Map! - Now In Colour!

I'm sick.

I have a rotten cold.  It's abating slightly now, but I'm still not out of the woods.  I still have a cough and a bunged up nose.  I could literally die at any moment.  Your thoughts and prayers are much appreciated.

Anyway, I have dragged - DRAGGED - myself out of my sick bed to write this post, because there's something important happening on the Metrolink.  A new map!  I was alerted to this by a tweet by Mark Ovenden, who wrote the excellent Metrolink: The First 25 Years book Robert got me for my birthday.

Pleased to see that the @MCRMetrolink will soon re-instate coloured lines to the network diagram. Service numbers will also be helpful for new people navigating the UK's biggest #lightrail system. Bravo @OfficialTfGM pic.twitter.com/5n2jnQxH6U

— Mark Ovenden (@markovenden) January 23, 2018

Oh yes - colour is back!  After a year or two of peddling that tedious grey effort, Metrolink have caved into public pressure and reinstated different coloured lines for different routes.  It's about time.  I am, as you may have noticed, something of a metro map fan, but even I had problems navigating the old monocoloured map.  When I was getting the tram from Trafford Bar into the city last week, it was only by carefully concentrating on the map and squinting at the tiny letters that I realised my tram wasn't going to Piccadilly; I had to jump off at Cornbrook and change.

The old map.

The new map.

The new diagram immediately looks fresher and friendlier.  The soft pastels Metrolink uses are an interesting choice compared with, say, the bold primaries of the Tube, but they really work.  It looks modern.  Interestingly, the colours chosen are, in the main, not the same colours the old map used to differentiate between lines.  I assume this is something to do with differentiating for colour blindness - ensuring that two colours that can't be confused don't run alongside one another.  To summarise:

• Altrincham to Bury (service A) was orange, but is now dark green (and called service 1);
• Altrincham to Etihad Campus* (service B) was reddy-orange, but is now purple (and called service 2);
• Bury to Piccadilly (service C) was dark green, but is now yellow (and called service 4);
• MediaCityUK to Piccadilly* (service D) was light blue, but is now orange (and called service 7)
• Ashton-Under-Lyne to Eccles (service E) was pink, but is now pale blue (paler than the old service D blue, and called service 3)
• Manchester Airport to Deansgate-Castlefield* (service F) is the only one that keeps its old colour, dark blue, but is now service 6
• East Didsbury - Rochdale Town Centre (service G) was purple, but is now lime green (and called service 5).

Eagle-eyed readers will have noticed asterisks in the list.  This is because of the real reason for the new map: service changes.  The Altrincham to Etihad Campus route is now cut back to Piccadilly, with the MediaCityUK service being extended to replace it.  More importantly, the Airport route is finally being extended across the city centre, so travellers are no longer dumped on the edge of town at Deansgate-Castlefield.  Now they're carried right across town to Victoria.

Here's the weird thing, though; the Airport line is going via Market Street, rather than using the new second city crossing via Exchange Square.  It means the Rochdale line (service 5) gets the new tram link to itself, which seems... odd.  It means that only a quarter of the trams leaving Victoria for St Peter's Square will go via Exchange Square.  That doesn't seem right to me; it seems like a waste of capacity.  

Another weird point about those service numbers is that they remain entirely diagram-based.  None of the trams will feature them - they'll just have the destination on the front.  This is disappointing.  Wouldn't it be better to have a nice orange 7 next to "Etihad Campus" on the front of the tram?  Really underline the colour and service so they register in the minds of passengers?

You might have also noticed that the old diagram featured an eighth route, service H, which was lime green and went from East Didsbury to Shaw and Crompton.  

That one's vanished entirely from the new map.  There's also no mention of it in the accompanying press release, which mentions all the other service changes.  Service H meant there was a tram every six minutes between Shaw and Crompton and East Didsbury; trams leave Rochdale every twelve minutes.  It seems unlikely that they would halve the number of trams on a section of line without mentioning it, but it's also unlikely they'd double the number of trams to Rochdale without a show-off press release as well.  And this is the route that goes via Exchange Square, too, so there's plenty of space in the City Zone for another colour.  Perhaps they just forgot about it?

My principal complaint about the new diagram is that it looks ever so slightly unbalanced.  The yellow, pale green and pale blue lines are all on the same side, meaning they slightly recede into the background; they can't compete with the bold purple/green stripe down the centre of the left hand side (with the dark blue Airport line in support).  It looks a bit like it's fading from view as your eye moves across it.  As I say though, the colours have doubtlessly been chosen and checked with experts to ensure they're legible - this was apparently what did for the old colour map:

That one featured a pink and a brown route, instead of the lime green and orange we've got now.  (It also deals with the change of direction on the East Didsbury line at St Werburgh's Road far more elegantly, though I prefer the new white blobs for interchanges).

One final point, similar to my sigh over the new Merseyrail map: as an enthusiast, I'd also like to register my disappointment that the under construction Trafford Park route doesn't make an appearance.  A nice little dotted line branching off from Pomona would've been great, showing that things are still moving on with the Metrolink.  But that's it really.  It's a good diagram, restored to greatness with a bit of colour.

Now I'm going to return to my sick bed and await death.  

Left of Centre

I was predisposed to like Aberystwyth.  I used to work with a girl named Emma who'd both studied and met her husband there.  Consequently she had dozens of fond memories of the place which she was happy to share.  She made it sound like a great, jolly, pretty town.

She was right.  There was a laid back, fun atmosphere to the place.  From the wide sweep of the bay, with a pier and guest houses painted the colour of ice cream, into the clogged streets behind, there was an energy and a charm to it all.  The promenade was being washed down with jets of water as I walked along it, preparing for the summer season.

I turned inland by a small square.  There was an old-fashioned pub overlooking it, and a group of students congregated on the benches.  The University does of course explain a lot of the town's vibrancy.  Aberystwyth is the end of the line, hemmed in by the sea on one side and the mountains on the other; you need to make your own entertainment.  The far Western brim.  The students had taken the town and filled it with their youthful vigour.  We were out on the edge, away from the bright lights of the rest of the country; it was a place to create your own world.

It was weird being in a proper town again.  For the last few days Barmouth had been as exciting as it got, and after that, Aberystwyth felt like a throbbing metropolis.  There were pubs and clubs and shops everywhere.  Suddenly I could see familiar names like WH Smith and Boots again.

I walked through the town to the station, a white stone building that stood imposingly over the locals.  Its off-centre clock tower was designed to be seen from as far as possible, directly down Terrace Road; I imagined harassed families running down it from the beach, buckets and inflatables flying, watching the minutes to their train tick away.

All was not as it seemed.  The station was still there, but there wasn't the proud arms of a railway company up there, or the double-arrow BR logo.  The writing along the top was A Wetherspoon Free House.  The station building was a pub now - another boozer carved out of an old building by the corporate behemoth.  Meanwhile, to the side, a retail park had been constructed on the old railway sidings, replacing engines with a Lidl and a Great Outdoors.  It was disappointing, though at least they'd named the pub Y Hen Orsaf - The Old Station.  Directly opposite was a far more offensive pub name:

Having a pub called the Lord Beeching opposite a station is like putting a giant photo of the Pope opposite an abortion clinic.  It's just offensive.  Especially since Doctor B sliced two of the lines from Aberystwyth, cutting a five platform station down to one mainline and one heritage platform.

To give Wetherspoon's their due, the building has been extremely well-restored.  The narrow rooms and areas of the old station have been maintained, with the pub gubbins inserted carefully inside, and the mustering area at the head of the platforms has been converted into an open terrace area.  I got myself a pint and sat down out there to watch the station activity.

With the boozers annexing the main station building, all the facilities had to move somewhere, and so ticketing and so on are now located along the side of the platform.  It's still possible to walk through the grand archway directly from the street into the station, but you pass an Indian restaurant instead of a moustachioed porter these days.  Passengers are pushed off to one side, following the barely noticeable sign you can see above.

I finished my pint and sauntered onto the platform for the train.  It was filling up with students clutching rucksacks, holdalls, black bin bags; for the first time in ages, I wasn't the only one on the train who looked like they were moving house.  There was a toilet on the station, which made me smile.  Years ago, I'd read the novel Stripping Penguins Bare, in which Benson, the hero, is picked up by an enormous man in the station toilet and taken to a farmhouse for a thorough seeing to.  I'd recently revisited the whole Benson series - the story of a Catholic schoolboy growing up in New Brighton -  as I'd got the long-awaited fourth book as a gift a couple of months ago.  Sadly, the newest book was a major let down; the author had gone away and convinced himself that he was writing social commentary, instead of amusing character pieces, and so it's three times as long with a quarter of the jokes of any other book in the series.

I didn't venture into the toilet; it was unseemly, and I really didn't want to find an enormous sex-crazed farmer in there.  I had a train to catch after all.

Collecting Aberystwyth meant that every station to the west of Dovey Junction was mine.  I'd conquered both branches of the Cambrian Lines - Mainline and Coast.  I was tired but deeply happy.

Eagle eyed observers will have noted that the Cambrian Lines go all the way to Shrewsbury, so really, I should have got the stations in between Dovey Junction and there as well.  To which I say - piss off.  Yes, there were more stations en route; yes, there's a part of me that wishes I could have got them too; but the geography and timetabling of the line meant that I wouldn't get home until nearly ten o'clock in the evening as it was.  If I'd stopped for stations on the way, I'd have had to stay another night, and though it was tempting, I wanted to get home to my own bed and my own telly.

Instead, I made just one more stop - appropriately to the self-styled Gateway to the Cambrian Coast Line.

For once, the station wasn't the main attraction.  I was here to meet the closest I have to a showbiz pal - Mike Parker.  Mike's the author of the absolutely fantastic book Map Addict, the story of his obsession with the Ordnance Survey.  It's always great to read a book that makes you think, "it's not just me then".  He writes lovingly and generously about his affection for the mapping giants, covering its history and infusing it with personal stories.  I enjoyed it so much, I did something I have never done before - I sent him a fan letter (well, a fan e-mail).  We struck up a correspondence and, when he was in Liverpool with his partner before Christmas last year, we met up and had a few pints in the Ship & Mitre.

Now I was in his neck of the woods, so he offered to return the favour.  He met me on the platform and immediately offered to take the obligatory sign shot.  We picked a heritage sign round the side, for a bit of variety.

As I write this, Machynlleth is underwater; terrible floods have swept through the town, driving people out of their homes and closing businesses.  (I have checked that Mike is okay; he lives outside the town, so all he's lost is some foxgloves).  Back in May though, it seemed to be yet another pretty Welsh town.  Mike filled me in on its history and sights; he's from the Midlands originally, but has turned native, learning the language and writing extensively about the country and its people.  He's even written about Dovey Junction in his book Real Powys.  He pointed out the town clock, for example, erected in the 19th Century by an unloved English landowner and now damaged.  Unfortunately, the builder was so unloved, they've had problems raising the money to refurbish it...

Our first port of call was Y Plas Machynlleth, the local civic centre, where Mike had to prepare his AV equipment (not a euphemism).  It was the Machynlleth Comedy Festival, and he was performing a standup routine later.  Through trial and error we set up his laptop, then headed back out into town for a pint.

It became clear that Machynlleth wasn't like other Welsh towns I'd been to.  Criccieth doesn't have a comedy festival; Tonfanau can only dream of an arts centre.  Machynlleth attracts thinkers, liberals, frontiersmen and women; it's a town that embraces life at a slight angle.  On the outskirts is the Centre for Alternative Technology, promoting eco-friendly developments and innovations, as well as researching new ones.  The people who waved hello to Mike (and he was very popular in town; we couldn't turn a street corner without him bumping into someone he knew.  It was like walking down the road with Sean Connery) were all a little different - a bit rough round the edges, a bit more easy going.  It's a town that's got its feet firmly planted in an organic compost heap.

(It does also have an Aga Shop, the only one I've ever seen outside of Chester; I guffawed, only for Mike to confess his devotion to his recently purchased Aga.  I don't think they're ovens, I think they're gateways to a cult, like those tests the Scientologists perform on people to get them through the door.  I suspect if I'd gone inside I'd have emerged with a five burner cooker and a strange devotion to Xenu).

We chatted over a couple of pints, before Mike had to go and give an interview to Radio 4.  Told you he was a glamorous showbiz person.  I tottered in the opposite direction, back to the station.  Outside I took an up the nose shot, just for completion - every other station got a photo with my nose hairs in it; why should Machynlleth be left out?

The station building, incidentally, is a lovely little thing.  Like much else in the town, you can feel the respect and care the residents have for their environment; they have put some effort into preserving their locale.

Trains for both branches of the Cambrian Line meet and part at Machynlleth.  The trains to England from both ends join up here (ignoring poor old Dovey Junction in the process), making an extra-long train to cross the border.  I clambered on board and chose a quiet seat for my journey home.

P.S.  Mike was worried I wouldn't know how to pronounce Machynlleth, so he sent me a handy pronunciation guide:

Thanks Mike!

Scally Central

Warning: there be spoilers ahead!

Above: Nicky Bell as Carty. Impenetrable Scouse accent not shown.

Last weekend I got a copy of the Awaydays DVD from Lovefilm, a film I'd been looking forward to seeing. I read the book two or three years ago, and I'd been really impressed. It shouldn't have appealed to me. It follows Carty, a nineteen year old lad trapped in a tedious job at the Inland Revenue who peps up his weekends by through acts of unpleasant hooliganism. The novel is filled with intensely described violence, committed by a character who clearly loves and enjoys the thrill of the battle.

Yet Kevin Sampson, as a writer, takes you inside Carty's head and helps you to understand who he is, and where he is going. The novel's partly based on his own experiences, and the realities and truths of nearing the end of your teens in the late seventies and falling in with a world of anger and pain and friendship really rang true. It helped that the novel is so specifically set on the Wirral, giving an extra frisson; it's one thing to read about a character living in a boho flat, it's another for it to be named as Reedville, a few hundred yards from my front door.

Awaydays the film sadly can't match up to the novel's visceral power, even though Sampson wrote the screenplay. It falls into the trap of depicting a violent, grubby world, but making it exciting and something you want to be a part of. This isn't a judgement on my part; on the contrary, the novel also makes the world of The Pack (as the hooligans are known) seem as thrilling as an army battalion. However, in the novel we can understand Carty and where he's going, and what he's getting out of the experience; in the film he fails as an interesting leading man, and becomes a blank. We're not seeing it through his eyes, so it becomes less involving. He's totally overshadowed by his mate Elvis, who admittedly was more interesting in the book too, but here dominates the screen in a great performance by Liam Boyle.

There's still the local interest though, as the film was made on the Wirral. It lead to a great deal of exclamations in our house, as we tried to work out where they were: "It's Hamilton Square!" "It's the Cavern!" "It's the front at New Brighton!".

The one time they step off the peninsular is to use the East Lancs Railway, for the very good reason that they could supply genuine old trains for the production. We get many a beauty pass of the old diesel pulling away from the platform, if you like that sort of thing. In the novel, this is meant to be Birkenhead North, and is symbolic of the difference between Carty and the other members of the pack. For them, Birkenhead North is "their" station, the one nearest their homes in the depressed North End of Birkenhead. For Carty however, it's very different; it's the station he uses to get home to Parkgate. The class differences are barely touched on in the film, but in the novel they're explored much more deeply, as Carty is a character who conceals his privileged home from his new mates.

Ironically, Birkenhead North then turns up for real, later in the film, except it's meant to be somewhere else. I say somewhere else because the film is, by necessity, extremely vague about who the football teams involved are. At no point does the word "Tranmere" pass anyone's lips, and the odd football scarf on show is blandly generic (red and white stripes, that kind of thing).

Birkenhead North therefore becomes Town X, and is given period specific posters to seal the deal. The station's architecture fits in with the bleak, end-of-days feel that pervades the film: it's a brutal, functional brick station, with high metal fences, and surrounded by waste land. It's the scene for a bloody confrontation between The Pack and the locals, and Carty gets beaten in the street outside before he fights back with a Stanley knife.

We don't get much of a look at other stations on the network; we're back at Bury Bolton Street for any further train scenes, but that's a lovely looking booking hall. It also provides an intriguing moment for me: in one scene, Carty dashes down to the platform and passes a bunch of vintage posters which have been used to give it that Merseyside ambience. Prominent, centre of the screen, is one for the Liverpool Overground.

Overground? First I've heard of it - unless this was a fake knocked up by the art department specially.

Naturally, the film can't end well, and it's another point where the book and film diverge. In the book, Carty begins to become tired of the Pack; we feel like he's maturing and growing out of the hooligan scene. In the film, it seems as though the Pack deserts him, rather than the other way round. The leader is killed, and replaced by a lad who has disliked Carty from the start. The Pack defeat another bunch of supporters, and then the lad turns on Carty and does this:

which, you know, doesn't go down well. I didn't get the same feeling of his journey as I did in the book, and I came away disappointed.

The Bf, on the other hand, really enjoyed it, so perhaps it's one of those times when you miss what's been left out from the book when you see the film. There's a lot of good things about it - it's very well directed by Pat Holden, and there are a number of good performances in smaller roles.

Or perhaps I just soured to it because of this:

That's the last moments of the film, when the poignancy and regret of the scene was ruined for me by TWO yellow and grey Merseyrail trains going past. 1979? My arse.

Huskisson! - The Life Before The Death

What started as a mild amusement with a side salad of historical curiosity, has developed into a fascination. I speak of course of the case of William Huskisson, MP, statesman, and the first man to fall under the wheels of a train. I've visited his memorial at Parkside near Newton-le-Willows; I've paid homage at his tomb in St James' Cemetary; I've even had a poke round the dock named for him.

The story is a classic in the annals of "hows about them apples?"; on the very day that the world's first passenger railway made its debut journey, Huskisson, a strong advocate, managed to inadvertently plummet under Stephenson's Rocket, resulting in his leg being crushed and dying from his wounds later that day. It's become a trivia question, a humorous anecdote, a moment of delicious historical irony, like the White Star Line claiming the Titanic was unsinkable right up until the moment the first class passengers realised all that ice on the deck hadn't fallen out of their martini glasses.

I wanted to learn more about him and his unfortunate demise, so I turned to Simon Garfield's The Last Journey of William Huskisson. I'm not a big fan of biographies, but this is a great read, as thrilling as a novel and giving you not only a portrait of Huskisson himself, but also a record of the travails the Liverpool & Manchester Railway went through before the debut trains ran on the 15th September 1830.

Huskisson emerges as a grand figure, a great man, and one who deserves to be remembered for more than his inability to get off a train track. Born in 1770 to relatively prosperous parents, he was educated in England before travelling to Paris to complete his tutoring under an uncle. While there, he became embroiled in the French Revolution, supporting the end of tyranny and witnessing the Fall of the Bastille at first hand. While he sympathised with the revolutionaries, he didn't go so far as to call for the end of the monarchy; he advocated progression, and a parliament with the will of the people which moved forward rather than dedicate its efforts to maintaining the status quo.

The lessons of France were carried back with him to England where, over the years, he became the member for various different seats before finally becoming the MP for Liverpool in 1823. He was well-liked and respected in the city, as over the years he had become a champion for free trade, and was a long time associate and supporter of another of Liverpool's famous names, George Canning. Between the two of them, they were a dynamic influence within the party, and frequently at odds with the Prime Minister at the time. Canning was the thrusting man of action, Huskisson the considered man of thought behind him - they were the Blair and Brown of their day.

Unfortunately Canning passed away shortly after finally becoming Prime Minister in 1827, leaving Huskisson to muster the movement on his own. He didn't have his friend's charisma though, and had been happier behind him, leading to a quiet collapse in the opposition to the PM, particularly when that role was taken by the Iron Duke himself, Wellington. Huskisson continued to call for reform and change, pressing for the repeal or revision of the Corn Laws (the protectionist rules governing the price of corn which were seemingly the only thing people in the 19th Century ever talked about), but it came to nothing.

The final straw came for him in the matter of Parliamentary reform. Unbelievably, even though the Industrial Revolution was in full swing and cities were growing across the country, Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham couldn't muster a single MP between them; the constituencies were based around ancient rights and land areas, meaning that Newton-le-Willows, for example, had two MPs even though it was just a tiny village. (Liverpool, as a historic borough and port, also had two MPs). Huskisson pressed for extending the franchise to these burgeoning population centres, and two particularly corrupt constituencies came within sight, one in Nottinghamshire and one in Cornwall. Huskisson and his supporters pressed for the two constituencies to be abolished and replaced by new ones for Manchester and Birmingham.

The inevitable horse trading then happened, with many fearful that if you started letting these big cities have representation, it would be the thin end of the wedge and soon you'd have people walking their whippets on College Green and using the Mace as a baton for their colliery bands (or something). A compromise was reached: Manchester would get an MP instead of the Nottinghamshire one, and the Cornwall one would just be abolished outright without giving anything to those dreadful Brummies, because their accents would just get on everyone's nerves (I'm guessing here).

The Lords, who could smell the approach of peasants, promptly rejected the compromise. Huskisson threw his dummy out of the cot - he felt that he'd already backed down enough by disenfranchising Birmingham, and he thought he had a deal. He wrote a letter at 2am, and sent it to the Duke of Wellington, saying that he could not serve in the Cabinet under such circumstances.

Wellington, who by all accounts was a better warrior than politician, realised he could dispose of a thorn in his side and accepted his resignation by return of post. Which lead to Huskisson saying, "oh, you misunderstood. I didn't mean it really, I was just joking," but the job was done, and he was sent to the backbenches sharpish.

Poor William. With his relegation to the back of Parliament, he promptly lost a lot of his influence and voice. He did have one thing going for him: a loud and continued support for the Liverpool & Manchester Railway bill, which was progressing at the same time. Huskisson could see the valuable advantage to trade the railway could bring to Liverpool, whisking goods from the Port to Manchester's manufacturers and avoiding the need for lengthy, expensive routes along canals.

And so he became partly responsible for his demise. One of the great features of Garfield's book is that he never lets you forget that a tragedy is building; as he flashes back and forth through time periods, places and people, it is all tinged with the knowledge of where all this is headed. Garfield points out that Huskisson only made it to the ceremony against doctor's orders - he had been suffering from a kidney infection. He persisted because he knew the importance of the event to his city, and because of a justifiable pride in the role he played in its creation.

(Actually, William seems to be have been a particularly clumsy soul. He fractured the same arm twice, in falls; he tripped on a cable and lacerated his foot; and, in an incident that Garfield mentions with admirable understatement, "His horse fell on him just before his marriage", which is bound to end up on an episode of Casualty before long.)

The route between Liverpool and Manchester was the first to have two parallel tracks beside one another, and so the dignitaries decided to make full use of this. The Prime Minister's train would occupy one track on the route to Manchester, while the other seven trains of dignitaries and local luminaries would occupy the other track, running alongside and ahead of the first train. In this way, not only would the passengers get to have a look at the countryside, but also a look at the Duke of Wellington as well.

All went well until Parkside, halfway between the two cities and where the train had to stop to take on more water. Despite being advised not to, many of the men took the opportunity to get out and stretch their legs.

Huskisson was on a high. The train journey was a triumph; the passengers were a-twitter with the brilliance of the journey, the thrill of the new technology. His role in marshalling the railway into life gave him a great deal of kudos. It was suggested to him that it would be the ideal moment to reconcile with the Duke of Wellington, and to go over and shake his hand. How could the Duke refuse him?

Huskisson strode over and reached up to take the Prime Minister's hand. Barely had he done so than the cry went up - a train was coming! Huskisson, along with several other men, found himself in the middle, between the two rails. Most managed to clamber aboard, but Huskisson became flustered; he panicked, and finally managed to get one leg over the side of the Duke's coach (the steps were at the rear, away from where he stood). But he wriggled, and writhed, and dislodged the door, so that it swung open and deposited him directly into the path of the oncoming Rocket - a train which had no brakes, only a reverse gear to slow it down.

Disappointingly, it seems the legend that he cried "Huskisson!" as he fell under the wheels is just that, a legend; Garfield makes no mention of it. He does go into graphic detail about the wound, and sensitive readers may wish to look away:

...the wheels had passed slantingly over the calf of the leg and the middle of the thigh, crushing and tearing the muscles but leaving the knee itself uninjured - a triangular wound unfamiliar even to medical men. The upper part of the leg had a multiple fracture, and the muscles were exposed in one wet and weeping flap... The arteries had not been severed, but lay flattened and pulsing in the sinewy turmoil.

Which is, you know, lovely.

Understandably, at this point, the party pretty much went to pieces. There was a dissolve into screams and panic; Mrs Huskisson came running forward, wailing and distraught; and the doctors on board did what they could. The best thing, it was decided, was to rush him as far as Eccles, and to get the surgeons from Manchester to meet them there. The flatbed wagon containing a brass band was unloaded (the band itself were forgotten about, and ended up walking home) and Huskisson was laid out on it.

The surgeons did their best, but even after they ministered to him, all was lost. Huskisson died that evening.

His funeral was held on the 24th September, and the whole of Liverpool, it seemed, turned out to pay homage. Mrs Huskisson hadn't wanted any pomp - in fact, she hadn't even wanted to bury him in Liverpool, preferring the church near their home - but the sheer weight of public grief persuaded her otherwise. His popularity with the citizens, together with the tragic circumstances of his death on what should have been a great day, captured the imaginations of everyone. Colour coded tickets had to be issued for his burial, so that spectators could get a proper view; people lined up on rooftops, and shops and businesses were closed.

In death, Huskisson became an even greater statesman than in life; the obituaries fell over themselves to praise him. Garfield's book is careful to debunk some of the more extreme claims made by those who wrote about him after he died, but he still manages to portray a great, intelligent, principled man. He was certainly a loss to the British parliament, and to the city of Liverpool, and deserves all the various tributes that exist for him. He deserves to be more than a sniggering joke.

I really enjoyed The Last Journey of William Huskisson, and not just because I'm a railway fan. It's superbly written, loaded with tension and speed, and kept me thoroughly entertained throughout. Highly recommended for anyone who likes trains, Liverpool, or just a damn good read.

Buy it from Amazon here.

Novel Pursuits

I have a confession. I love Merseyrail, the network, the map, the yellow and grey M. But my heart belongs to the London Underground. That's the network I first fell for, the one I first journeyed on just for the pleasure of journeying, the one I first became a teensy bit obsessive about. Merseyrail is my wife - safe, reliable, always available when I want it. London Underground is my mistress - ready to be ridden hard but only on the occasional stolen weekend away. And yes, that metaphor did just get a bit unpleasant.

I've got loads of books about the Underground; in fact, my bible is London Underground Stations, by David Leboff, a gazetteer of the architectural features of the system's stations. It's very out of date now, but I have many a happy memory of riding around the Underground when I should have been at Sixth Form, clutching my book and wandering from line to line. It's the simple things that amuse me.

In fiction though, it's slimmer pickings. There is one, truly great novel about the Underground: 253 by Geoff Ryman. It's amazing in its print form, and it's amazing in its hyperlinked, hypertexted form as well. The story of the people occupying a tube train, there are 253 stories about 253 people, each one of which is 253 words long. I first read it about fifteen years ago, and I still dig it out every now and then because it's just fascinating.

(Also, parenthetically, Geoff Ryman is a brilliant writer. Lust is superb, kinky fun, and Was gives the Wizard of Oz a whole load of dimensions you never even thought about. I saw him talk once, and I was all ready to ask an intelligent, thought provoking question, until I moved wrong and the Stewie From Family Guy Key Ring I had in my pocket shouted "Damn you vile woman", and I spent the rest of the lecture trying to conceal myself under the seat).

Anyway, where this is going, is that having read the Best Novel About London Underground Travel, I'd not really hunted out another. However, Jamie from Boom Bang A Blog (the internet's best resource for anything involving singing Moldovans and douze points) suggested that I have a look at Tunnel Vision, by Keith Lowe, as it seemed similar to my tarting. Only in a day and on the Tube.

The plot is basically that Andy (our hero) makes a bet with Rolf, his fellow Tube loving nerd, that he can visit every station on the Underground in one day. He does this the day before his wedding, and bets his honeymoon tickets, his passport, his travelcard, and his Eurostar ticket to the ceremony in Paris. In other words, if he doesn't visit all the stations in 24 hours - and take a photo of every station sign - he won't be able to get married, and he won't be able to take his bride away to confirm their nuptial bliss in Antigua.

I don't know if you're thinking the same thing as me, but all that went through my mind was, "what an arsehole". You'd have to be astonishingly, horrifically drunk to agree to that sort of thing, and what's more, you'd have to be a massive wanker to actually go through with it. Especially when your fiance - the fragrant Rachel - finds out about it and explodes. This was a pretty major handicap for me. It's hard to sympathise with the hero when you think he's a bit of a twat. I spent most of the novel thinking, "I hope he fails, and she dumps him. It will teach him to get his priorities right."

This is a novel though, a light, jolly romp of a novel, and so apart from Rachel no-one tells him he's a twat - even when she writes it on his forehead in lipstick.

The second problem I had, again, right from the off, was that you can't just spontaneously decide to visit every Underground station, and then make it up as you go along. It's impossible. You've got about twenty hours to do it in, so you need to know timetables, change times, which carriage to get in so that you can jump out quickly at the next station. And if you suffer derailments, one-unders, cancellations, pulling of emergency cords and so on (as Andy does, in what surely must be the worst service day in the history of the LU) then you may as well give up because there's not point in carrying on. You just can't do it. If you're as big a Tube nerd as Andy supposedly is, you'd know that. Also, he's just leaning out the doors to take a photo of the platform sign, and as both I and the Tubewhore will tell you, that's just cheating. If you don't pass through the ticket barrier it doesn't count.

Anyway, leaving that aside, Andy travels all over the system with the help of Brian, a tramp who attaches himself to Andy at Morden station and becomes his partner in crime. Brian's one of those cute, cuddly homeless people you get in fiction: despite allegedly being an alcoholic, he doesn't actually drink that much, and he certainly never gets drunk, stands up in the middle of the Tube carriage and starts screaming that he's gonna fugging kill the lot of yus. Moreover, he doesn't smell, doesn't have any mental health issues, and is just a bit sad because his wife ran off with a kitchen fitter. And just to prove how unrealistic he is, at no point does he soil himself. This is frankly ludicrous. As anyone who has travelled on the Underground will tell you, the first thing all tramps do the minute they get on a Tube train is to fill their pants, so that every passenger then becomes trapped inside a long metal stink bomb, pressed up against one another and trying not to gag into each other's handbag. Brian pees on the track at one point, but that's as far as his outdoor toilet habits go. Ridiculous.

The novel's breezy and fast paced; thankfully, we don't get to experience every single station along with Andy, as even I might have found that tedious. At the same time, we get to see Rachel being very badly stalked by Rolf, who has conceived this whole scheme as a way of trying to split the happy couple up so he can have her for himself. I can see why Rolf would go after Rachel, because she is, frankly, perfect. She is a former underwear novel who's also superintelligent, swears like a trooper, is down to earth and funny while at the same time being glamorous and approachable, and she loves Andy to bits even though he is, as previously mentioned, a wanker. While she spends the day wondering if Andy's ok, he's staring down the blouse of an Italian temptress and rubbing up against the breasts of female passengers (seriously. There seems to be an awful lot of Tube based frottage going on. Every time there's a bit of a rush hour crush Andy takes the opportunity to stare down a woman's blouse at her tantalising hints of bra).

It sounds like I hated this book, which I didn't. It's perfectly readable, it's not too taxing. As the book progresses, I did become more involved in the plot line, and it felt less like an Underground geek's trek round the system with a bit of fiction slathered on the top and more like a proper novel. Towards the end, as he gets close to achieving his aim, I even began to wish him well.

It's also a fascinating reminder of a time, only ten years ago, when you could run round the Underground like a lunatic, when you could take pictures of pretty much anything you saw, when you could shout and scream at LU officials without being shot in the spine by gung-ho men from the Met. You don't think things have changed too much in the last decade, but there's no way Andy would be treated with the mild bemusement by the staff that he is here in our post 9/11, post 7/7 world. Which is sad. It's also sweet to remember a time when you used to have to use call boxes to contact people and A-Zs to find your next Tube station instead of just using the augmented reality app on your iPhone.

The end - and this is where spoilers come in, folks - was sadly a big let down for two reasons. Firstly, Rachel doesn't get on the Eurostar to Paris when Andy doesn't get there on time. Instead she lets the train to her wedding (and her family, incidentally) go off into the distance while she quietly awaits his arrival. Sod that. I'd have been avec gay Paris before you could say baguette, nabbing myself a Frenchman who owned a Citroen and wouldn't abandon me for the delights of the Metro. Very disappointing.

The other let down was that Andy forgets Mornington Crescent because he's using an old Tube map, which shows it as still closed for refurbishment. Rubbish. I live 300 miles from London, and I've still got a copy of the latest Tube pocket map. Also, I was well aware when Mornington Crescent reopened. If Andy is as much of a Tube geek as he supposedly is, he wouldn't have made such a basic, schoolboy error.

Perhaps I'm too much of a Tube geek to read this myself without spotting the flaws. Perhaps it's utterly fascinating to - for want of a better word - civilians. I just couldn't totally engage with it. Geoff Ryman remains undefeated.