British Summertime

I really hate folk music.

I try not to because it brings a lot of pleasure to a lot of people.  Nothing that makes people that happy can be wrong.  If you start slagging off people's minority interests, then you end up saying that collecting train stations is an abomination, and then what are you going to do?  Judge not, lest ye be judged.

None the less, I really hate folk music.

I hate the twiddly, diddly, bouncy jollity of it.  I hate the singers' superiority complex - "we're keeping a fine English tradition alive.  What are you doing?"  I hate the repetitive choruses.  I hate the audiences, dancing and whooping to a lute and penny whistle like they're seeing Rhianna at the O2.  I hate the songs that sound like they're about something jolly, and then the singer stops and says, "of course, that song's actually about incest in the era of the plague."  And I really hate the beards.

Obviously, I then managed to hitch my wagon to a man whose favourite band is Steeleye Span, and whose favourite song is this crime against humanity:

This proves that the universe has a very cruel sense of humour.

I bring all this up because the train I boarded at Marple was a folk train.  Worse: it was a folk Pacer.  It was a bus on wheels, on the hottest day of the year, rammed full of people nodding their heads appreciatively to two people with acoustic guitars.  It was like being strapped into an oven and then having Barclay James Harvest piped in through the grill.  It was as close to a living hell as I have ever experienced; the only thing that could have made it worse was if Olly Murs and Robbie Williams were there to provide backing vocals.  Possibly while doing a "hilarious" dance.

Adding to the awfulness, not everyone was listening.  I mean, I hated what the two beardies were doing with their guitars (one of the singers was a woman, so her beard was metaphorical, but definitely present) but I knew that the polite thing is to shut up and pray for death.  They've been paid to widdly-dee on the train, and a bunch of people are here to listen, so you just roll your eyes and passively hope for a train crash.  You don't try and have your conversation as normal, and louder than the singers as well.  It was an acute level of social embarrassment uncomfortably wedged into that sweatbox.

Thankfully I was disembarking at the next station.  I was the only one who got off there, much to the guard's surprise.  "Are you getting some air, or are you actually getting off?"

"I'm getting off," I said.

"Fair enough," he shrugged, and locked himself back in the folkmobile.

I stood on the platform for a few minutes, just to enjoy the blessed silence.  Strines is technically under Transport for Greater Manchester but you'd have problems believing it.  The station's surrounded by thick woodland and there's no traffic noise.  Once the train had left the only noise was my footsteps as I went down and under the track in search of the sign.

I retraced my steps to the footpath.  There was a public bridleway, but I was taking the smaller route, the Midshires Way.  A steep cobbled path clambered the side of the hill, with a warning that it was unsuitable for road vehicles.  It was also unsuitable for ill-prepared bloggers who'd come out in Converse trainers instead of walking shoes.  I slipped and skidded on the cold stones.

The shade meant that I had some relief from the baking sun, but it couldn't stop the ambient heat; soon my t-shirt was utterly soaked with sweat.  I looked like I'd been hosed down.  Somewhere below me, a cool brook teased me with its rippling tinkle.

The path rose higher up the hill before emptying me out in a tiny hamlet.  A couple of farmhouses, a church and, blessed be, a pub.  I loitered.  Should I go in and get myself a drink?  A pint of foaming bitter, a cool Pimms, even just some tap water?  I had only a few quid in my pocket but it seemed like a fair sacrifice.

I decided to be strong.  This was as high as my walk got - it was all downhill now.  If I made good time I'd be able to get the next Sheffield train.  With a longing look I turned away from the Fox Inn and followed the road to the head of the Goyt Way, another cross country track.

The path swung through fields and woods before emerging in a cluster of farm buildings, converted into quiet country homes.  A friendly Border Collie lolled out of a driveway, tongue hanging out the side of his mouth, for an exploratory sniff; I stroked his thin fur as he snuffled at my feet.  His owner was somewhere off inside the house, the front door wide open for a draught.  The road was lined with thick bushes and stinging nettles but the world was still.  Nature was resting in the wilting warmth.

After a few more turns, I ended up on a busy B-road through the village of Hague Bridge.  Two teenagers had parked their cycles at the side of the road and were watching the traffic while drinking pop.  I crossed between two parked cars (sorry, Green Cross Code Man) and darted across the bridge that gave the village its name, under a sign that intriguingly pointed to the "Drum Factory".  I bet it manufactures oil barrels or something equally tedious, but for a moment I imagined a musical instrument factory.  Men in overalls stretching oilskins tight, a testing facility run by Ringo Starr, industrial accidents being dangerous but undeniably tuneful.

There was a little playground, and a car park, and some bunting threaded through the tree tops.  I wandered over to the gate, thinking it might be some kind of local attraction, but it was the entrance to some allotments.  It seemed the allotment keepers really didn't like ramblers.  There were a bunch of signs posted over the gate, laminated and mounted on board, listing the rules and regulations and advising that the allotments definitely weren't a right of way.  Some arrows pointed to where the actual footpath was.

The arrows were a misdirection.  There was a path alongside the railway, as promised by the sign, but it was narrow and unkempt.  My legs - in deference to the weather, I was wearing shorts - were cut by brambles and my ankles were stung by nettles.  After about five minutes of walking I joined a wider, better kept footpath that also ran from the car park.  Well played, allotmenteers.  You bastards.

Now I was down by the river, headed for somewhere that was not even slightly amusing.

Ok, it's quite amusing.  I wonder if there's an age where you stop finding the word "bottom" funny?  I hope not.  I love the British ability to find smut in everything; I read one report that speculated Pacific Rim has been a relative failure in the UK because everyone saw the title and went "Hrnk.  Rim."

There was a man sat on a bench down here, a bike propped up beside him, enjoying a sandwich and a sneaky can of bitter.  I followed the well-worn path alongside the river, trying to resist the urge to clamber down the bank and have a paddle in the shallow water.  I imagined the cooling flow bouncing over my toes and soothing them, then imagined the mud sticking to the soles of my feet as I clambered back out with nothing to dry them on.

There were a few other walkers, couples on a stroll, but most of the time I had the reserve to myself.  Strange to think that barely an hour ago I'd been in Manchester.

New Mills Central station sounds like it should have been right in the middle of an urban sprawl.  Indeed, if I'd continued on the path a little bit further, I'd have hit factories and shops and houses.  Arriving from the direction of Mousely Bottom meant that it seemed like a silent rural station to me.

The Sheffield train was a little late, just a few minutes, but enough to give me time to take a seat and get a breather.  I positioned myself opposite the fine station house so I could admire its symmetry.

I crossed my fingers and hoped for the best.  My heart sank a little when the Pacer arrived but, thankfully, it wasn't an entire afternoon of folk trains; this one was just filled with people.  There wasn't a single finger in ear singer to be heard.

My last station was Chinley, which the map told me was another small halt out in a village in Derbyshire.  It was a bit of a surprise to step off the train onto a super-wide island platform in the centre of a deep cutting.

Chinley had once been important.  It had been a junction between three different lines, forming an interchange between trains to Manchester, Sheffield and London.  There were five platforms here, something which is inconceivable today.

Beeching and further rationalisation reduced the station down to nothing, just a train an hour in each direction.

I'd arrived in Chinley at the very best time.  A poster sellotaped to a lamp post gave me a little giddy thrill:

Why that was today! 

I found the fete easily.  All I had to do was walk towards wherever all those kids with ice creams and balloons were coming from.  I wandered round the back of the community centre and found the playing fields.

It was wonderful.  Some children in full karate gear giving demonstrations in a pen to one side.  An ice cream van was doling out ninety nines to over excited toddlers.  A tug of war rope ran through the centre, with a chalkboard next to it showing the team names and who'd won and lost.  Two game old birds - forty if they were a day - were demonstrating their belly dancing skills in outfits that covered their bellies.  They writhed and wiggled, a little out of sync, with a half dozen people on chairs watching appreciatively.

The stalls were mainly selling little crafty gewgaws - signs that read Bless this mess and World's Greatest Grandma, home-made jewellery.  I passed up the raffle and the refreshment tent, where a steady queue of Dads were waiting for pints of beer in plastic cups, and went inside the village hall itself.  There was union jack bunting and tables surrounded by families and pensioners.  Behind the counter a load of nice middle aged ladies were selling cake after cake after cake; drizzles, sponges, angel and fairy.  Chocolate and strawberry, jam oozing out of slices.  There weren't any muffins or cupcakes here - this was proper, old fashioned, British baking.  I thought about buying a thick treacly slice of fruit cake, but I felt out of place.  I was an outsider in this little village celebration, a gatecrasher.

I used the loo and then had a bit of a look at the community noticeboard.  It was absolutely jammed, every square inch covered with leaflets and posters and notices.  I was pleased to see that the Chinley Community Cinema's film showing the next day was going to be Skyfall, though there was a part of me that wondered if there was anyone left in the country who hasn't yet seen it (£100 million at the box office, biggest selling DVD of the 2013, just saying).

I left the fete behind.  The rest of the village was unsurprisingly quiet.  I'm guessing if you didn't want to take part you got the hell out of there.  I was going to sit down in a little park, but there was a drunk hiding from the sun in an alcove with a can of Tennant's Super so I didn't bother.

Instead I headed south, out of the village, enjoying the warmth on my face, the light tingle on my arms as I gently tanned.

I'm a very shy, very private person.  I find neighbours an irritation, surprise visitors a pain in the backside, socialising a terrible stress.  I like living anonymously in a flat in a town where people don't know me.  I like being able to walk down the road and not worry that I'm going to have to have a conversation with Mrs Millett from number 22; I like going in shops and not having to explain my purchases to the over friendly man behind the counter.

Chinley's community spirit made me wonder if I was missing something.  All those people laughing and joking together as they served up a lemon sponge.  People calling across tables to one another.  Children running in and out of tents.  As I passed the scout hut, proudly displaying its totem pole and liveries, I thought about how it would be good to be part of this little world.  Although I wondered if they liked gays out here in the sticks.  I wouldn't want my fabulousness to be a problem.

The pub at the village bottom was also a B&B, and it was setting up for a wedding.  People kept walking upstairs in shorts and t-shirts and then reappearing back in the bar looking uncomfortable and hot in their finery.  Again, I felt out of place.  This time, though, I had something to help combat that feeling.

Alcohol.  The cause of - and solution to - all of life's problems.

Suburban Sprawl

For reasons far too dull to go into here, I found myself in Manchester with a few hours to kill.  It was the hottest day of the year.  The Manchester International Festival was offering up Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet.  In Salford Quays, you could view previously unseen sketches by L S Lowry.  Via on Canal Street had a reasonably priced cocktail menu.  In short, the city was my oyster.

I immediately headed out to the suburbs so I could visit some train stations, because I am an idiot.

I started in the pretty suburb of Romiley.  I'm not sure why, but Romiley doesn't sound like a real place to me.  It sounds like something out of Game of Thrones; I would not have been surprised to find it full of dragons and large breasted women in chain mail.  It actually turned out to be a perfectly ordinary street of shops and pubs.

The station building recently celebrated its 150th birthday and, while it's certainly seen better days, there are still hints of its previous grandeur from the street.  Little terracotta flourishes beneath the windows, ironwork lamps.  There's a bit of greenery poking out of the brickwork and there are far too many ugly signs screwed into the wall, but it's a pleasing place.

Unfortunately there's a lamp fitting right in front of the station sign, which seems like extremely bad planning to me.  It meant I had to go for an odd angle to collect it, and then adjust the exposure just so you could read it.  This just shows my commitment to evidence gathering; I want you to be able to see that station sign.

It's still not entirely clear but trust me, it's there.

I headed up the flakily painted staircase to the ticket office to buy a Wayfarer.  This is Manchester's version of the Saveaway or the One Day Travelcard, but it's much more than that.  The Wayfarer's boundaries extend far beyond TfGM's jurisdiction, into the adjacent districts, making it a great value purchase for a day out.  The Wayfarer can take you from Buxton in the south east to Parbold in the north west, to Warrington, Northwich and Chorley.  At £11 it's a positive steal.

The only downside is it comes out of a drawer, rather than the machine, and so I had to endure the man in the ticket office sighing and looking disgruntled because he had to get out of his chair.  He wandered into the back to fetch the box of Wayfarers, giving me an evil look the whole time, before finally tossing it under the glass partition with all the care of Michael Jackson with a baby.  Sorry to inconvenience you by buying something, sir.

Back outside there was a wonderfully evocative spiral staircase up to the Manchester platforms.  When it was first built, there was a glass dome at the top of the stairs, a little crown on top.  That's long gone unfortunately, replaced by a metallic roof which, while certainly practical, doesn't have the same charm.  Or any charm at all.

I walked under the tracks through a wonderfully cool underpass and up to the southbound platform, past a hyperactive boy taking the steps down two at a time and shouting "look at me, grandad!" to the long-suffering relative behind.

You can see the octagon of the stairwell framed in the doorway there, and how the dome must have once capped it beautifully.  Now it just looks... unfinished.

That aside, at platform level Romiley's a bit of a star.  It's got some great Victorian buildings that have been carefully maintained.  There's a strange sleight of hand going on - even though I was above the street on the railway bridge, it's been designed to look like a ground level building; it's basically a country station on stilts.

With the trees and the wooden signal box, it was a reminder that Romiley is a village that's been swallowed up by the conurbation.  It's a rural halt that's been co-opted into the city.  A sign warning you that the waiting room was closed at certain times "due to persistent vandalism" reminded you that this was an urban stop.

I was headed south, to Rose Hill Marple (sometimes known as just Rose Hill).  It's one of those odd little stubs that has somehow managed to cling on in the 21st century.  The railway line used to continue beyond the station all the way to Macclesfield, but it was a mostly rural route that couldn't compete with the more direct line via Stockport.  Most of the old railway line is now a footpath, but Rose Hill's high commuter numbers gained it a reprieve.  Now it's a one station spur for the drivers to turn a train around in.

It can't compete with its predecessor, with a single track and a closed ticket office, but it has a little car park and was fairly busy for a Saturday lunchtime.

Up on the road bridge I found a station sign.  I've reached the stage where I've no idea what's going to be on one of these signs when I'm in Manchester.  The TfGM logo?  GMPTE?  Some variation on Regional Railways?  There's no consistency, once again reminding me that the local transport executive doesn't view the railways as a high priority.

From there it was a stroll into Marple itself.  I feel like that should have a "Miss" in front of it, to be polite; I don't approve of ITV's sudden use of Agatha Christie's Marple.  The venerable Jane would give you a very frosty look if you addressed her by her surname alone.  Mind you, there's an awful lot about the ITV adaptations I don't approve of, from the outrageous levels of ham acting, to the fondness for surprise lesbians, to perfectly good Agatha Christie thrillers having Miss Marple forced into them where she doesn't fit.  I'd rather they simply invented new mysteries for her than squeeze her into Why Didn't They Ask Evans?

That's not a complete tangent, by the way; there is a legend that Christie took the character's name from the station when her train was delayed here.  I suspect the canny hand of a marketeer, eyeing up Heriot Country in Yorkshire and trying to claim some of those tourist pounds.  Despite this, Marple wasn't a bad little place.  The locals seemed to be proud of it at least: three shops in a row were named after the suburb (Marple Flooring, Marple Express Pizzas, and the Marple Fish Bar).  In fact I saw the word Marple so many times it began to lose all meaning.

A left hand turn took me into Station Road and an avenue of brick homes and high trees.  It was a prosperous, well-appointed village.  This may be betraying my adopted Liverpool home, but there really are some lovely parts of Manchester.  The city centre's a bit generic, but places like this, or Romiley or Didsbury, made me understand why so many people wanted to move there.

A set of locks, incongruously at street level, alerted me to the canal bridge.  It was strange to see all this water so high in the hills, with a view of the peaks off into the distance.  I guess that's why there were locks.

The canal also meant I was approaching Marple station; as happens so often, the trains had followed more or less the same route through this part of the world.  This station is unashamedly modern, constructed in 1970 on the demolished remains of a much older building.  Strangely, the fact that they didn't bother doing the same thing at Rose Hill probably indicates how little they thought of it, whereas now it's more of a source of pride that they still have a Victorian station.

I walked down some steps into the extensive car park, past a metal crate on which someone had scrawled art exhibition and an arrow.  I hadn't seen anything on display, so either the sign was out of date or my comprehension of modern art is hopeless.  The station building was a squat little bungalow at the far end of the car park, barely visible amongst the vehicles.

I'm guessing the facilities inside were less than ideal for the staff, because the automatic doors had been wedged open to allow what little breeze there was to pass through.  I imagined the man at the ticket window was probably wearing shorts under the counter.  If that.

I took a spot on the platform to wait for the Sheffield train.  This was the last of the day's "town" stations; from here on it would be countryside all the way.  In the blistering summer heat, that was a real relief.