The Village Hobby Pt 2: Men and train sets

Hobbies are a low key Faustian pack, at least among those who are in gainful and resentful employment. The deal is that you will work in an unrewarding job that is simply there to bankroll your real life. It's like being a super-hero, you spend all day pretending to be normal, and spend your nights making dioramas of famous scenes from World War II if dinosaurs had been involved - and who doesn't thrill a little when confronted with a 1/32 scale recreation of a T Rex battling a British tank unit on a Parisian street corner, or a Spitfire downing a pterodactyl over Big Ben (yes of course the dinosaurs fought on the side of the Axis - they were recreated using perverted Nazi science, what are you, thick?)

One of the positives of this trade-off is that while you sure as hell don't give work a thought while you are away from it, you can devote time at work to your hobby. Not overtly of course, as for instance waders, a tackle box and a keep-net writhing with angry fish might cause comment as you take communion, but you can certainly give your pastime some thought.

This is because, as anyone who has ever sat in a meeting featuring PowerPoint and has spent the time from Slide three until 'any questions' idly wondering if you could capitalise on the upcoming badger cull by introducing a range of 'Woodland Soups' without being too specific about the content, or the likelihood of contracting TB as a result of ingestion, will be able to confirm, musing is not easily detectable (unless you operate a lathe or are a surgeon, in which case bloody well concentrate and stop wondering whether that triceratops model you ordered for your recreation of the siege of Stalingrad has arrived yet).

If you have a hobby, and you are at work, and your badge says that you are 'happy to help', then you are a fibber. But that's OK because badges that read 'Hello, I'm Gary, ambivalent about helping, but if you want to discuss what would win in a fight, a T Rex or a Cromwell, I am very much your man' are difficult to find, even on the Internet.

When you leave work for good you are unencumbered by nine to five distraction and the fear that your colleagues might find out what you do at the weekend and judge you because you rather like folk dance, or weaving, or competitive masturbation, and you can level up from hobbyist to enthusiast. And there is no better place to see retired folk in enthusiastic action than a railway line run by enthusiasts (unlike commercial train companies, which are staffed by unenthusiasts).

Retired enthusiasts are such a regular feature of steam train lines that you could be forgiven for concluding that the train crew came with the engine when it was new and have simply stuck with it after it was acquired by a trust formed of people who like grease, polishing things and smelling faintly of equal parts soot and sawrfega.

Because maybe it's the grimy faces, but bloody hell do the enthusiasts look happy when they smile. And who can blame them? You know that whooshing feeling you get in your stomach when you see a bloody big loco thunder by and the whistle shrieks and the clouds of steam flow back over the carriages like a white mink stole thrown over the shoulder of a silent movie starlet, well they get that all the time, from marmite to horlicks and in their dreams as well.

Steam enthusiasts are the ultimate hobbyists. You can be enthusiastic about your skydiving, or your golf, or your fishing or God help you your Morris dancing (by the way, putting on some bells, thwacking a twig and doing a jig in a car park followed by ten hours of drinking makes you a Real Ale enthusiast, not a folk dance enthusiast, although the two are often confused), or about dressing up as a Roundhead or investigating paranormal activity (usually in pubs, handy for accessing spirits) but being a steam enthusiast, traction or rail, is commitment. And romantic.

A change of scene

What between the riots, recession and no Downton Abbey on the telly on a Sunday night, one could be forgiven for concluding that things could be described as grim. And that’s just at home, when one turns on the idiot lantern to the BBC Speculation 24 channel (other ways of upsetting yourself and commenting on how a newsreader’s blouse is inappropriate are available) you let a whole world of misery flicker into the room. If it’s not the planet trying to make life difficult for people, it’s other people trying to do so.

Is it any wonder that people turn, in a variety of ways, to alternative realities? The great thing is that doing so does not require a huge glowing contraption that makes a whooshing noise and flings you to an alternative England where there are cool airships, the Crazy Frog ring tone was never invented and neither Hitler, Murdoch or Cowell attained positions of influence, rather people are constructing their own realities.

And they are well catered for. Stop in at any newsagents and, after you have bought your scratchcards and fags and noted down the number on the card in the window advertising a ‘large chest for sale’, you may notice the plethora of magazines that line the walls like a fresco pained by somebody with multiple personality disorder and a passion for part-works about quilting. The gateway to alternative worlds is here. Either different worlds altogether, inhabited by celebrities who although they notionally occupy the same planet that the public do, inhabit a different existence, or a minute focus on a part of the reader’s world, such as the one that collects lace.

And especially railway modellers. There are any number of magazines dedicated to modelling, military and civilian and by far the most populous of these are for railway model enthusiasts.

We have all, at one time or another, run a toy train around an oval track but, for the serious modeller, it’s much more than that, it’s the creation of a perfect world, where the trains have character, rather than being shaped like an articulated dildo and where they pull in and out of stations, normally small country stations, that have station masters and porters and are even probably manned at night.

Most importantly, the trains run on time. Because the modeller can write his (no ‘or her’ here) timetable.

This is indeed an alternative world, one in which the modeller has control of the rolling stock, every run and every shunt. Imagine the sensation of power and relief that a commuter must feel running their own train service. An alternative, preferable world, complete and to scale and never, ever, late.

Postcard from Norfolk – Sheringham

A rare rainy day in North Norfolk. The principal attractions of North Norfolk are, if you like vast expanses of beach and waves, to be found outdoors. Indoor activities such as drinking are of course great fun, but can't be sustained beyond a few hours and are best enjoyed after a good walk. So when the rain came on, the alternative to soaking up the weather on a beach was to head for Sheringham for a trawl along the Hugh street.

Sheringham is the home of some rather excellent shops, although the second hand bookshop and the little grocers has gone, the former I don't know why and the latter probably a victim of the Sainsbury's that has opened up on the high street.

The town is also home to one end of the North Norfolk Railway. This is run by enthusiasts and runs steam trains up and down a length of line from Sheringham to Holt, although now that it is connected to the national network again, there is the delicious prospect of one day just steaming to Scotland for the hell of it. Certainly steam was up today, meeting with the low cloud. Despite the rain the sight of a steam train always gladdens the heart and the platform was crowded with, if I am honest mainly men, taking pictures of the train, the engine, the carriages and each other.

The NNR run specials, such as the Santa special and the Halloween special. Wheat I'd really love to see is the dinner special, where there is fine dining on a train rather than the usual grimly microwaved snack, or the thriller killer murder mystery specials here the whole train is a rolling whodunit mystery theatre. And what I'd really like to see happen is occasionally switching evenings around, so that half way through the soup course the diners are confronted with a body, and a selection of character suspects including a mysterious oriental gentleman, a femme fatal, an aristocratic big game hunter and a vicar. In the absence of a butler of course, the conductor would have to have done it.

Said it all

Right, so what does THIS mean? A single white plastic bag thrust unfolded through the message pipes of the station. Send for Robert Langdon, we need to decipher this.

The white plastic bag is like a ghostly remnant of the original colourful semaphore collection of sweet wrappers. The most likely meaning is that some lazy sod could not be bothered to walk the ten yards to the station rubbish bin, but at least they were contentious enough to stash the bag rather than toss it to the breeze. Indeed, with stores charging people for carrier bags, there has been a reduction in the amount of plastic bag litter. Plastic bags used to be a regular a feature of the hedgerow as birdsong. While an appeal to the public’s environmental sensibilities didn’t halt the spread of plastic across the countryside, charging folk a penny a bag has caused outrage, the re-use of plastic bags and a whole new ‘bag for life’ industry. I own several bags for life, not because I believe in reincarnation but because I repeatedly forget to take my bag to the shops and have to pick up a new one.

So possibly what this is is just a handy way of always having a plastic bag to hand. By stashing plastic bags at various strategic locations throughout the village, one would never be far from a plastic bag if needed, and would not, presumably, have a cupboard full of bags for life.

Say no more

They’re gone!

Is it a conscientious cleaner? Or is it a message. If so, what kind of message, a warning perhaps that this platform is no longer a safe place to trade cryptic confection communications?

Certainly some spook shuffling around in a wide brim hat and raincoat with the collar turned up, or a bummer, is a more likely bet than at railway employee with a rubbish bag and a spare half hour to beautify the station.

Or maybe I do the platform staff a disservice. The village station stop is by no means an inner city hub, where the litter consists mainly of sleeping tourists and tramps, so the errant crisp packet dancing in the breeze does rather stick out. I’m prepared to bet that the staff would leave the wrappers there as a temporary art installation until professional pride overcame art appreciation and they trashed the lot. At least they didn’t simply rearrange the lot to confuse the intended recipient.

I shall miss the colourful collection of wrappers. Not to the extent that I would want to add to them though, I am much more a folded fag packet sort of chap but I thought that in an age of communication saturation, where everyone is constantly communicating yet not really saying anything that it was interesting to see something that was public yet coded, highly visible yet narrowly understandable, and more letter than litter.

Say it one last time

The flight jacket. Timeless. Classic. I remember when I got my flight jacket. A birthday present, it was everything that was great about a garment, it had sheepskin lining to keep you toasty, and a leather exterior to show I have a grudge against cows. I still have it, even though it has been unworn for twenty years, after an evening where I was thoughtless enough to wear it while also wearing chinos and was greeted with the phrase ‘alright flight commander?’ when I strolled into my local pub.

Two things – at least it wasn’t a ‘Top Gun’ reference but…it’s WING COMMANDER you arsehole!

My plan is to wear it in my old age. I am preparing the mission patches that I will have sewn onto it. I am tempted to get some made up along the lines of ‘Iraq’, ‘Lybia’, ‘Syria’, China’, Syria again!’ and of course ‘Syria…can we bomb it any flatter?’ but there’s also the temptation to have mission patches along the lines of ‘Narnia’ or ‘Mordor’.

The moment, and I mean the moment, I walked out of the shop with my new jacket, I started noticing all the other f**kers with their sheepskin flight jackets. Where the hell had they come from? There had, surely, not been this number of fighter-pilot wannabes when I was walking into the shop.

Once you purchase something, you start to notice others with the same or similar product. Once you start to do something, you start to notice that others do it too. This aspect of human behaviour explains the success of social networking on the internet. And dogging.

Most of us are too busy putting in a dazzling performance in the lead role of the production that is our lives to sit back and scrutinise the background. Once you do though, it’s like the Matrix, you start to notice weird shit popping up everywhere. Actually, it’s totally mundane shit but because you’ve noticed it and because you are playing the lead role in the movie of your life it has to be significant right?

I have, of late, been fixating on chocolate bar wrappers jammed behind a pipe on the train station I commute from. By focusing on this I can distract myself from what others describe as ‘real life’ but what I consider to be ‘a series of situations, problems and experiences so complex and horrible that I feel they can only be solved using an magic abacus made of beer’.

The point is, once you start to notice something, you can’t stop. Take for instance the chocolate wrappers. It’s fairly unlikely that they are actually some sort of message (unless it’s ‘this is the shittest Dan Brown plot ever’) and they are more likely to be a lazy, but tidy, kid placing the wrappers there every morning when he has his 3,500 calorie breakfast shortly before he presents his hyperactive arse at school to be educated.

So, on the train, I notice that there’s a carefully folded wrapper jammed between the table and the carriage ‘wall’. Normally I’d just think litter lout but, lucky me, because I have fixated on the secret society of public transport confectionary communicators, I am now panicking that by sitting next to a folded choccie bar wrapper I am somehow sending a message. I have no problem sending a message, I’d just like to know what it is.

For instance…

Mars Bar - unimaganitive
Chrunchie – your mouth will feel dirty afterwards
Dairy Milk – Oh God, so good, I want more, more, more. Feeling a bit sick now. More!
Marathon – problems accepting change
Curlywurly – eight inches of pure pleasure…but didn’t they used to be longer?
Frit and nut – satisfaction and it’s one of your five
Finger of fudge – too delicious to be used as a sex aid…twice.

Manchester by rail...standard class!

Ahh, the romance of train travel! Clouds of steam, assignations in the dining car, genteel murder, stoking, assignations in the luggage car, gin, amusing incidents in the sleeper compartment, bribing the border guards and, of course, thanks to terrorists and strict border controls, it's still the best way to smuggle smack or shooters into the country.

Modern day train travel has much to commend it. There's the quiet carriage, where mobile phones and, apparently, loudly rustling your crisp packet is frowned upon to the point of Paddington hard stares or second degree tutting. There's the buffet car, with it's cornucopia of snacks meaning that some offer up to three flavours of crisps to compliment your twelve cans of Stella.

Recently, I had to travel up north for work. I love the train journey up north. You go through what is now a deprived area of the country but what was once a glorious industrial powerhouse. That's one of the reasons why there is a railway track there at all and also the reason why for so much of the journey the railway runs alongside the canal network. Railways were laid alongside the canals they would eventually replace because the navvies had already done all the hard work of levelling the area, building embankments, finding the best pubs and composing folk songs.

Previously I'd done the trip first class. Not this time though, this was austerity Britain and I was under the distinct impression that my class of travel was one above having to shovel coal into the engine for 200 miles. Or whatever.

The view, however, was still first class. England was in the grip of winter and there had been a hard frost that night, now the same clear skies that brought the frost let the sun illuminate it in dazzling style. You could see the cold, the white countryside, the breath of the cattle and, in the canals, a thin skien of almost ice on the iron dark chill waters.

Inside all was jolly and warm. First class travel means that you get fed and watered. Tea and coffee and coffee and tea and a hot breakfast. Not so in standard class. Luckily I am a man of immense resource and enviable pic nic skills and so using only the most basic of amenities; a M&S simply food, a coffee shop and an artisan bakers, had cobbled together a light three course breakfast.

Then, as we left the station, came the announcement that because the catering crew has missed the train, there would be no catering, at all, on the journey. The howls went up from first class while, sitting in a fug of smug, I debated whether to eat my BLT or auction it.

I ate it, of course, and enjoyed the view. But I wonder if future travellers will have that same opportunity. The canals today are used for holidays and colourful narrowboats putter along, a reminder of a time when the world moved at a slower pace. I can't see the holiday makers of the future getting away from it all on a motorway cruise, although journey times might be similar.

One of the more colourful sights was, in the middle of an expanse of what at first appeared to be suspiciously well groomed countryside but was, of course, a golf course, two golfers striding forth across the frozen fairways. Colourful trousers making an impression in the black and white surroundings, clouds of breath steaming over their shoulders like the puffs that would have come from my train decades ago. They must really love their game, or have really shit home lives.

It was refreshing, at journey's end, to see the northern city I was visiting in the sunshine for the first time ever. No kidding. The place looked transformed. But no wonder they shot 'life on Mars' there. It was like going back to the 1970s. Everyone was smoking (remember smoking?) and everyone was overweight, probably due to the wheezy queue that seemed to be a permanent feature outside the door of Greggs. Not that I blame them, if I hadn't of feasted on a BLT that morning, I might of joined them.

Norfolk notes - Sheringham

Sheringham continues to get posher. This is the town that did the near impossible; in the sort of act of a hero overcoming a monster that one normally associates with Greek myth, Sheringham saw off Tesco and instead of getting a shop in the centre of their town that would bugger the economy of every surrounding shops forevermore, have decided to go with a Waitrose placed out of town. This protects the local economy because of its geographic placing, and also because no bugger can afford to shop there.

Having said that, I notice that Sainsbury's local has snuck onto the high street. Though if the one in Sheringham is anything like the one near me, deciding to price everything as if it had just been announced on telly that the apocalypse was imminent and now is the time to panic buy and hoard will ensure that the local shops keep going.

Sheringham has also connected to the rest of the world in rather a special way. Sheringham is home to the North Norfolk Railway, a railway run by enthusiasts that runs form Sheringham to Holt. This means that you can catch a steam train and ride in style for about twenty minutes, then turn round. Great fun and they do Santa specials, dinner specials and so on.


Essentially all any railway needs to make it great is to be steam powered and run by enthusiasts. And now, it's connected to the main line thanks to tracks that run across the main road. This is, without doubt, a great idea. More, it begs the question why more enthusiast run railroads are not connected to the national network, even those ones running little trains that chuff chuff you round parks or, in the case of nearby Wells-Next-The-Sea, from the town down to the beach. OK so there is the question of gauge to be considered but surely there has to be scope for improving the day of frequent rail travellers beyond measure by replacing their commuter service with a tiny tourist train where the carriages are like benches. One would turn up at one's destination covered in soot, bandy legged and terrified - but strangely exhilarated.

The town was busy, the good weather having brought out middle aged men who seem to think that having leathers that match the paint job on their motorbikes means that nobody will notice their paunch. Still managed to get a table at the pub on the seafront however and took on coffee to sustain us on the short walk back to the car where the picnic and more flask tea awaited.

Other, posher, sorts had gone for the pub lunch option and very nice it looked too. At the table next to us the obviously untrained visitors had left some of their chips (I know!) which attracted the attention of a jaunty little bird who hopped and frolicked on the table, pecking at the leftovers.


Amusing as it was to see a bird so apparently unafraid of humans, like some sort of Disney tramp bird scavenging leftovers, it did occur that while one bird hopping, tweeting and gobbling chips was interesting, a flock of the bloody things doing the same would have been a different proposition entirely. That's the things that one must never forget about nature; it outnumbers us.

Postcard from Paris - getting there

Once, travel was synonymous with glamour. As soon as commercial passenger ships stopped carrying plague and slaves, they turned into floating international villages where a fellow could conduct a shipboard romance knowing that as soon as he got into port, and went back to using his real name, there was little chance of the scandal he created on board reaching friends, colleagues or his wife. Ocean travel as luxury stopped as soon as they stuck golf courses and waterslides on the back of the ship, turning it into a floating Butlins.

Air travel used to be glamorous. First we had the 747 where the posh folk actually went on the upper deck, then we had Concorde where the chavs were not even allowed on board. Now BA has stopped commissioning new airplanes with first class cabins and the French not bothering to brush their runways buggered Concorde.

Rail travel just keeps getting better. What started with a steam engine hilariously just this side of incredibly dangerous that ushered in a new age of killing a lot of people very quickly turned into the best way to travel, although you had to get your carriage romance over in short order, or spend a lot on buns in tea shops as in ‘Brief Encounter’. It was even, thanks to Agatha Christie, by far the most fashionable mode of transport to be murdered in.

There may be luxury trains like the Orient Express and the Blue Train, there may be faster trains like the Bullet Train in Japan (but who the hell wants to get to work that quickly), but the apogee of train travel must be the Eurostar, simply because if the Brits and the French can work together, it’s the eight wonder of the world.

Best of all, is St Pancras International and the new high speed link out of London, a station so effortlessly cool that it has the longest champagne bar in the world and a collection of amateur artists sketching the canopy badly. The centre of the city to the Dartford crossing in twenty minutes is spectacular, only teleportation would be quicker. Buy the right ticket and you get food and drink served at your table. It’s civilized, which sounds as if that should be the least you can expect but, if you’ve traveled recently, you’ll know that in certain cases ‘civilized’ is setting the bar pretty high.

A word of warning though, you may find yourself sitting next to French people. Being offensively French. By which I mean the chap had the sort of facial hair that I thought was only now encountered in sit coms and French language school text books. And porn films. Bad ones. From eastern Europe.

And you can take a Swiss Army Knife on the Eurostar. Try getting away with that on an airplane, where they have a girly strop if you try and sneak on some hand lotion. This means that should some mad mullah try and take control of the dining car or similar outrage, not only would be shortly resemble a pincushion but it’s a certainty that some wag would wade in with the corkscrew or bottle opener as well as the knife blade.

Eurostar also meant that I could start the afternoon at the private view of the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition. This means that the galleries are no less crowded, but they are at least crowded with the sort of people who have forked over money for annual membership as a friend of the RA. It also means there is a champagne bar, meaning that art appreciation is enhanced by a few glasses of fizz, enough to strip away enough of the higher intellectual functions to appreciate the works on an emotional level, and remove enough inhibition to either mutter ‘what a lot of tut’ when looking at the latest Emin or, God forbid, even speak to fellow gallery goers. Stand out works this year were a post-card sent from a sculptor who had his work refused and a fine impressionist style painting of Venice.

Surely the next step in the development of the train is the Euro sleeper. Fall into bed in London and wake up in Italy or some other far flung point, probably with a medium to high class hooker in your cabin, the choice is yours.

Travelling in style

I’m writing this on my laptop, sitting in a first class carriage watching the English countryside slide past. There are slower ways of seeing England, but there are few better. This is especially true is you like canals. The railways may have killed off the canals but, with the permanent way being laid so often next to the waterway, travellers today can now look at hundreds of miles of the canal network as it passes at high speed. Of course, this has it’s downside, travelling by train is fantastic (you drink while somebody else drives at insane speed, that kind of arrangement is only available elsewhere on shocking council estates when you are in the passenger seat of a stolen car), because ever now and then you look out and see a boat captained by somebody smoking a pipe, wearing a moleskin waistcoat and a beard that society would disapprove of, accompanied by a dog with a kerchief for a collar and you know, you just bloody know, that not only is he carefree but he has picked up a couple of dainty female passengers who are into free love and experimentation and are, at this moment, in the galley making him a bacon sandwich. This is in contrast to life on the road, where the only passengers in the cars of, for instance, sales reps, are murdered hitchhikers.

The better you travel, the more you are rewarded. Travel by air and what do you get – you get to breath the air that the guy in front of you, the one with lank hair and a cough, was breathing half an hour ago. You get to sit in a seat that’s too small in an airplane that’s too crowded and if you get drunk enough to actually blot out the pain, you’ll be considered too drunk to be a passenger.

Travel by car and you have the illusion of freedom but, in reality, you’re just swept along with everyone else. There’s a reason that pictures of a highway at night, with the taillights all surging in the same direction, looks like bloodflow or a river, because you’re in the current. Don’t believe me? Try swerving across four lanes of motorway and look at the reaction you’ll provoke.

Travel by tube and you are normally asked to leave cinemas whenever there’s a horror sequence set on the tube because no atrocity quite matches what you once had to go through that time when you were bursting for the loo, the train stopped in a tunnel and the lady in front of you had a PVC handbag. The resulting six month stretch in Parkhurst almost erased the embarrassment of the moment, but not quite.

Travel by boat is best of all. Slower than driving, a bit quicker than walking and all rivers, eventually, flow to the sea so the possibilities are limitless.

(Interjection – it’s suddenly got so dark outside the train that I thought somebody had closed the curtains in the sky. It is, in fact, simply the traditional laden northern sky). (Or a tunnel, I’m a bit pissed on red wine).

Which is why, I think, I’ve recently seen the VW camper van as my vehicle of choice. It’s not unlike a boat in its lines and when you put up that roof extension thingie, it’s like raising a sail. All in all, I rather like camper vans, I just love the idea of having everything you need, stove, bed, telly, to hand and, best of all, when you fall out with the neighbours, you can drive off.

A camper van is very, very different to a caravan. The caravan is used by two sorts of people, wife-swapping cannibals of Welsh descent who enjoy nothing more than confounding senior maths lecturers by causing traffic jams where there should be none; and pikies.

As for global warming and pollution – fuck it. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s a price worth paying for me to be able to sit on the train (product of the industrial revolution, where it all started), listening to my iPod and sipping red wine. Mind you, I’d miss the snowboarding.

First Class!

I am writing this in the first class lounge at Manchester railway station. Better even than the free snacks is the free wi-fi and being able to watch the concourse from a sort of glassed-in eyrie. Top!