Last night I was out for a meal, and halfway through chomping on a juicy steak, Robert said to me, "You know when you should finish your blog? When the Northern franchise ends."
I immediately punched him in the jaw for having the temerity to tell me how to write my own blog, but to be honest, I'd had similar thoughts myself. In case you're not up on the world of railway franchising, the company that currently runs trains across the North of England - a conglomerate formed from Serco and Abellio - were beaten in their bid to carry on running the trains by a different company, Arriva (part of Deutsche Bahn). What this means is a lot of new uniforms and posters and, possibly, improved services and routes. (The latter part is not as important as new signs).
When the news came through I was weirdly upset. I didn't start travelling over the Northern map because of some loyalty to the company, or because I thought they were especially good at what they did. They were just the people who ran the trains I wanted to use.
As time has gone on, however, I've grown accustomed to their face. It's like that quiet, nice bloke in the corner of the office, the one you're not actually friends with, but who you chat to easily and who doesn't actively make your life hell. When he announces he's leaving, you get a little wrench, a little sadness, and a little worry about who's going to take over his role.
Thoughts of the Northern franchise ending naturally lead to thoughts of this blog ending. I'm still in double figures for stations to collect, but the numbers are dwindling fast. There have been a couple of Network Rail shaped blockages - the Farnworth Tunnel works have meant that I couldn't collect a station in Manchester, and Apperley Bridge station opened for business yesterday, adding another stop to my spreadsheet. On top of that, Kirkstall Forge and Low Moor stations both have promised opening dates of "the spring", which could be anything between March and May - and the Northern franchise ends March 31st.
So it's possible that this blog and the franchise will end at the same time. It's certainly a date to aim for. I definitely know what the last station will be, and have done for a while. Finishing before the turquoise of Arriva come sweeping in would put a neat bow on the whole experience. But, to quote a different Doctor at the end of his life...
I got off the train at Knaresborough and immediately felt a pang of regret. It was nothing to do with the station, which was utterly charming. The Victorian buildings had been preserved and maintained, the ironwork was freshly painted and clean. Reproduction posters lined one of the walls.
The regret was mainly based on the fact that I wouldn't be able to spend very long here. My Excel spreadsheet with all the times and travel methods - always a valuable and entertaining part of the trip planning - gave me an hour to get from here to the next station, Starbeck. Which was a shame, because Knaresborough looked like a gem.
The only thing I'd known about the town before arrival was its involvement in the English Civil War, when the Roundheads captured it after the Battle of Marston Moor. Beyond that - nothing. Now I could see pretty stone buildings, Georgian town houses, a peek of river down old worn steps. I took the sign picture while gnashing my teeth.
There was an underpass beneath the tracks, stained with rust from the ironwork, and I came out on the other side in the delightfully named Water Bag Bank. Our forefathers may have been many things but they weren't necessarily poets. Still, they knew how to build a pretty house.
I walked past the parish church then turned to head downhill, past a couple of pubs. I paused on the bridge over the river Nidd and once again cursed my foolish planning. I'll have to come back.
Over the other side was a true curiosity: Mother Shipton's Cave. Known as England's "first tourist attraction", it's the home of the "Petrifying Well" - a waterfall whose high mineral content means that it can turn items "to stone". There's an awful lot of inverted commas in that last sentence, which just about sums it up. It's based on a load of superstition - Mother Shipton herself was a "prophetess" - though the science behind the petrification is perfectly valid: it's just stalactites and stalagmites, only quicker. It sounded amusing, but I was surprised to see that there was a gate barring entry, and even if you wanted to go in you had to pay.
Instead I pushed on, up and over the hill, towards Harrogate. Two disgustingly healthy women jogged past me, one of them wearing a vest with MARATHON 2015 written on it. That's just showing off. Woop-de-do, you can run 26 miles without dying. I could do that if I wanted - I just choose not to.
I passed the Harrogate Golf Course ("Unlimited Golf for £88 a month") and descended into Starbeck, It's a small suburb on the edge of Harrogate, and was currently under siege from a chain of parked cars. There's a level crossing right through the centre of the main street, and it was letting a York train through. The road is far too busy for this sort of interruption, but there's no way to get round it other than an expensive bridge, so you're left with a traffic jam every half an hour.
Starbeck just underlined my regrets about having to leave Knaresborough so quickly. It wasn't that it was bad, it was just ordinary. There were shops and pubs and bus stops like anywhere else in Britain. It didn't have that special glow like Knaresborough had. There was a KFC, for goodness' sake.
Some of the shops were quirkier than normal, I'll give you that. Harrogate Angling Supplies advertised that it supplied "pet food, air guns (18+ only)" and a pint of maggots for £1.40. Everything you could ever wish for. I tried not to think about the maggots being stored right next door to Elite Butchers. Actually I tried not to think about Elite Butchers at all, because of their crimes against the English language. A sandwich board outside promoted their "Chicken Gordon Bleu", which I thought might be a gag until I spotted a sign in the window informing me that their "potato's" are sold in oven proof trays. One spelling mistake, I can forgive; two is abominable.
More interesting was the factory for Farrah's of Harrogate, makers of toffee for over a hundred years. You might not recognise the name, but you'll recognise the blue and white tins the toffee comes in - they're a standard product in artsy craftsy gift shops across the nation. Doctor Who even used one of the tins to store some crystals in Planet of Evil. I actually bought the BF some Farrah's toffee a couple of years ago for his birthday; he is a big toffee fan. He had one or two and then the tin sat under the coffee table for six months before being thrown away. Farrah's Harrogate Toffee is odd. It was originally invented as something to take the taste away from drinking the town's mineral waters, but frankly, I'd prefer the sulphurous aftertaste.
Starbeck station is blessed with the weeniest station sign I have ever seen. It's about a foot square.
The station itself is nothing special. Just a couple of platforms and waiting shelters. While I was there, two workmen arrived and began inspecting the Harrington Hump. I'm not sure what they were looking at, but they fenced off one particular section and spent at least two minutes staring at it.
The train arrived, fortunately not squishing the squirrel who'd leapt onto the tracks a few seconds before (he nimbly leapt up onto the platform with only moments to spare; he was clearly the Bruce Willis of the squirrel world), and carried us off to Harrogate.
I was ready for Harrogate. Knaresborough's charm had been a surprise to me, but I'd heard about Harrogate. Its reputation preceded it. I stepped off the train and all but shouted, "Come on Harrogate! Charm the fuck out of me!"
Then I looked up.
I didn't expect that. I thought Harrogate was going to be a sort of Northern Bath, but here was a big slab of Brutalism staring down at me. It was compounded by the footbridge that had been installed over the tracks from a nearby shopping centre to the car park. The doubling up made it look clumsy and inelegant.
I'd assumed that Harrogate would have a fine old Victorian station, but that was demolished in the Sixties after Beeching cut three of the four railway services that passed through the town. It was replaced by a solid grey box which Northern had done its best to make look festive, but was a real disappointment.
It was stark and unfriendly, and three sets of doors made it cold. A draught whipped through and caused the waiting passengers to huddle in their coats.
The normal place to go on arriving in Harrogate would be its scenic spa facilities. The waters in the town were famous in the 17th century, and the wealthy people visiting in search of rejuvenation made the residents very rich very quickly. I wasn't really interested in that - I wanted A Little Peace.
The Harrogate International Centre was the venue for the 1982 Eurovision Song Contest, and as a fan of the pan-continental kitsch fest, I had to go and see it. Royaume Uni won the right to host the contest after Bucks Fizz's skirt ripping triumph in Dublin the year before and for some reason, Harrogate was chosen as the host city. This is in the days when Eurovision was a relatively modest affair you could tuck away in a conference centre in a small Yorkshire town. Last year, the Danes converted an entire abandoned shipyard into "Eurovision Island", so things have grown slightly.
Some kind soul (/madman) has put the entire 1982 Eurovision on YouTube, and bless him for it. I watched it before I headed to the town and if you've got a couple of hours to spare, I'd highly recommend you watch it too. It's delightfully ramshackle and naff, a real throwback to when Eurovision was kind of awful and therefore, kind of wonderful. Nowadays the show is slick and professional, and the really dreadful songs get weeded out in the Semi-Finals where most of the continent will miss it. I think I preferred the Bad Old Days.
If you haven't got time to watch the whole thing, do watch the start where the BBC pretty much admit that Harrogate is a bizarre choice to host it and say "Where is Harrogate?" in a dozen languages. You can see the Harrogate International Centre in all its glory, filled with dinner jacketed dignitaries instead of the 8000 gays who attend the show these days.
In case you were wondering, no, we didn't win that year. Our entry was Bardo, a perky twosome who pranced their way around the stage singing "One Step Further". They were doing it in real life, you know.
The orchestra was, naturally, under the direction of Ronnie Hazlehurst. Anyway, we came seventh, behind this weirdo from Israel (who came 2nd!):
but thankfully ahead of the Austrian entry, which is so bad it makes me want to clap and run round the room giggling:
I miss the postcards between songs.
In the meantime, Finland managed to get nil points with this rancid turd from hell:
They reckoned they were taking the mickey, but they were from Finland, so who could tell? (Sorry: Eurovision always turns me into a mini-Farage),
Anyway, come the end, host Jan Leeming (wearing a sparkly headband, because EIGHTIES) announced that the winner was Nicole from (West) Germany. It was the first time Germany had ever won the contest (and they've only won it once more since, with Lena's superb Satellite in 2010). Ein Bißchen Frieden was a heartfelt plea for tolerance and peace; like a lot of German songs it sounds great in its native tongue and hopelessly trite in English.
I scoured the convention centre for a plaque commemorating this significant event in European culture. Harrogate seemed to stick a plaque on everything else in town; why not this? I couldn't find anything though, not a bronze square, not a blue circle, not a single statue of Nicole having a quick strum. It was terribly disappointing. Also disappointing were the more modern extensions to the HIC - dull glass boxes that couldn't compare with the swirly glory of that main rotunda building.
I wandered off, singing "Ein Bißchen Frieden" to myself as I went. I always thought I was a Eurovision nut, but then I met some other fans at a North West meet up and realised that I really wasn't in the same league. I buy the competition CD every year, and I can just about list the winners, if you give me a while; I've never even watched Melodifestivalen. I'm certainly not in the same league as Jamie, who makes videos about the contest on his Sight & Song vlog. I bow down to his superior knowledge.
Behind the HIC the town reverted to type. There were fine homes and mansion blocks. Harrogate is regularly voted one of the best places to live in Britain and I could certainly see why. The sunlight sparkled off clean tree-lined streets and between attractive rooftops. On a hill, the Majestic Hotel surveyed its people, imperious and proud, and definitely ignoring the Premier Inn that had been built at its feet.
The town was starting to work its magic. I headed back into the centre, keen to see more.
This is my 500th blog post. And it only took seven years! I'll try not to dwell on what a massive waste of time this has all been, and instead I'll say thank you for reading. To celebrate, here's a blog post about a station that isn't even on the Northern map, because no-one said all those blog posts were actually relevant.
If you read the very first post on this blog, back in 2007, you might be wondering what I was doing in Chathill in the first place. Back then I was just going to visit all the stations on Merseyrail's Northern and Wirral lines. Just those, no others. Slowly it expanded. I added the City Lines. Then I added the grey lines on the Merseyrail map. Now I'm visiting every station on the Northern Rail map. The blog's tentacles have reached all over the country.
It's addictive, station collecting. It starts to become an obsession. I just booked a holiday for next Spring, and I found myself looking at a map of the local public transport, wondering what stations I could visit. Someone I follow on Twitter went to an interesting place in Suffolk; I looked up where it was, and if there was a station nearby.
What I'm saying is that the Northern Rail map is sometimes a straightjacket, stopping me from exploring further. A case in point came on the last day of my trip to Newcastle. Northern's purple stops at Chathill, and after that the line turns grey, hinting that beyond is Scotland and, quite possibly, dragons.
Between Chathill and the Scottish border, however, there's one more station, the last, most northerly station in England: Berwick Upon Tweed.
The minute I realised it was there I knew I had to visit it. No matter that it wasn't within the bounds of the blog - I had to go there. Instead of getting a nice lie in on my last morning in the Royal Station Hotel, I packed up my stuff and headed for the 6:30 train to Edinburgh.
The train loitered at Berwick and so did I. It was smaller than I thought it would be - just a single island platform - but it was pleasingly furnished and clean. It helps that you've just swept over the Royal Border Bridge, an epic viaduct across the Tweed that gives you a magnificent view of the town and its environs. After that you have to be in a good mood.
I crossed up and over the footbridge and down into the ticket hall. It's been refurbished too, with some original features, but a CafeXpress has been inelegantly inserted into it. The corporate colours clashed with the subtle Victoriana.
There's some impressive ironwork outside, and the building's built in imposing red brick, so it's still a decent presence. It's bigger than it needs to be, but that was the Victorians for you - railway stations were just a massive game of "who's got the biggest penis?" to them.
I walked into town. Berwick is built on a bend in the river Tweed, and for most of its history England and Scotland exchanged barbed words over who owned it. The town was passed back and forth like a valuable heirloom among grabby descendants; successive armies marched in, kicked the previous one out, and hung around until it was their turn to get ejected.
The town walls date from Elizabeth I's time; with Mary, Queen of Scots getting all uppity over the border she thought it might be wise to bolster the town's defences. Now they're a tourist attraction. Grassed mounds that give you a great view over the town centre, with the occasional gun emplacement to remind you that these walls were proper defensive measures.
Like most towns that have retained their walls, Berwick Upon Tweed feels ancient. It's a morass of narrow back streets and higgledy-piggledy houses leaning in on one another. From the central street, with its impressive Town Hall, back roads fall down towards the river.
The problem was it felt tired. Physically, it was like a slightly larger Morpeth, which I'd visited the previous day, but here it was a bit more run down. There were empty shops on the high street and the paintwork on a lot of them needed work. It was undoubtedly charming, and I'll take a couple of vacant units over a MegaMall that sucked up all the life in the town, but there seemed to be a sadness in the streets.
I headed down to the wide River Tweed. There are three crossings here: the railway goes over the Royal Border Bridge, there's a concrete bridge from the 1920s (the Royal Tweed Bridge) and the Old Bridge, which dates from the time of James I. In the morning light all three seemed to glisten, impossibly glamorous and exciting.
The Quayside was straight out of Poldark, or rather, its Northern cousin: cobbles, tiny boats, dark alleyways leading to secluded courts. I followed it round to the base of the Old Bridge, then turned back into town. The road was steep and unfriendly; strange to think this was once the Great North Road from London to Scotland.
It was still early. The streets were still quiet and the shops were still closed. I followed the edge of the walls past a tiny shuttered ice cream parlour; on closer inspection, I read a plaque on the side that informed me it was built as Berwick's first public toilet for ladies. I immediately ruled out ever buying a 99 from them. I don't care how long it's been closed and how nothing inside it is original, that's still a place where people used to go to pee and so I couldn't eat a King Cone without suspecting it would be riddled with germs. At least there was a better view of Stephenson's railway viaduct from the end of the road.
I headed back to the station, being sure to keep Berwick's own Weeping Angel in sight at all times. Moffat was really clever to spot how freaking terrifying some of these war memorials are. This one looked like it could quite easily snap your neck without a moment's doubt.
I needed to get back to the station so I could get a bus. You heard. I thought there was no point in coming all this way to Berwick Upon Tweed and not getting even a glimpse of the Scottish border. I'd thought about walking, having assumed that the town was right on top of the red line, but it turns out that the border's actually a few miles north. A bit of online research revealed I could get a bus to Foulden, a village just over the line, cross over it, then get another one back. I paid my £4.30 - once again being thankful that bus fares on Merseyside are subsidised; you could almost get a SaveAway for that - and I was carried swiftly through small lanes to Foulden.
I didn't spot the point when I crossed over into Scotland. I stepped off the bus into a small country village that didn't look any different to the ones I'd been exploring in Northumberland the last couple of days. A bit quieter, yes, but it was nine am on a Saturday; people were having a lie in.
There was a brown Historic Scotland sign pointing at the Foulden Tithe Barn, so I went and had a look at that. It turned out to be an old barn. A very old barn, yes, but even the plaque on the side admitted it had been substantially altered in the 17th and 18th centuries, so it was hard to get excited about it.
More promising was the church behind it. Sorry, this is Scotland; the kirk behind it. I let myself into the graveyard, casting a casual eye about for anyone famous and/or my own name, and walked up to the church.
God has put a test of human willpower right outside the church. The bell on the top is rung by pulling a long metal cable, and that cable is just hanging there, on the exterior wall. It required every iota of strength and self control I possessed not to grab hold of the metal ring and make the bell clang over and over. I should definitely get a place in heaven for that.
I pressed against the vestry door and found, to my delight, that it was unlocked. I was able to simply wander into the kirk. How wonderful it must be to live in a place where you can trust the locals, where a community building like this is simply left open for visitors and worshippers, without fear of it being vandalised or robbed.
Inside was a simple, Protestant space, unadorned, uncomplicated. I'm not a believer but I still appreciated the quiet dignity of the building, and how special it must be to come here to gather your thoughts. I signed the visitor's book and left quietly, double checking to make sure I'd pulled the door tight behind me.
I left the village the way I'd come, but this time I carried on walking until I reached a small wooden bus shelter. Presumably, after independence, this'll be where the shock troops will be posted to man the border towers, but for now it was just an isolated spot that happened to be quite close to an administrative line.
That's my rucksack dumped by the post box, by the way. Who the hell was going to steal it?
I trekked a few yards up the road so I could pull this face.
And then I went a couple of yards further so I could pull this face.
Then I went back to Scotland to wait for my bus and wonder why exactly I thought those facial expressions were a good idea.
Don't leave us, Scotland. I know it's not really any of my business but, you know, I'm called Scott, so I feel like I have a little bit of a right to an opinion. I like you. You've got lovely people and lovely towns and the Glasgow subway. (We won't mention Lulu). You make Britain more interesting by being in it. I know the Coalition government are bastards, and you didn't vote for them, but I live on Merseyside; we never vote for the Tories, and yet they keep getting in. It doesn't mean that there should be a People's Republic of Liverpool. If you leave we'll be condemned to Tory governments in England until the end of time.
Anyway, I refuse to believe Alex Salmond would be any better. He's a particularly oily politician, with off-the-scale levels of ego; I strongly suspect that after independence he'll declare himself Emperor of Caledonia and demand a castle be constructed on Arthur's Seat. Think of that face on your bank notes. Then shudder.
The whole independence debate makes me sad, mainly because people are so furious about it (on both sides) - you can't be a bit wishy washy or open to debate; either you want the United Kingdom to be destroyed in a ball of flame or you want all Scottish people to be enslaved and dragged to London by their throat - there's no position in between. And as an English person it's hard not to feel unloved - are we really that bad? Have we really been that cruel? I feel like a husband who's just been told his wife has never loved him, and can't work out why.
The only plus side to Scottish independence is Sean Connery's promise to come back to live there if there's a "yes" vote. I want to hear what excuse he comes up with for not selling his luxury home in the Bahamas, because let's be honest, there's no way he's ever leaving that. Not least because he'll have to start paying taxes.
I went back to the grass verge by the bus stop and sat down (the actual shelter seemed to be a place for swifts to hang out; they kept divebombing the entrance so I was nervous about being in there and ending up as a low budget Tippi Hedren). I don't want this to one day be a spot where I have to wave a passport, or where one bus service will end so I can take another one. I like our silly, odd, mixed up, family. I'd like it to stay that way.
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