If that doesn't ring a bell, first of all, lucky you; secondly, it was the date of the Brexit referendum.  I voted in the morning then trotted off to Lime Street, not realising that it was the last day of Britain being a relatively normal country.  I was getting the East Midlands Trains (not Railway then) service and I was going to take copious notes.  In fact, my notepad is basically a constant stream of observations for the journey, six hours of scribbling, twenty-one pages of tiny writing, which I'm now going to reproduce here.  I've tidied it up a bit, removed the spelling mistakes and the odd name, but otherwise, this is what happened to me and what I was thinking for that whole trip.

LIVERPOOL TO NORWICH - 23rd June 2016.

10:45.  Primed and ready to pounce at the button.  Surrounded by pensioners in bright florals and polka dots eyeing me shiftily.  They're worried I'm going to take their seat, I can tell.  They've got that hopping anxiety, side-eyes to watch me in case I try to get ahead of them.  My relative youth means I win out though, because my eyes are good enough to spot when the button lights up, despite the bright sunlight.  I'm in there, pushing ahead of them while they're still gathering up cases.

My seat is a table; I don't normally like tables when I'm travelling alone.  I'm always worried I'm going to end up surrounded by teenagers, or worse, chatty people.  People who want to make friends.  People who think a five hour train journey is a chance to mingle.  Sod that.  I want to sit in silence with a podcast in my ears.  My reserved seat is facing backwards, which is annoying.  I unload a packet of crisps and a Coke Zero for the trip, storing the rest of my lunch under the seat.  

A tiny Asian woman, barely five feet tall, hesitates by my table.  She puts down her big leather handbag, brown, with a jacket poking out the top, then picks it up again and wanders off.  Soon she's back.  She sits down uncertainly.

"Is this the Norwich train?"

"Yes," I say, and she thanks me and goes back to looking a bit anxious.  Now I'm anxious too, worrying that maybe this isn't the Norwich train, and now this poor lady and I are going to end up in Carlisle together.

The diesel engines, which have been running continuously, suddenly cut out.  As one the passengers wonder if we've broken down.  Then they start again, there's a whistle, and we trundle out of the station, my companion nervously checking the envelope with her tickets as we go.

We're still in the Lime Street tunnels when the guard appears for a ticket check, bald and gruff, scrawling a twist with his biro, and we're just out of Edge Hill when the trolley appears.  The voice over the tannoy confirms that we're headed for Norwich so I can breathe easy again.  The trolley boy is dark and stubbly, skinny, with a black flower tattoo poling out from his rolled up sleeve.

Estimated time of arrival at Norwich, says the guard, is around 16:10.  This is the longest single train service I've taken since the Sleeper; standard class all the way, no extras, just a load of red seats to stare at.

South Parkway.  The woman opposite looks vaguely like she wanted a cup of tea, but was too shy to stop the trolley boy.  Though it may have been her general nervousness; she sits sideways so that we don't catch each other's eye accidentally.  There are black inky fingerprints on the cornflower blue table, a remnant of the previous occupier.  Do newspapers still give you inky fingers?  I thought they all moved to computer colour printing.  Maybe it was the Telegraph, refusing to go with these modern (1980s) technologies. 

A quick look at the train app as we reach Widnes and we're already three minutes late.  I break open the Coke.  At Warrington, she puts her handbag on her lap to free up the seat; it's reserved from Peterborough.  When we leave the station and no-one sits down she moves the bag back.

It's quiet, this train, conversations in hushed murmurs; when a phone rings, the bell is the noisiest part - the rest of the conversation is in strange whispers.  As we pass under the M6, the lady moves to the offset seat, and I try not to feel hurt.  Would stretching out my legs into her recently vacated space be rude?  Yes, it probably would, so I stay hunched up.  Although then I glanced to my right and spotted that not only had she stretched out, she'd also taken her shoes off, revealing two slightly grey heels and bronze nail polish.  That's not on.  I mean, admittedly she was only wearing sandals - there was no unlacing of shoes - but still.

We're approaching Oxford Road.  A clatter of branches from an unkempt tree, then the island of tall apartment blocks that fascinate me.  A woman on a balcony adjusts her bra through her blouse.  We're due to get a third for our quartet at Oxford Road.  Obviously the hope is they won't turn up.  The back of Home, and a couple of towers.

The platform is packed.  Hare Krishnas on the platform at Oxford Road and our seat mate arrives, a woman in her fifties with a mop of brown and grey perm.  She stows her suitcase then puts her other two bags on the table, canvas woven in bright colours.  She's got a travel mug of a tea and a tiny homemade roll wrapped in clingfilm.  Pink leggings and two or three layers.  "With the air con on, it's a bit cold," she says to the Asian lady.

"Chilly," she agrees, smiling.

Piccadilly.  

Stockport looks pretty, the Co-op pyramid poking out of the trees like a Mayan ruin.  The woman next to me pulls out her glasses, then some crochet work.  She's making a jumper or cardigan, picking at threads.

There's a patch of astroturf on Stockport platform.  Finally the seats across the way fill up; three men in their 60s with bags that won't fit in the overhead rack.  They dump them in the vacant seat.  "Put your seatbelt on," one jokes, and they all giggle.  They're going to North Norfolk; I think they may possibly be train people.  There's certainly no sniff of wives.

"It does get a bit tedious after Sheffield," one warns, the only one with hair; his two companions are bald as eggs.  Yep, they're train nerds; they're talking about chords and the LNWR.

My companion rolls a ball of blue wool the same colour as the table top out as my watch ticks over onto 12.  The ladies begin to chat, first about where they're going, then the Asian lady compliments her crochet work - "it's beautiful."

"It's just a blanket.  It never turns out the way you want it."

An unscheduled stop at Hazel Grove, presumably something to do with the flooding.  The train men are talking about routes and which ones they've done as we plunge into the tunnel beyond Manchester, the one you enter in a landscape of suburbs and industry and emerge into green.  It's the bit of line that makes me think of Diamond Geezer, and trudging around a hill.  

Actually the train nerd with hair is quite hot in a DILF kind of way.  Distinguished in a checked shirt and sandy M&S slacks.  His mates are not hot.

I started wondering if I should have something to eat.  I'm not especially hungry but it would break up the boredom.  I'm a bit put off because I can't remember what flavour my crisps are; I suspect they're a bit stinky.  I'll leave it.

Train folks are talking about the Woodhead Tunnel.  I suddenly realise this is me, Robert and Ian in twenty years time.  I hope I am the hot one.  "So do we agree that privatisation has been a good thing?" one pronounces and I switch off.

To be honest I'm annoyed they haven't recognised me.  I'm a very very minor face in the world of railway blogging!  I knew I shouldn't have taken these couple of months off.  I'm already forgotten.  

Edale is damp and green, lush, thick grass and trees.  The Asian woman has pulled out a very dense, very boring looking conference agenda and is looking through it.  I can only see a few words and they don't seem to connect into a sentence.  Just before Sheffield, the crochet woman drops a needle, and I actually talk to her as she retrieves it.

"Have you dropped something?"

"It's ok, I can see it."

Very proud of myself for not fucking up that interaction.

She shifts from blue to purple wool.  At Sheffield, the train goes back the way it came; suddenly I'm facing forwards.

In the row behind the trainspotters there's a middle-aged man and his doddery old mum.  She's fallen asleep but he's eating his lunch.  A white bread roll that he's putting ready salted crisps into, and a plastic bag with a quartered pork pie.

The Asian lady puts her coat on.  "It's chilly."

"It's the air conditioning, I think," says the other lady.  I like the fact that they're having the same conversation in reverse.

A new ticket inspector, bluff Sheffield, checks all our tickets again while the trainspotters talk pubs and restaurants.  They have a voucher; "it's pasta or pizza only, from the fixed menu."  The trolley boy is the same though.  

A check of the app and we're four minutes late; we got back on target in Manchester and lost it again at Hazel Grove.

"I used to do that," says the tiny woman, pointing at the blanket.

"I started it in February," her new friend replies.  "It's something to do on the train or in front of the telly.  Or waiting for the kids to finish their swimming lessons."  The Asian lady is returning home to Nottingham after three days in Liverpool on a course.  "It'll be nice to get home."

"Well, yes, but I'll have to go back to work."  She pulls out a grey silk scarf with black spots, and Crochet Lady coos "that's beautiful", and I think they're definitely repeating themselves now.

It seems to be the toilet shift; the door hisses open and shut as a stream of passengers make their way.  I'm trying not to think about it.

Trainspotters move onto model railways - "Hornby have just brought out the Q6" - and have a tupperware with a bun and a couple of sandwiches and a thermos.  One of them has, anyway, the taller bald man; he doesn't seem to be sharing.  Meanwhile the middle-aged son is playing a fruit machine game on his phone.  I know this because I can hear it loudly paying out.

Alfreton.  Haphazard details of my visit swim in my head, the heat, the road, a convenience store where I bought water, the general Midlands-ness of it all.  Going the wrong way and having to turn back, a mining village, a canal walk, cows.  Finally the station, tired and hot, not being able to sit down because the shelter was full of trainspotters with tripods.  

The Asian lady begins to redistribute the contents of her handbag into her pockets, getting ready.  A moth flies right by my face and crashes into the window before vanishing.

"I wonder how the voting's going," says the Crochet lady, and I brace myself.  They chat generally - the polls are open so she can vote when she gets in, the results will be out in the morning, they'll count through the night - but neither asks how they're voting.  I'll put Asian lady down as remain but Crochet Lady is harder to read; she could go either way.  There could be a Daily Mail stashed in her handbag.

There's actually works at Ilkeston!  It's happening!

The Trainspotters have moved onto European railway systems and their failure to implement decent platform heights.  "I thought disability standards were all across Europe!  I thought we all had to do it!"  I tense up again.  Maybe I just shouldn't listen to other people's conversations.

Nottingham.  Of course the last time I went here I went to Hooters.  Still a bit ashamed of that.

"Prague's worth a visit but it's full of schoolkids on trips."

The Asian lady says goodbye to her pal and leaves us.  The seat reservation says we'll be getting a new companion.  On the platform at Nottingham is an old man with a cane wearing a grey hoodie with a picture of John Wayne on the back.  The trolley boy disembarks with a clatter.

Our new companion is an old lady with big dark glasses in a sleeveless top.  She leans across and says, "I always wanted to learn to crochet.  You could've taught me on the way!"  They immediately bond; our new companion knits and sews and patchworks.  I feel like joining in with my love for the Sewing Bee and how Rumana was robbed but I keep quiet.  I did pipe up when the new lady arrived to point out the Asian woman hadn't been sitting in the right seat; written down it sounds like I was a pedantic bastard but it wasn't like that.  Not entirely.

Ooh, the Trainspotters are talking about some gay!  "Does his mother know?  His brother must know.  He's reasonably intelligent."  I think DILF might be a gay too.

We leave Nottingham past the rotting hulks of warehouses - finally a bit of unfamiliar track.  And only halfway.

Now the smaller bald man has broken out his sandwiches - they smell of meat.  Yup, DILF is definitely A Gay, with a German boyfriend.  I remember the dark fingerprints; I hope the lady didn't dirty her wool.

New lady pulls out her lunch - "I think my daughter thought I was travelling for a week!"  She's been visiting her daughter, looking after her grandkids.  Another ticket inspection, this time a smiling man; his aftershave lingers after he leaves.  

Everyone is eating now.  The carriage is thick with the smell of room temperature bread.  I wonder whether to eat my sarnies, feeling inadequate next to these two ladies with their home made snack boxes - I bought mine at M&S.  The new trolley boy looks like a young Kevin Eldon.  I decide to go for it with my ham and mustard while Crochet asks the age of Old Lady's grandchildren - "Seven and five.  A lovely age."

"But hard work."

"Ooh yes."

I'm amazed by their skilful small talk.  I just can't manage it.  My mind goes blank and I'm lost.  I answer the questions yes or no then scour my brain for follow up questions that never come.  

Nottinghamshire is hazy, swathed in grey.  The guard singsongs over the tannoy: "ladies aaaaaaaand gentlemen."  

Grantham's home of the Woodland Trust, apparently.  Growing up I thought that Margaret Thatcher was Northern, because I thought Grantham was in the north; it sort of is, and sort of isn't.  The Trainspotters get excited by a freight train waiting across the way, and there's the click of an iPhone camera as they preserve it for posterity.  

I've got pen on my arm.  I've been on this train for three and a half hours.  I'm not entirely convinced I'll actually be able to walk if I get out of my seat.  Middle-aged Son stands and stretches as we hover at Grantham, engine running, waiting for a train to pass on the main line.  Finally an HST burns by and we chug out of the platform.  

We'd been warned that the refreshment trolley is leaving at Peterborough and Small Bald has had a bit of a panic.  He walks down the carriage, first asking the guard, then nipping into the next car.  He finally reappears.  "He's coming down in a minute."  The ladies pull out purses for a final tea.  I've come out without any cash and I'm not going to pay for a cuppa with a card so I'll stick to the bottle of water in my bag.  (The Coke Zero was finished off somewhere around Alfreton).  

The trolley boy is a bit sweet, chucking out his pre-prepared lines as the older lady orders a latte with sugar - "white or brown, my love?"  That's another thing I can't do, the friendly little affectations, the chummy finishes.  I can. on a good day, manage a "mate", but it's usually attached to something a bit aggressive.  It's not parrotted the way some people manage - mate mate mate mate.  The guard returns through the carriage, hunched over, looking a bit like a cartoon character.

Big Bald is getting a footplate experience at the start of July, a birthday present.

"I thought it was a driving experience?"

"That was about two hundred pounds more."

I'm thinking about having a pee.  I'd have to interrupt Crochet Lady's crocheting but it's probably about time.  Maybe.  There's a queue so I can last.  I actually want a little sleep, but I can't doze on trains, I can't.  I'm convinced someone will steal my things.  The only time I dozed was after waking up too early on the Caledonian Sleeper and nodding off on the train back to Glasgow.  Fortunately that train was so packed no-one would've been able to run off with my bag.

Old Lady is reading Val McDermid while the Trainspotters lecture Small Bald about his tea making techniques - "the fat in the milk blocks the holes in the tea bag."  The Old Lady's two-sugared latte smells tooth destroyingly sweet.  I have a bottle of fizzy water.

Peterborough is signalled by a pretty waterworks building, and then the backs of retail parks.  The dome and tower of a mosque.  Some extremely noisy people board, but they're in the wrong carriage.  There doesn't seem to be any sign of the woman who should be sitting in the old lady's seat, lucky for her; she's all settled in.  There's no sign of whoever should be sitting the Trainspotters' luggage seat either.  

Middle-aged Son's fruit machine app pays out again.  Crochet Lady dumps her stuff on the seat and goes to the loo; clearly it's a sign that I need to go while she's out of her seat.  Finally burst through to the toilet.  Just a square with a scratched toilet seat on a metal cone.  I pee and hurry back to my seat, pleased my legs still work after all that time in one spot.  

Flat fenlands out the window, infinite and featureless, trees as landscapes.  Very much had enough now.

"Good book?" asks Crochet.

"Yes.  Very gruesome."

I'm keeping my eye out for Ely cathedral.  I've never seen it, but of course I know of its reputation for being huge.  I'm probably on the wrong side of the train.

A howl of the horn.  I wonder how many train drivers we've had.  Travelling this far is unacceptable for drivers but fine for passengers.  The guard comes over the speakers to tell us "we're approaching... Ely... for services to... Cambridge."  He's astonishingly laid back.

Ely cathedral is hugely impressive and hugely out of place.  It floats over the rooftops, completely out of proportion to the town below.  

"There are loads of people getting on at Ely," DILF warns.  "Best move your things."  They stow them behind the seat backs and a teenager slips in their place.  He moves off though, and a terribly posh girl whips out her laptop and takes his place.  Surprisingly we then reverse, and I'm going backwards again.  Old Lady's phone burrs and tinkles but she doesn't notice; when she does she holds it with the delicacy of a woman afraid it may explode.

Posh girl is now chatting animatedly to Small Bald about Steeleye bloody Span and Quadrangle.  There is no escape for me.  They went to see them at the Royal Exchange.  DILF is disinterested, confirming his status as the Best One.

In the sky, a fighter jet, flying so flat, so fast, not doing that thing where planes seem to go slow in the distance.  This is fast.  It banks and curves away.  

Now Posh Girl is chatting to the guard about the flooding.  Everyone can just make chat.

Lakenheath!  Octopussy!  Ridiculously thrilled.  Explains the fighter jet anyway.  Posh Girl and Small Bald are really deep in conversation now.  Meanwhile Crochet and Old Lady discuss knitting.  "Do you knit for your grandchildren?"

"No.  They're allergic to wool, for a start."

Thetford station, advertising the Dad's Army museum.  Penultimate but still three quarters of an hour to go.  There's nothing.  Nothing in between.  It's different to the north where there's landscape and scenery and life.  Houses in the middle of nowhere.  Here it's just emptiness.  Fields and trees.  Little life.

Middle-aged Son has pulled on a bomber jacket; he's ready to leave.  His mum has woken up too, and stares out the window.

I've had enough.  Also Small Bald's voice is starting to go through me.  I feel awkward for the girl.  When the men were talking it was fine but now it's weird.  They explain their story to Meryl (that's her name) - that they went to grammar school together and now they meet up once a year to do something train related.  They're embarrassed, and Meryl picks up on it, but Small Bald doesn't, and tries to get them to whip out their old pictures.  They refuse, so he describes the picture instead; black and white, four of them, at Carlisle station trainspotting.  They're meeting three friends so I wonder who was left out.

The ladies have packed up their reading and their hobbycraft; we're all ready for the end.  Finally I give in and put on a podcast again, RHLSTP, because I can't take any more.  I adjust my seat and realise the ladies are dozing.  All this way and right at the death they decide to sleep.  Anxieties again; do I wake them at Norwich?  Although I have to because I'm trapped.  I keep catching Middle-aged Son's eye, or is he catching mine?  He doesn't seem happy either.  Have I missed something?  Have I done something?  Unless he snuck a look at my notebook while I was in the loo.  Could be possible.  Now I feel a bit guilty.  Sod it; I'm never meeting these people again.  

The endless skies are darkening now as we approach Norwich - hopefully not a sign.  My phone power is low.  I glanced over at the Old Lady and she opened her eyes at that exact moment, which was awkward.  Farms, a load of chicken coops.  Small Bald goes to the toilet and the conversation dies.  Big Bald is forced to lean in and take over the chat.  Horses gathered under a bridge.  Big Bald appears to be explaining the etymology of the word "tramp"; I missed how this came up and now I'm desperately trying to work it out.  A gravel plant as we come into Norwich, crossing the river and passing the depot.  Time to wake up and go.