What I Did On My Holiday, by Scott, Aged 30

Ah, Madrid. A city I had never previously been to, and one I knew very little about, other than it was probably going to be warmer than the Wirral in October. So the BF and I boarded our EasyJet plane and made our carbon footprint even larger so we could get a little short break action.

And, as it turned out, some International Supertarting. I couldn't help myself. Mark Ovenden's fantastic Metro Maps of the World book (http://www.metromapsoftheworld.com/) had said that the Madrilenos were obsessed with their Metro, and it's true. My travel guide was only a year old, but the map of the system was out of date already - about a dozen new stations had been added to it.

So I had to collect the stations. It's a disease. To try and minimise the inconvenience to the beseiged other half, I only collected them when we were forced by connections or missed trains to loiter on a platform, which didn't happen that often over the course of the five days; it is a very good system. I'm forced to apologise, therefore, for the lack of Opera, Atocha Renfe, and Goya, despite all of them being graced with my presence; sorry stations, but you had your chance. Goya was actually particularly disappointing. Baker Street, on the London Underground, is tiled with images of Sherlock Holmes; while on Merseyrail, as we saw, Aintree's one big Horse of the Year show. I expected a long mural of Goya's works along the platform (perhaps not his Black Paintings; descending underground and having Satan Devouring His Son welcoming you there could perhaps induce a few more one-unders than intended). Instead it had a tiny little portrait as you hit the platform - impossible to read as it was at the foot of a flight of stairs, and commuters harrassed you constantly - and that was it. You could say, yes, but look at their huge expansion projects and excellent transport links, but I don't care; I want portraits of befuddled royals while I wait for my train!

Santo Domingo: location of our rather lovely hotel, and also the location of a less lovely red light district a few hundred yards away. Being naive homos, it took the searching glances from a good few scantily dressed whores before we realised we were in that kind of area (go for a night out in Birkenhead and you will see girls wearing a lot less and not even charging for it). We beat a hasty retreat, finding refuge in a decent looking restaurant to escape the prostitutes. I have nothing against sex workers; I'd just rather not see it, ta.

We seemed to spend half our life going through Banco de Espana. Partly this was because we fell for the massive Parque del Retiro, and wandered through its leafy environs on a couple of different occasions. Also, it's convenient for the Prado, which we visited one day, but were seriously disappointed by. They had run out of English-language guides, which unfortunately meant that we had no idea what we were looking at; as a result it sort of descended into a melange of stern looking 15th century aristocrats and various pictures of Christ and the Holy Family. It all became a bit wearing, frankly, and we ended up rushing off. There wasn't even a decent shop.

(Insert hilarious bowel related reference here). Colon is ugly, I'm sorry. It's one of those 70s developments where everyone was tremendously excited that they had invented concrete, and so used it all over the shop i.e. it was now used as a vast skateboard park.

O frabjous day! Callao! Callay! (You really cannot have too much Lewis Carroll). Callao was the location for our local El Corte Ingles department store, a Spanish national treasure. Actually, one of our local El Corte Ingles, because at the other end of the street was another one. I had a cup of hot chocolate in the cafe here, and when I say hot chocolate, that is literally a description of what it was. Pure, melted chocolate in a cup. Why not just inject it into my waistline? It was also the location for a number of large cinemas - sort of like the Leicester Square of Madrid.

The big gay station of Chueca, hub of Madrid's big gay scene. I'd love to say that this district was superior to Canal Street, or Old Compton, but it was just a bit... well... tawdry. Of course, all homo districts are - the huge sex shops tend to lower the tone - but we'd actually walked through Plaza de Chueca and dismissed it, thinking that nowhere that downmarket would be the centre of the city's queer zone. On the plus side, the station literally empties out into the Plaza; Old Compton Street is yet to get its own stop on the Picadilly line, so one up for the Spanish I feel.

Lawyers have advised me not to mention anything involving certain illicit substances here, so I won't. We were only changing trains anyway, so I have no idea what entirely legitimate practices were going on above my head.

...And so, we head back. Lovely modern station, and huge too. By this point I just wanted to be home, as you may be able to tell from my thousand yard stare. Madrid was very nice, and it's certainly a great plus to wander around in a t-shirt in mid-October; but it just didn't do it for me, not in the same way London and Paris and Amsterdam and Berlin did. It just felt a little bit... small. The capital of one of Europe's great nations should have been more than it was. It didn't feel impressive enough. But its Metro is lovely, and they should be given every round of applause under the sun for realising that a good, efficient, clean underground system is worth every penny you can throw at it.

Horses for Courses

The Wirral Line, so far, is pretty much sewn up. Two branches complete and a couple of random ones polished off along the way. But I felt I was neglecting the poor old Northern Line. So early Saturday morning, I board the train and head out for the Ormskirk line to polish off a few more.

This line is very familiar to me. I was a student in Ormskirk, at Edge Hill College of Higher Education/University College/University (delete as applicable). I used this line with alarming regularity. Ormskirk is a very pretty little town, but when you're 19, you crave the big lights, big shops and especially, big pubs of the city, so I'd be on the train into Liverpool the first opportunity I got. But that was of course over a decade ago now, so it's all a bit stranger, a bit more alien.

Travelling along the line I was struck by how things had developed. As you rise up out of the tunnel onto the viaduct, the train gets a magnificent view of the dockside estate. What had changed in the intervening years was that the crumbling warehouses were being replaced by office buildings, new industrial units and, in some cases, luxury apartments. Yes, it's a slow transformation, and there's still an awful lot to do. The massive hulk of Stanley Dock still rots in the distance - the world's largest brick building, and no-one quite knows what to do with it. There was a family of tourists on the train, and the dad got quite excited by the huge warehouses. Bless him; he tried to interest his small daughters in the industrial architecture ("Look! A bonded tea warehouse!"). They couldn't give a toss; quite reasonably for six year old girls, I think.

I carried on going, past Sandhills, Kirkdale and Walton, heading for Orrell Park. Walton, I've already done; Sandhills, I'm leaving until it's redeveloped, which should be soon; and Kirkdale is somehow tied into the Kirkby line for me, mentally, so that can wait. In my head the priority was Orrell Park, Aintree and Old Roan, because - OCD alert! - I always liked the O-A-O symmetry of their names.

I knew nothing about Orrell Park whatsoever. I didn't even know where it was. But it was quite a sweet little station, tucked away on a side road, with a man actually cleaning the platform of litter as I arrived. Yes, reader; someone clearing up litter.

It actually turned out that Orrell Park was just moments away from Walton shopping centre, a long messy conglomeration of shops threaded along a busy main road. I like this sort of thing. I come from a town where, if you want to shop, you go into the town centre; that's it. I sort of like these neighbourhood shopping areas, that have a tiny branch of Boots and a little Woolworths next to green grocers and butchers. It's interesting, and it's just another "big city" thing for me.

I walked from here to the next station, Aintree. Perhaps I'm educationally subnormal, but until I moved up here, I had no idea the Grand National was held in Liverpool. I don't know where I thought Aintree was, I just didn't think it was round here. The racecourse has taken idiots like me on board and has helpfully signposted their main attraction:

Merseyrail have also embraced the whole equestrian theme to a quite ludicrous degree, viz:

The horses! The horses! They're everywhere, and I think they went to my head a little, so I went a bit daft when I decided to collect this sign. There was just something about the whole positioning, that made me decide to go for the railway-alien-antenna look. I probably did it just to distract myself from the colossal shitness of that station building. Seriously people, if you're going to spend all that money building a brand new station, how about building one which doesn't look like a public toilet?

Still, I thought, Aintree: home of one of the most famous racecourses in the world - at least I'll get a decent ALF out of it. I was shocked - no, disgusted - to find there was not a single ALF on the platform. In fact, this was to be an entirely ALF free excursion. This is the best I got:

"Aintree Station: Alight here for Aintree". Really? Do you think so? Consider me outraged. My stern letter to Merseytravel about the quality of their ALF boards just got even sterner. It's one thing to not have a board at all. It's quite another to be patronised by the signage.

Grumbling, I boarded the train for what I intended to be my final destination, Old Roan. This is another station which has had a load of money thrown at it. Sorry, it's not a station: as the sign shows, this is the Old Roan Bus Rail Interchange (well, it would if my fat head wasn't in the way). What this means is a train station with a load of bus stops outside, but still, I admire the commitment to integrated transport.

I nipped out of the station in search of a little bit of history: the infamous Paradox. When I was a student, they used to organise bus trips to this legendary nightclub, a huge edifice towering over the railway line. The reason it was legendary was because it was cheap, it was scuzzy, and you were virtually guaranteed to come away from there with at least one filthy sex act under your belt. I never went because, as a sensitive young homo, they didn't quite cater for the filthy sex acts I wanted to commit (I had to go to the Curzon in Liverpool for those) but I would sit enraptured as my friends came back with tales of bacchanalian debauchery. That may be a slight exaggeration; usually they just got a few gropes and perhaps a happy finish, but still.

A friend had said he would be in Aintree, at the vast sprawling retail park that stretches between the station and Old Roan. But he hadn't texted me to say he was there so, on a whim, I went back and caught the train to Maghull instead.

Maghull was always going to be difficult to reach, because it's impossible to walk to. This is because of Switch Island, the charming sounding but actually nightmarish road junction which is to the south of the town. At this point, the M57, M58 and A59 all collide in a huge level junction, above a canal and below a railway line, in the kind of half-finished mess that transport projects sadly seem to descend to. Originally the M57 was meant to carry on to the coast, and the M58 would have integrated into it, and it would have been impressive; instead they just sort of gave up (see here for the full story: http://www.cbrd.co.uk/badjunctions/57-58-59.shtml). It's just a roaring confusion of lanes upon lanes which make no sense. I felt quite smug whizzing past it on my train.

Maghull is an unattractive name for a not terribly attractive place. Try saying out loud; it's like you're clearing your throat. The townspeople seem quite proud of it - I was so desperate for an ALF I took a photo of the sign - but really, it's a not very nice town. It's the proud possessor of the ugliest town hall I have ever seen in my life, out on the dual carriageway (in another signifier of what a rubbish town this is, the station is miles away from the middle of it, so I couldn't go and see it; do a Google Image search, if you can bear it). And its station has a level crossing which, as I've indicated previously, I think are just awful. No wonder I don't look happy.

Full disclosure: I'm prejudiced against Maghull because, when I was at Edge Hill, there was a group known as "the Maghull lads". These were a bunch of lads who seemed to be rotated between all the women of Edge Hill, breaking hearts everywhere they went. Anyway, they were quite unpleasant to my friend Jennie, who to this day pronounces Maghull as if it were a gum disease, so perhaps I shouldn't be so blinkered. I'm sorry Maghull. I'm sure you have many charming hidden features. Somewhere.

Maghull also had a little bus station attached, which contained one of the early signs of the death of civilization:

There are about 15 different things about that poster which depress me inutterably. Fortunately, my mate arrived at this point to stop me from throwing myself under the next train. He whisked me away in his car so he could buy a new fish from a local garden centre. He picked an unattractive brown lumpy thing, which he then promised to name after me; surprisingly, I continued talking to him after this, and after a bit of lunch he dropped me off in town for the train home.

I got off at Hamilton Square. I was going to leave this one for later, but I was there, and I was keen to finish off my day of tarting, so I snapped a couple of shots. Hamilton Square is where the original electric train between Liverpool and Birkenhead ran to, and its very attractive station building still bears the signs. "Frequent electric trains" - how marvellous is that? The huge tower was a water tower, constructed to run the hydraulic lifts which took Victorians down to the subterranean depths. It had a twin in Liverpool, at James Street, which like so much in the city was bombed in the war.

(Actually, I should admit to something. Though I was pleased to cross another station off the list, and architecturally it's the best of today's buildings, the best thing about Hamilton Square for me was the poster below.

How fucking gay am I? I can't help it. I just think the name "Lucky Santangelo" is simultaneously the worst and best name in Christendom. God bless you Jackie Collins and your limited command of the English language).

Odds and Sods

I'm trapped under a cold. It's damned annoying. It's one of those persistent, makes you feel like crap but doesn't actually debilitate you colds, which mean all you want to do is wrap yourself up in a duvet with a cup of tea and a Futurama DVD. As a result I'm pinned inside the house with no chance of getting out there and tarting.

In the meantime, I've cobbled together a post from some of my leftovers. While I'm out and about, I sometimes see something which amuses me, or interests me, so I snap a pic in case there's room for it in the usual posts. When it comes to posting the thing, though, I find that the pics sometimes interrupt the flow of the writing; that I had an interesting picture, but it didn't fit in with my general thrust at that point, and so it got left out. So this post rectifies that with a few oddments that are hanging around the Merseytart folder on my PC.







This was at St Michaels, on the Northern Line. The local children had obviously been given the task of designing a logo to represent Liverpool for the Capital of Culture, and their efforts were turned into a frieze on the southbound platform. Something about the colours here just appealed to me. Shame about the blob of frigging chewing gum, though. Since terrorists intent on paralysing our nation's transportation system have taken to putting the bombs on themselves rather than litter bins, can we have our bins back? Not that the ignorant sods would probably use it. Really, random executions would stop these chewing gum abusers. That was all a bit Daily Mail, wasn't it? Let's move on. Well done children of St Michaels for your efforts, and well done people of Merseyrail for putting it on the platform. There should be more of this sort of thing, I think, little features on platforms to catch your eye.



Watch out for flying sausages. (Readers under the age of thirty: you don't know what you missed). This is in West Kirby, and it made me smile for a moment.





Sometimes a photo doesn't make it because my photography skills are somewhat, erm, lacking. The above picture does the dank, evocative, moody subway at Port Sunlight no favours whatsoever, which is a shame, because it's great. I'm probably alone in this opinion, but I like dark oppressive railway subways, and this is a great example of the type. (I should imagine my opinion would be radically different if I were, say, a thirteen year old girl using this subway at ten o'clock at night). It's strangely wide, and divided down the middle with this fence, for no apparent reason. It looks like something out of Children of Men; I'm expecting Pam Ferris to be herded down it with a load of screaming immigrants. Can I just add parenthetically that I loved Children of Men, and that it makes me cry like a baby every time? When they carry the baby out of the building and all the soldiers stop to look, I turn it a blubbing wreck of snot and tears, and I do not cry at any films, because, essentially, I'm dead inside.

The lovely 1930s concrete platform roof at West Kirby, two proud wings thrusting into space.




A rarity on this site: a picture of a train! This is taken at Walton station, and it shows a train headed towards Ormskirk. I am afraid I have little or no interest in the trains themselves. They look very nice, in their new grey and yellow livery, and they are usually comfortable and clean, but that's where my fascination ends. I'm all about the railway architecture, and frankly, I couldn't give a monkeys if this is train number 49728. I'm not sure if that makes me more tragic or less. (I will say that I prefer electric trains to diesels, but that's mainly to annoy someone I know who loves diesel trains - what fascinating circles I move in!) Gaol spotters will be pleased to note that you can also just about see the prison wall in the distance.



This is on the Birkenhead swimming pool, just round the corner from Conway Park. For years I had wandered past here and assumed the streak of silver was just an abstract piece of metal art, but no; in close up, it's actually a swimmer! He looks a bit Stanley Matthews in those shorts, but still; it's very nice. I actually now feel sorry for metal man, as he's sort of marooned on the side of a not very impressive brick building. He'd be much better out over the entrance.


That'll do. Normal service will be resumed soon, I promise - I'm hoping to get out next week...

Somebody Stop Me

I don't think there's anything more to be said, really, is there? HELP ME.

Plus One

It's goodbye to intimate shots of my nose hair; yes, for this trip, I have a guest photographer, in the form of The Boyfriend. He's been curious about my little jaunts for a while and now I thought it was safe to let him in on it.

Plus, I needed someone to hold my hand, as today we were venturing into dangerous territory: the North End of Birkenhead. There are some areas that are just more than a little bit intimidating, and the North End is one of them. A council estate clustered around the docks, this is one of the most deprived areas in England, and is certainly not the kind of place that is kind to naive trainspotter types. If I'd been on my own, I'd have been quite intimidated; as it was, I was just apprehensive - after all, we were two unfit homosexuals, so the odds would be against us in a gang fight.

We walked through the estate unmolested, only spotting one tattood thug with a rottweiler, and just the two druggies. Birkenhead North station itself is down a side street, behind a row of burnt out shells of terraced houses - it's clearly going for that hot this season, downtown Basra look. It was at this point that The BF chose to inform me that he had been to this station before, when he was a loyal Liverpool supporter waiting for his train to North Wales, and he had been forced to flee from a baying mob of locals who threw glasses at him. Timing is not his strong suit. We got the pic done in double quick time, and managed to hurl ourselves on the New Brighton bound train.

Today's session was designed to knock off the other northern branch of the Wirral Line: this way everything north of Hamilton Square would be done. As a result the next station was Wallasey Village, which is perched on an embankment. This meant I could get a high level shot which is probably as arty as this site will ever get.

The station name, however, is a complete violation of the Trade Descriptions Act - Wallasey hasn't been a village for decades, and the road away from it was choked with traffic and lined with burger bars and discount shops. Definitely not in picturesque Little England here.

It was barely a ten minute walk to the next station, Wallasey Grove Road, which had a car park and a bus stop and seemed surprisingly busy. It turned out this wasn't because there was a rush of commuters utilising this handy transport hub, but instead it was because there was a cash machine here, and people were turning up in their cars to use it. The station building's vaguely picturesque, but in terms of signposting, the best we could manage was the car park sign; the Merseytravel post you normally see there was way out on the main road, and we needed to dash to catch our train.

Actually, that's slightly misleading; we only needed to dash because of The BF's reticence at passing on information. I was stood on the platform, trying to work out which was the correct one for New Brighton, as a train pulled into the one opposite. It was only then that The BF told me we were on the wrong one - leading to us making a mad dash up the overbridge and hurling ourselves on the train as the doors sidled shut.

So from there it was a reasonably long distance to New Brighton. The view from the train is actually very scenic here - there's a whisk round the corner, and suddenly you can spot the sea, and the beaches. New Brighton is right at the tip of the Wirral, and as the name implies, it was intended to be the North's version of the resorts on the South coast. It was too late to be gentrified, though, and so it headed rapidly downhill, becoming a day trip destination for the workers of Liverpool and Birkenhead.

The station's a pretty impressive terminus, and it was obviously built to handle a large amount of holiday maker traffic. It also featured today's only ALF which, at the request of a Mr JH of Chester, has been framed face on in the pic instead of at my usual jaunty angle:

There were a fair few people disembarking here, as there was some sort of car rally going on on the Parade down by the front; it meant that our wanderings were constantly accompanied by the roar of car engines. This doesn't sound too bad but it's like having a swarm of bees loitering next to your ear. We collected the station though, with The BF doing his best David Bailey impression to try and avoid catching the glare of the sun.

Though it was grey, it was warm, so we walked into the town and down to the front. New Brighton is on its last legs as a resort, and it's a shame. The whole place has the air of having given up being an attraction, and instead is starting to become more and more residential. The main road from the station down to the sea is now lined by small Barratt homes, and a large, impressive looking building on the front has been converted from a nightclub into apartments. The views are still good though, with Liverpool's increasingly impressive skyline in the distance, but everything is tawdry and half-hearted.

Like a lot of people, I have a great fondness for the seaside resort, and I'd like to see them work; but New Brighton doesn't know what to do with itself. While West Kirby, on the other side of the peninsular, has gone the upmarket route, New Brighton's trying to be Blackpool when it just doesn't have the same (dubious) charms. A bowling alley has been built on the front, which is a start, but it's architecturally hideous, and turns its back on the promenade in front.

This aqua amusement arcade has the right idea, showing a bit of glamorous leg, even if its best days were somewhere around the Coronation. If New Brighton had a cinema, perhaps, and a couple of chain restaurants - a Pizza Hut, a Frankie & Benny's - it would get people visiting. No, it wouldn't be classy, but West Kirby does the classy end. I'd rather see this place with a decent history and actual attractions made into a destination again, rather than the depressing retail parks where cinemas and nightclubs are shoved nowadays and which look the same no matter where you are. The latest plans to regenerate the place certainly don't sound promising: constructing a Morrison's supermarket on the front and filling in the Marine Lake to do it. Sorry, did I say unpromising? I meant fucking awful.

Anyway. New Brighton also features Fort Perch Rock, a fortification built to defend the Port of Liverpool from Napoleon, but finished once the Napoleonic Wars were over. It looks pretty good from the outside, and deserves its place on the ALF, but it was two quid to get in and The BF and I are determinedly tight. Plus the sign outside absolutely forbade photography. I think that's just being mean and I have no intention of encouraging that sort of behaviour. I took a picture of the outside though, as a yah-boo-sucks to the killjoys inside, and we moved on.

Back up the hill to the station to go home, going past some pretty villas which obviously once housed terribly rich people but now seem to all be in the process of being chopped up into apartments. There was a single hotel en route, but sadly it seemed to be the kind of place asylum seekers get dumped in rather than a destination.

Instead of going back to Birkenhead North, we continued on to the final station above Hamilton Square: Conway Park. When I first met The BF, many many many years ago, I used to travel every Friday from Ormskirk to Birkenhead Park to see him. On the way, I got to see this station being constructed from the train. It was fascinating to watch it being revealed, a little more each week, peeling away the tunnel around us and forming platforms and circulating areas until finally there was a new, gleaming station waiting for us.

It still does gleam; considering it's now nearly 10 years old, Conway Park still looks pretty clean and tidy. The tunnel roof was opened up when they constructed the station (apparently this is because if the station were underground, the costs of maintaining it would be astronomical) and at its head is a nice, modern looking building. We rode up in the lift to the surface - The BF shamelessly eyeing up a lad in the elevator, the big tart - and then went and stood outside so I could get the name pic. The name, incidentally, is complete rubbish. It was named after the development it's in, even though it's right next to the town centre, and "Birkenhead Market" would not only be far more apt, it would be a lot more attractive. But I expect the developers contributed some money to its construction, and wanted some payback for it. Ho-hum.

So that's another five down, and the whole of the north of the Wirral is wiped out. The map below shows all the stations I still need to do; through use of MS Paint I've wiped out all the ones I've done, like some sort of Nazi commandant (go back into the archive to see what's missing). It still looks like it could be a while before we're complete!

"I love humans. They always see patterns in things that aren't there."

So sayeth the Doctor, and who are we to argue? This is more an accidental tart. I was on my way to work and I managed to miss my train by about 30 seconds, which is rather frustrating. However, making lemonade out of the situation, I turned it into a Tart - and actually, it allowed me to collect a pair.

Full disclosure: I have a teeny, tiny bit of an Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. I value symmetry above almost anything. I like to see order and structure in things. And I like to find patterns in random things - it makes me feel a whole lot better.

The line from Birkenhead Central to Chester is most familiar to me, because I use it for work every day, and in my head I've sort of divided it up into little slices. Rock Ferry, Green Lane and Birkenhead Central - they are all grouped together as the "urban" stations, all grit and grime. At the other end, there's the pleasing symmetry and sort of inter-related names of Bromborough Rake, Bromborough, and Eastham Rake - something about those three names is just so satisfying to me.

And in the middle, there are the "twin" stations: Bebington and Port Sunlight. Both stations are up on viaducts, they're pretty simple at platform level, and they both serve the Port Sunlight village - viz:

In full OCD mode, can I say how much I love that they swapped "Port Sunlight Village" and "Lady Lever Art Gallery" over between signs? It was probably done for some tedious geographical reason, but I like to think that the man in charge of ALFs just wanted to make it interesting. (However, he'd lost his inspiration by the time he got to the Evil Repeating Birds of Leasowe & Moreton).

So I started at Bebington, my usual departure station. The light was bad, and it was extremely difficult to get in a position, which is how I ended up under the bridge, and... well basically, this is one big apology for the shittiness of this shot. I'm sorry Bebington. I let you down.

Anyway, onwards and upwards. It's a straight line from Bebington to Port Sunlight - the road follows the railway embankment - but I took a diversion and wandered through the village itself. (As you may have deduced, I was in no hurry to get to work). If you're not familiar with Port Sunlight, it was built to house the workers for the Lever factory in the village - yes, that's Sunlight as in Sunlight soap. The Lever family constructed a whole town for the employees, with a pub, village hall, church - even an art gallery. This was just for the rank and file; the managers were housed in Thornton Hough, which is further down the Wirral and is like a Disney English village - everything is designed to look like it's been there since Ye Olde Days, even though it's only about a hundred years old.

The whole village is now a conservation area, and they are incredibly strict about preserving it, as they should. Normally I hate new buildings that pretend they're old. Chester is full of them and they make me want to scream. If it's the twenty-first century, build a twenty-first century building, and don't shove a load of mock-Tudor bobbins all over it. Somehow, though, Port Sunlight gets away with trying to look older than it is. Perhaps it's their social significance. The houses must have been astonishing for the factory workers at the turn of the century, people who were used to slum conditions. In fact they're better than some houses being built today. At least these ones have space and light and room to breathe. You don't get that on a Brookside estate. And can you imagine employers building a village for their employees now, or if they did, actually making it somewhere you'd want to live?

If you get the opportunity, do go and take Port Sunlight in. The Lady Lever Art Gallery does some very nice cakes. There; now you have no reason not to go.

Anyway, I eventually had to drag myself away and go to the station. It was built in keeping with the village, though it was actually constructed some time later, and it's lovely; like a little country cottage. It's also amazing what a difference a few hanging baskets make.

In fact it's so nice I now feel doubly guilty about how crappy Bebington looks next to it. I might have to revisit I think.

Map! Part Deux

As an update, here's where we are so far with the Merseyrail map. Two branches are completely done, which is pleasing, but the Southport line hasn't been touched at all, and even though I travel on it every day to work, the only station south of Birkenhead Park that's been tarted is Bache. 18 are done, leaving 49 to go, and I've been doing a lot of easy ones so far. Plus with the Mysterious Train Wheel Problem, services have been cut down - so going forward, things can only get more difficult.