Train Journey

I travelled back from Guisborough on Thursday.  Caught GNER from Darlington to London Kings Cross, round the Underground to Paddington, then GWR to Reading. 

On the way down we passed through Grantham and, as usual, I looked out for the Isaac Newton Shopping Centre.  The thought of the great man standing in a checkout queue at Sainsbury's always makes me smile.   I wonder if that other famous person from Grantham, Margaret Thatcher, has a more appropriate building named after her?  Maybe an abbatoir? 

The journey went smoothly: an 8 minute delay at Doncaster was converted to 1 minute early at Kings Cross.  We lost about 15 minutes coming out of London but by then we were on the home stetch and I wasn't bothered.  At Darlington I had bought a copy of Spitfire: The Biography by Jonathan Glancey and was three quarters of the way through it before we pulled into Reading.  I will finish it on my next few journeys to and from work.

A Day in Birmingham

On Friday I spent several hours wandering around Birmingham city centre.  I have been through Birmingham on trains many times before but this was the first time that I had ventured out from New Street Station and I was pleasantly surprised.  Imposing Victorian buildings, large paved open spaces with fountains and statues (scientists and engineers such as Joseph Priestley and James Watt amongst them!).  I got a distinct feeling of being at a centre of immense power and wealth, as if Birmingham was to the Industrial Revolution what Rome was to the Roman Empire.

Waiting outside the Museum and Art Gallery for it to open, I tried to ignore the large flat screen on the Town Hall that was showing the BBC TV news (Had it been dark I would have been tempted to silence it with a brick).  Even the less imposing buildings such as the Library were not too bad.  Of the modern buildings, the most eye-catching is the Hyatt Hotel, a glass tower block with another glass tower block reflected in its windows (I would have taken a photo if I'd taken my camera with me).  In the afternoon I had a look around the two Waterstones bookshops.   

On the train journey home I saw two red kites several miles apart near Didcot.  Red kites are now common in the country between Oxford and Reading.  A little further on there were 4 small deer in the middle of a field.

The Log from the Sea of Cortez by John Steinbeck

In March 1940, writer John Steinbeck set out with marine biologist Ed Ricketts, two seamen and an engineer on a expedition to collect marine animals in the Gulf of California.  This book was written by Steinbeck using the log and field notes of Ricketts as a base.  It is a wonderful scientific tale, similar to Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle, and Rachel Carson's Edge of the Sea, but with interludes in which Steinbeck recounts the thoughts, discussions, and experiences of the crew.  Sometimes Steinbeck falls into speculative biological philosophy.  Parts of this are rather dated, for instance, by being based on over-stretched analogies between biological systems and society, or by using the pre-Hamiltonian idea of  evolution being for 'the good of the species'.   In spite of these few short-comings, I really enjoyed this book, and looked forward to reading it on the train each day. Now I have finished it, I miss my little dose of the sunny Sea of Cortez,  with all its colorful inhabitants, to lighten these gloomy January mornings.