Two

 

Long before I started my way down the Midland Metro tram line, I casually mentioned it as a concept in the DMs to a venerable blogger who shall remain nameless.  "Seriously, don't start on it," they warned.  I replied that I could handle it.

"I have no doubt that you can, but that doesn't mean that you should."

Those words came to mind as I got off the tram at Black Lake.  I'd been travelling all morning, and I thought I must be near the end by now.  It came as a shock to realise that I was on the cusp of Zones 2 and 3.  There were still loads of stops to go and, to be frank, it was a little difficult differentiating between them.  Black Lake did at least have a stretch of canal for me to cross and a bit of greenery, but I was soon on a main road with a factory, as I had been for an awful lot of the day.

I nipped across the road and returned to the side of the tram tracks.  There was a footpath following them to my next stop, which was a bit of a cheat, but I didn't fancy going ridiculously out of my way to walk along a busy dual carriageway.  At least this way it was a little scenic.

The path took me under road bridges, some old and made of brick, some newer and concrete.  Very soon I'd reached the next stop and I dutifully took up a spot on the platform.  After a few moments, I remembered the sign picture, and I ran up the steps to snap it before the tram arrived.  This is getting to be a nasty habit.

The full name of the stop is Dudley Street Guns Village; this being an area that was traditionally associated with the armament trade.  It's not very 21st century to boast about that kind of thing.  I understand when developers want to give their new developments a heritage sheen and call them "the Custard Factory" or "Miller's Quay" because of some tenuous link to a long-closed industry, but naming it after a profession devoted to murder is a bit much.  Certainly the local school thought so, and changed its name in 2017, noting that some websites blocked it from searches.  If this blog is even more unpopular than usual, it's because I wrote "Guns Village" in it, and not because nobody cares about a middle aged man looking at tram stops.

Dartmouth Street signalled the edge of West Bromwich town centre.

I decided to detour to the High Street, just for a look, as the next stop was very close indeed.  I walked down a typical Victorian terrace, ending up on a corner where a ghost sign promoted the Independent Order of the Rechabites.  These were a Victorian religious sect who believed in temperance and who gradually moved into financial services, operating as a mutual building society.  They're no longer a religious force in the UK, but still have a few adherents in Australia.

Their advert could, in some ways, be seen as provocative, because on the opposite corner was Society House, the former HQ of the West Bromwich Building Society.  This one was founded by Methodists, and still exists today, though its gloriously 1970s headquarters is now vacant.

The plan is apparently to turn the building into 100 apartments, though there didn't seem to be much work going on as I passed.  The West Brom moved a couple of streets away to a new headquarters next to a Travelodge.  

The glory days of this stretch of West Bromwich were clearly the 19th century, with a sandstone Town Hall and elaborately decorated buildings - churches, schools and the like - repurposed into more secular and dull purposes.  Lodge Road backed onto the Edward Street Hospital and was located in a deep cutting.  

There was a lift, but it was one of those lifts that you absolutely know is going to smell of piss before you even  press the call button, so I followed the staircase down and round the shaft to the platform and took a seat.

The seats were decorated with the original logo for the Metro.  For a network that only turned 25 years old this year, it's been remarkably changeable; the current diamond logo is the third in that time and the trams are the second batch.  I bought David Voice's book The West Midlands Metro and Very Light Rail a while back and it paints a somewhat haphazard picture of the network's evolution.  My favourite detail was that the line used to have ticket machines at every stop, but they kept breaking down; finally someone was sent from the manufacturer in Italy to investigate.  They were horrified to learn that the machines were installed on outdoor platforms in wet Birmingham; they'd been designed for indoor use only and were not weatherproof.

It felt a little like the West Midlands invested in a tram, not because they wanted to, but because they could; as though they'd seen Manchester had one and had got jealous.  It explains why, for the first sixteen years of its existence, the line ended at Snow Hill station and didn't go anywhere in the city centre, thereby cancelling out the usefulness of a tram route.  Its extensions are bitty and piecemeal, and I can't help thinking that its chaotic birth - plus the financial and engineering disaster that was the construction of the Edinburgh tramway - effectively killed off trams for the rest of the country.  We'd probably have Merseytram sailing down Paradise Street if they'd been a little more prudent.

I was now in West Brom proper, at its Central stop.  The problem with tram stops is they're not especially exciting.  Without ticket offices and waiting rooms and all the accoutrements of a railway station they're basically a couple of shelters and a walkway.  It was, of course, a proper train station once but all that is gone now.  There's something slightly demeaning about large towns like West Bromwich and Oldham losing their railway connections.  It's a shame that they couldn't keep a fast connection into the city while also having the convenience of a tram link.

They've tried their best to make this a gateway to the town by landscaping it and calling it Metro Plaza, with specially themed signage (in the old pink and blue of the Network West Midlands branding, but anyway).  It might be more successful as a space if it wasn't stuck round the back of the shops, overlooking the bus station.  It didn't put off the students from the nearby Sandwell College, though, who were spread all over the seats and walls eating their lunch.

I'd bought a wrap from Sainsbury's for my lunch, but it was in my backpack and I fancied something trashy so I walked down the High Street in search of something to munch on.  I was out of luck.  West Brom's main shopping district was one of the most down at heel I've seen in a long time, a parade of pound shops and local marts and charity shops.  It didn't feel welcoming or a place to linger.  The few food places I saw - somewhere I could buy a quick hot snack - seemed cash only places, and it's 2024 and I didn't have any cash on me.  (In fact, I'd forgotten my wallet entirely, so I couldn't even access a cash machine; I spent the entire weekend on Apple Pay).

The pedestrianised strip ended and I thought "well, that's that then".  I'm very sorry if I missed out on some delightful culinary treats but nothing called to me.  I decided I'd walk on to the next stop and have that wrap after all.  This end of town was even less appealing, a rat run to the bypass, and next thing I knew I was waiting to cross at a busy intersection by a factory that made jeans. I like to imagine there are Brummie versions of  Ivy Tilsley, Vera Duckworth and The Blessed Ida Clough bellowing at a modern day Mike Baldwin in there, demanding endless tea breaks and absolutely refusing to do any actual sewing.  

Outside the tram stop was a set of railway wheels, mounted on a pedestal, a reminder of the old iron way.  At least I think that's what they were.  As usual in the West Midlands there was absolutely no signage to advise me what I was looking at.  It might've been the remnants of an HGV that got stuck in the mud and fell to pieces for all I know.

I went down to the stop and took out my wrap for my lunch.  Ah.

Apparently the conditions in my backpack had not been great, and the miles of walking had pummelled it into a pancake.  The contents had squeezed out the ends so what I really had was a single flat piece of bread with a smear of vegetables.  I decided I'd do without.

Kenrick Park was another stop where it was actually better for me to follow the tram tracks.  Alongside much of the route was the West Bromwich Parkway, which, despite its name making it sound like a car park, constituted a walking and cycle path that shadowed the trams.  This was the quickest way to my next stop, The Hawthorns.

As I walked along the path, alone, unbothered by scenic views, it came to me that I really wasn't having much fun.  The wise and venerable blogger was absolutely right - this wasn't a route worth bothering with.

Part of the problem stems from it being a converted railway line.  For a hundred years the region turned its back on the tracks, hiding them away in cuttings.  This is fine when it's a heavy rail route because you only get the odd, large station to interrupt it; it's fast and direct.  Trams are more circumspect and need more stops, and those stops were wedged in inelegantly.  While railway stations become hubs and centres for the community, the tram stops were afterthoughts, tucked down side roads, buried under bridges, away from places you'd actually want to be.  I'd seen this before on the Metrolink, but that network was big enough to provide variations, and they'd really embraced the trams and tried to make them part of the city.

The West Midlands Metro didn't feel like a proper tram route.  It reminded me of an airport shuttle, the little monorails you get that take you between terminals at big hubs, an anonymous vehicle designed to get you from A to B without hassle or glamour.  It could be so much better.

The Hawthorns, of course, I'd already been to.  Somewhat unbelievably, it was this year, back in January.  That feels like an age ago.  2024 has been a very odd year for me; we're approaching the end and I'm not entirely sure I can remember most of it.  It's simply been... there.

Unsurprisingly, The Hawthorns hasn't changed radically in the nine months since I last visited to collect the railway side.  I did find a delightful little surprise though: bands of decorated bricks inlaid into the platform walls.

Lovely.

Handsworth Booth Street turned me out onto a small access road.  I followed it down to beneath the railway bridge, where trucks clattered by with heavy loads.  Across the way, a garage had filled a narrow street with its vehicles, scattering them over the pavement and forcing me into the road.  Litter piled up between the cars and the walls.  I walked round a corner and a sofa had been abandoned on the corner, its seats torn open to expose the stuffing.

There was a brief glimpse of the city centre across a concrete driveway, then I was passing a primary school, where a teacher tried to corral his charges into a PE lesson on the playground.  The road was bigger, wider now, and I found the tram halt opposite a bus shelter that encouraged me to give the gift of gold this Diwali.  

Winson Green stop came with elaborate metalwork instead of a boring old sign, and was subtitled "Outer Circle".  This was where the Metro crossed the path of the legendary number 11 service, a bus route that encircles Birmingham and takes about three hours.  A vague part of me had thought about travelling on it, for a look, but then I remembered that I don't like buses really and the Metro wasn't exactly floating my boat either.  If you want to know what it's like, Diamond Geezer did it in 2015, and Jonn Elledge did it three years after that, so I wouldn't really have anything pertinent to add anyway.  

I was exhausted by now.  I'd been walking for hours.  The frequent trams and the short hops meant I'd never really had a chance to rest between walks.  I was hungry too, having missed out on my lunch.  It was, by now, nearly half two, and I thought about that lovely hotel room waiting for me from three o'clock.  I considered giving up there on the platform at Winson Green, getting the tram into town, and using the hotel bar until my room was ready.  Then I looked at the map in the shelter.

I'd started the day in Zone 4, and now I was two stops from the end of Zone 2.  I had to complete that much.  The city centre - the glamour stops - could wait for another day.  

I got off the tram at Soho Benson Road with an extremely good looking man in a wheelchair.  You know how a little awkward part of your brain registers the presence of a disabled person, and you immediately panic that they think you're staring?  I experience that anxiety, but from a different angle; I wanted to stop him and say, "I'm not looking at you because you're in a wheelchair, I'm looking because you're very hot."  

This was a proper inner city now: dense, traffic-filled, grubby.  Scrappy pieces of land were covered with parked cars.  New homes had been built as a regeneration attempt; cul-de-sacs designed to minimise crime, apartment blocks with gated entrances.  I took a well-used desire path across a patch of green and dodged a black bag of dog mess right in the centre of the walkway, with the grass either side littered with carriers full of who knows what and a torn mattress.  Over the railway tracks, the tall buildings of the city centre appeared again, feeling incredibly distant.

Pitsford Street had once shadowed the Hockley Goods Yard, a massive expanse of railway lines and vehicles with a passenger station, Hockley, at its centre.  In 1971, British Rail took the decision to close the entire line between Snow Hill and Wolverhampton, and Hockley stopped getting any services the following year.  The goods yard became an industrial estate, but the newly-created West Midlands Passenger Transport Executive swept in and protected the railway route.  BR may not have seen the value of trains between Wolverhampton and Snow Hill, but the WMPTE did, and it subsequently became the Metro.

There's very little left of Hockley station; as is often the case in the West Midlands, they rebuilt the road passing the site and knocked down what little remained.  This entrance from the corner of Icknield Street is about all that's left.  When heavy rail services resumed, the station was relocated further south, closer to the city centre, and named Jewellery Quarter.

That was going to be my final stop of the day, but first I had to reach it, so I took a stroll through a graveyard.  Warstone Lane Cemetery was a private burial ground, set up in the 19th century.  For a while it was a lucrative business, but the problem with graveyards is they start filling up, and after a while they ran out of space for corpses.  The business ended and it was taken over by the City Council.

Its undoubted highlight is the catacombs, two rows of chambers for the interring of bodies.  The day I was there it was being photographed by a professional, with a tripod and everything; I skulked off to one side and took a snap with my iPhone.

Jewellery Quarter station is in the next street and, again, I was here back in January.  I resisted the urge to visit that lovely little pub.  I needed a lie down and a sandwich.  The Metro was almost conquered, but it'll be a while until I return for Zone 1's stops.  Who knows how long.

All I Need To Please Me

"How far does your expertise extend into the field of diamonds?"

"Well... Hardest substance found in nature.  They cut glass, suggest marriage - I suppose they replaced a dog as a girl's best friend.  And that's about it."

Not every station has to have a unique USP, but it's nice when they do.  The Hawthorns has two.  The first is that it is a train and a tram stop.  The Hawthorns is the point where the line to Smethwick and the tram line diverge, and a station was built to take advantage of this.  This means that - for the first time in the history of this blog - there's a station sign with both the West Midlands Railway and Midland Metro logos on it.

OK, I was excited.

The Hawthorns' other selling point is that it's a stadium station.  There was a halt here for a while for football specials, but only in the 90s did a proper station arrive giving access to the West Bromwich Albion ground round the corner.  As you'd expect, the station puts this right up front on the station signs:

It's the West Brom stadium that gives the station its somewhat delicate and countryfied name; if you didn't know better, you'd think it served an elegant cul-de-sac of semis.  As it is the station is wedged behind factories and a Park and Ride car park.  I came out of the wrong entrance, and realised I was walking away from the actual football ground, so I took a side alley to get back on track.  It was named Roger Horton Way, after a former local councillor - a slightly ostentatious name for what's basically a cut through between back gardens and the railway tracks.

Long term readers (hello you!) will know that I love a good sports stadium.  I'll go out of my way to have a look at one.  And West Brom's ground is... not a good sports stadium.  It gets the job done, don't get me wrong.  But while other grounds feel like modern, futuristic venues, gleaming with money and entertainment options, West Brom harks back to the days of football hooligans and kettling.

Walking round The Hawthorns was like walking around a fortress.  Hard brick walls butted right up against the pavement, with gate after gate ready to eject unruly patrons.  This was a tough, working class football ground, not a fancy pants all purpose stadia.  (Obviously, as someone who grew up with Kenilworth Road as their local ground, I have absolutely no legs to stand on and criticise).  All of Birmingham's football teams have this slightly chippy, unglamorous air to them, ducking in and out of the top flight, mainly arguing with their local rivals.  As I write this, Aston Villa are fourth in the Premier League, and yet nobody's really taking them seriously as a threat; they're getting a pat on the head for doing well and then the Liverpool and Manchester and London clubs are turning away to have a chat among themselves over who's actually going to win this thing.

I will say, of the four big West Midlands clubs, West Brom is my favourite.  First, it's got the best name - West Bromwich Albion.  What an interesting confluence of words.  That it shortens to West Brom is a bonus.  It has a stylish kit, with blue and white stripes.  And it has the best famous followers.  Aston Villa claims Prince William and David Cameron, so they can sod right off; West Brom on the other hand has Sir Frank Skinner and King of the Random Aside, Adrian Chiles.  You can't compete with that, sorry.

A man passed me clutching a WBA calendar, presumably having waited until 2024 to start before he bought it from the club shop - a loyal fan, but also thrifty.  I followed the long, wide road towards Birmingham city centre, past large vacant factories and the inevitable McDonalds Drive Thru.  A massive branch of The Range appeared, and I wondered yet again where the hell The Range came from.  I swear it didn't exist a decade ago and now it's got bigger shops than Tesco.  

I declined the offer of a free sofa and continued down the Holyhead Road.  I didn't realise it, but I was slipping away from everyday West Midlands and into something very different.  It was the Royal Oak pub that was the big signal.  The minute I write "Royal Oak pub", you've got a picture in your mind.  Staid.  Traditional.  Perhaps some exposed beams and a nice picture of a crown and tree on the sign.

Instead, I give you a tractor with a dummy on it while someone pumps out Indian music.

This Royal Oak has gone full Desi, and it made me laugh out loud.  I'm not sure if that was their intent but it certainly made my day.  From here on in, I was plunged into a very different world to the white bread one I occupy.

I'm not entirely culturally unaware.  I grew up in Luton.  My class at school contained a David and a Sarah, but also a Qaisar and a Hema and a Hina and a Farwaj.  I knew when it was Diwali, and what that meant.  I saw Asian shops and mosques all the time; admittedly, mainly from the car window as we passed through Bury Park into town, but I wasn't entirely ignorant of cultures other than mine.

Then I moved to Merseyside, and I've lived here for nearly thirty years.  And Merseyside is incredibly, overwhelmingly, white.  There are pockets of areas for other communities - Chinatown and Toxteth being the most obvious - but the vast majority of faces and histories you'll encounter there are white.  So being in this district of Birmingham and being plunged into a Little India was fascinating and thrilling.

Every shop front was somehow different.  The wares were unfamiliar.  Faces on posters, on the moving screens in the windows of opticians and beauticians, were brown, not white.  Takeaways and restaurants offered food I'd never heard of at prices that seemed too good to be true.  (Homemade filled naan for 75p?  What's the catch?)  Seeing an "English Nashta" on the menu at Karak Chaii (2 Chicken Sausages, 2 Lamb Rashers , 2 Aloo Tikki, 1 Toast, a side of Masala Beans, 1 Masala Omelette) made me grin, stupidly.

So much food; you could go to a different eatery every week for a year.  Not just Indian, but also Polish, Jamaican, all sorts of cuisines.  Sweet shops that presented neon coloured bites that you knew would give you a dozen cavities from three feet away. In between were the jewellers, glittering with too much gold; your eyes took in nothing but gleaming yellow and sparkling gems.  Were they real?  Costume?  I couldn't tell; all I could see was the shine.  Then the wedding shops, with the tedious white of the English bride replaced by a riot of colour and glinting sequins.  Dresses in the window to tempt you in then, behind, acres of fabric for you to choose from and make your own, personal, dream gown.   Sometimes a familiar name would pop up - a Nationwide building society, an Iceland, a Paddy Power - and it would look incongruous among the foreign names and unique storefronts.  And yet, there was something so incredibly British about the dome of a Gurdwara rising up over the roof of Farmfoods.  A mix of worlds that didn't clash but instead intermingled.

It wasn't perfect.  Litter was a real problem; I was constantly kicking chip papers and crisp bags and discarded carriers out the way.  Parking was a nightmare, with cars seemingly stopping at random, their horns adding to the streetscape.  And a little reading around on the net reveals that it's maybe not the nicest spot to be in after dark, when prostitutes and the drug users mix with the all night stores and the chicken shops.  But there, on that Tuesday afternoon, I was entranced.  I felt like I'd really travelled to a different world.

The commercial side of Soho Road slowly faded away, replaced by large historic mansions turned into offices and the occasional large factory, its single owner long abandoned for smaller units.  It was that strange, liminal space of a city, the demilitarised zone that exists between the bustle of the city centre and the point where people start to live.  

A flyover erupted out of the centre of the road, a conspicuously unpopular flyover; as I approached it the traffic all seemed to turn away, leaving the odd single vehicle to carry on into town.  Giant slip roads and concrete pillars divided communities and diverted walkers for one or two vans to carve a few seconds off their journey.

Getting across the roundabout, as a pedestrian, meant sinking even further below the surface of the street into underpasses.  Dark, forbidden alleyways that most people avoided.  I headed down the ramp, then turned into the cold, graffiti coated corridor to the centre of the roundabout.

The other side was an island.  As at Five Ways, the space in the middle of the roundabout had been carved out as a public area, but while that had been green and welcoming, this was stark and concrete.  The pillars of the flyover burst out of the ground and the sky was covered by the concrete.

I loved it.  It felt like a secret world.  I was the only person in this wide expanse of city, away from the cars, away from the people, hidden.  It was an island that for a small period of time belonged to me.

I'll always be drawn to the underground, the concealed, the tucked away.  Tunnels and burrows, bunkers and cellars.  Disappearing beneath the world.  Hockley Circus was that kind of place - buried from public view.

I re-emerged on the other side and trekked back up to street level, where a three metre high beaming Tess Daly tried to sell me vitamins, and Jamie Theakston and Amanda Holden promised me a breakfast show like no other.  It was a boring, mainline world.

Crossing the ring road by a high bridge, however, reintroduced the city to me.  The End Time Ministries Seminary and an Indian fashion store (TRADE ONLY!) were replaced by large, brick buildings, warehouses and workshops.  I'd reached the Jewellery Quarter.

I will admit to a certain amount of cynicism when it comes to branding areas of a city.  Liverpool has about fourteen different "quarters" now, each with its own promotional team and coloured streets on the city map.  Every new development signals the beginning of a new "neighbourhood" ("we're the Fabric District, because, erm, there's a hat factory and a couple of seamstresses here!").  It's a way to market post-industrial spaces and try to create a buzz that'll sell apartments and hey, if it works it's great - nobody called Rope Walks anything other than "those streets behind Bold Street" until the PR men got their hands on it.

The Jewellery Quarter, however, is still a living, working district for the manufacture of precious items, and has been for centuries.  What is now the world's largest Assay Office attracted silver and goldsmiths to the area in the 18th century, and they stayed throughout the centuries and World War II bombing to form a district that still produces a huge proportion of Britain's jewellery.

I'd prepared myself to be a little disappointed.  As a teenager - and in particular, a James Bond-obsessed teenager - I'd developed a keen interest in diamonds.  Ian Fleming's two books, Diamonds are Forever and The Diamond Smugglers presented a glamorous world of excitement and intrigue where people would go to any length to acquire these tiny glittering rocks.  I don't have any interest in jewellery - I don't own a necklace or a ring or even a watch - but I've always fancied owning a diamond.  Just to hold one.  It's the Liz Taylor in me.

As such, on a trip up to London aged 16, I headed to Hatton Gardens.  I was disappointed.  I'd imagined it would be nothing but shining, glistening sparkles, a constant stream of white light bouncing off facets.  Instead it was all quite boring. The shops were unappealing - the proper jewellers are over in Mayfair - and it felt rough and downmarket.  That was when I learned that industrial districts are pretty much the same wherever they are, whether they're producing spray painted car parts or high end necklaces.

I was ready, then, for the Jewellery Quarter's unglamorous side.  It was charming, with some beautiful old buildings and narrow twisting streets, but it wasn't the constant bling-fest its name implied.  It was a living, working industrial space.  I passed the School of Jewellery, still a centre for teaching gold and silversmithing, and walked towards the huge white expanse at the end of the road.

The Big Peg, formerly known as Hockley House, was built by the City Council to try and keep jewellery making in the district after the war.  Many of the factories had been bombed by the Nazis (in fairness to the Germans, most of them had switched from making rings to armaments) and then rents began to rise steeply.  Birmingham constructed Hockley House and its adjacent units as a place for them to continue to operate in the area.  (They also chucked in a multi-storey car park, because Birmingham has to Birmingham at all times).  

This was where I finally got to see my diamonds, in the windows of the jewellery shops around the Big Peg.  They only really appeared in the last few decades, as shopping became more and more of a feature of people's lives, and the idea of buying a ring or a pendant became more accessible to everyday Brummies.  

After all that walking, I felt like I deserved a treat, and where would be better than a pub called the Jeweller's Arms?  I took a pint and found a seat right underneath the heater to warm myself back up again.  It was a proper boozer, friendly and open, its rooms filled with gruff faced men eating pies and young students playing darts.  

I let it all cascade over me.  Sebastian the barman was giving out tourist tips to an American woman, and a couple of the patrons joined in to help.  A tatty mongrel poked his head round the corner to stare at me; infuriatingly, he was just that little bit too far to stroke.  A couple left together then, twenty minutes after, the husband returned for another.  I had a second pint.  On a visit to the toilet, I spotted a sign advertising the pub's cheese nights - "we'll supply crackers and butter, you bring the cheese!"  I wondered if they'd mind opening a Merseyside branch.

By the time I made it out to the station, twilight was descending.  The Jewellery Quarter station opened in 1995 and is exactly what you'd expect from a station of that era - clean, functional, efficient.  On a cold January night it was a beacon, the high window lighting up the pavement and drawing in the workers headed for home.  Outside are two features of interest.  First is one of those pieces of art that Centro chucked up all over the place and then absolutely refused to provide any information about; however, in a rare turn of events, I can actually tell you that this one is called Clockwork and is by the artist Mark Renn.  

More interesting for those of us with a lower sense of humour, though, is a genuine Victorian urinal.  You can't use it any more - a shame for those of us with two pints of beer swilling around inside us - but it's a proper piece of cast iron loveliness.  Isn't it great that human beings have evolved beyond the need to urinate, and so councils don't need to provide public toilets any more?  What a boon.

Oh, the things that pissoir has no doubt seen.

I am going to register a complaint.  Back at the start of this blog post, roughly eight million words ago, I registered my excitement at getting a station sign that incorporated both the train and tram logos.  Jewellery Quarter station, despite also featuring both forms of transport, has only the orange West Midlands Railway logo.  What's that about, eh?

I headed down the stairs, past the sign telling me the station was part funded by the European Regional Development Fund, and onto a platform.  It was chocka, not only with passengers waiting for the train south (which was late of course), but also because the railway platform was the only point of access for the tram stop.  This seems like a very large design flaw.

I waited for my train, filled with beer, a podcast in my ears, a smile on my face.  I felt... oh what's that word?  Oh yeah.

That.

And Bond suddenly remembered the eyes of the corpse which had once had a Blood Group F.  They had been wrong.  Death is forever.  But so are diamonds.

This trip was entirely paid for by donations to my Ko-fi.  Thank you folks.  You're absolute stars.