Goodbye Mr Potatohead

It's half-term and the three of us are having the rare luxury of a week off together.  Tomorow morning we are off on an intrepid journey to London, courtesy of National Express.  It's a long time since coaches were my long-distance conveyance of choice but when they were the Clipper was my preferred Newcastle to London option, partly because of the price (it was something like £8 pounds  return, which was very cheap even in 1987) but mostly because of the ham and pease pudding sandwiches, which used to trundle by at regular intervals accompanied by Geordie trolleygirls who really wanted to be air hostesses, and who would gaze out at the A1 (South) dreaming of runways, vodka martinis and handsome Greek airline pilots. Nowadays, I am told, the romance has gone out of coach travel and if you want a ham and pease pudding stottie cake (or for that matter a cup of coffee) you're going to have to bring it on yourself.

Anyway that is the intrepid adventure that we have been looking forward to all week.  In the meantime we have been busying ourselves with menial but strangely satisfying tasks such as hauling all of Frankie's toys up into his room (they had for several years been forming an ever more unsightly mini-landfill behind the telly) and sorting them out into a series of plastic boxes.  My librarianship training came to the fore and now the young lad is the proud owner of a carefully itemised collection, with separate sections for small cars, big cars, dressing up, trains, building bricks, tiny little people... you get the idea.  I stopped short of assigning Dewey numbers, an oversight which my mother the college librarian may be tempted to put right next time she visits.

The unexpected part of all this activity is how thoroughly Frankie has bought into the concept of tidiness.  Suddenly he's obsessed- A Place for Everything and Everything In Its Place would appear to be the motto, and apart from the occasional moment of artistic discord (on matters such as whether the medium-sized fire engine counts as a Big Car or a Little Car) harmony reigns.

we've also managed to buy a new computer which is blessed news and should mean that this here post should be the last one ever typed out on this clapped out old machine where your fingers go so much faster than the whirring cogs inside so that you have to keep waiting for it to catch up and whenever you make a mistake it takes two minutes to delete the wrong letters and put the right ones in.  For instance it has taken five minutes just to write that last paragraph, which still isn't finished yet.  Oh the suffering I endure to keep you people in once every thirty day updates...

Right I'm off now as the baked potatoes I put in half way through that reminiscence about clipper coaches are about to  burn.  London here we come...  

Comments

[Abby]

Hurrah, a new computer and extreme tidiness. I see you have gotten full of fancy airs seeing as you're off to the capital and all. Now, did I hear something about you dangling down a chimney pot?

[looby]

Well...hostesses on coaches- I'd forgotten them! I used to go to gigs in London using teh overnight coach from Lancaster. It was quite romantic actually and once I think I managed to get the back seat to myself and get a halfway decent kip.

Hurrah for the new computer! Most new computers I get stay unused for several weeks because at the very last moment you find the modem won't speak to the video driver flange screw file or something.

[Dan Flynn]

C,

I used to be a coach afficionado in me younger days before leg room became important. I then moved onto train travel but stopped when the price of tickets reached ridiculous levels. Virgin once demanded ownership of my house and chattels in exchange for a single to Birmingham - I turned em down of course. Never quite got to the bottom of the chattel thing though. So now I drive to London park on the outskirts and get the tube into town. Works for me.

Re the issue of new pc's, this old one of mine has about had it. Honest, the local stonemason can produce text quicker than this machine. Sigh.