Chassen Park

It's been a rather long few days in the Torquer household, so I'll fill ya in.

Firstly I scooted off to Nottingham at the earliest opportunity to get away from my ignorant, insolent and persistent younger brother. After having grown out of CBeebies last year, he has been enveloped in the world of Tracy Beaker, a fictional TV character, young girl, roughly age 12. Her behaviour mainly involves complaining and tugging on other people's hair. Fortunately he does not copy the hair pulling bit, but unfortunately has already mastered sarcasm at the age of 6.

Furthermore, as I was in Nottingham, I noticed that everything seems to be much better there than in Liverpool. They have a 5 city centre cinemas, 60p bus fares, more frequent recycling collections, nicer scenery and even a Primark. The only aspects that Liverpool beats it on is 2 cathedrals and less gun shootings. They even have a Muji for Christ's sake.

Frequent readers of my blog (i.e. once a year) may remember my trials traveling to and from Nottingham over Christmas a few months ago. This time the train went wrong again. We were only waiting for an extra twenty minutes while some guy with a watering can topped up the coolant, though. However, this now means that I have had more unsuccessful journeys (being delayed, cancelled, no seats etc.) than successful ones aboard Central Trains services. A sign of the times, shall we say.

On the return leg from Nottingham, I called in at my other relatives in Manchester. Gratefully they do not live in Moss Side (like Toxteth but with more drugs) but in the quaint suburb of East Didsbury. Sigh, endless green avenues of trees in blossom, endless crunching of litter as you tread over it...

I stayed there one night, and, lets just say that bathroom is a bit, well, one star. I did manage to amass a large of amount of assorted confectionary and fruit for some reason.

So, lugging this heavy load down to the station the next morning, I consulted the departures board and went, as it indicated, to platform 7 for my train back to Liverpool. Now this platform is one all on its own at the side of the station. You can't actually see any of the other platforms/entrance/departure boards from there. I set my stuff down and waited with no-one else for about 15 minutes in silence, with silence all around me. I decided I fancied a quick snack form the extortionately priced vending machine at the end of the platform. I chanced leaving my bags unattended and hurried over for a 70p Twix (Innit! Bloody expensive or what?). I turned round and saw that the departure board had changed and my Liverpool train was apparently waiting to leave on the other side of the station: platform 1!

I legged it back over to my stuff, hurled the Twix into my bag and belted up the steps to the gantry. "Ah bollocks! Stitch for Christ's sake!" I cursed through the commuters, gathering surprised looks. I suspect people were thinking about how unorganised modern teenagers are ... always late ... tut tut. How totally unfair. I threw myself onto the train with moments to spare, almost giving an old man a heart attack.

"Good afternoon Ladies and Gentlemen, this is the 15:29 to Flixton, calling at Urmston, Chassen Park, Humphry Park and will terminate at Flixton."

I nearly cried.