greetings from the granite…
And a big wave from Aberdeen …just!
Yesterday’s journey was always going to be something of a tightrope walk (necessitating as it did a 5am start) but all still went according to plan until I arrived at Scarborough station with time to spare only to find that the early train had been cancelled, the next service (helpfully suggested by the lady in the ticket office) arriving in York precisely thirteen minutes after my connection departed. Thus sleep deprived and panic-stricken, I was reduced to intercepting other travellers whilst manically waving a twenty pound note and by pure dumb luck found a lift with people also needing to catch the 7.37 to Aberdeen, plus two friendly dogs who helpfully kept me warm all the way there and had no use for my twenty pound note, either. As my silver haired old grandmother used to say, thank fuck for that.
Londoners who visited earlier in the week will be pleased to know that the ambient temperature here is around 18-19 degrees, a far cry from the furnace-like conditions enjoyed on Monday-Tuesday during my flying visit to the Square Mile; sorry! Unfortunately, always being sure to book a hotel with air-conditioning only really makes a difference when it works and in this case even torching the room in protest would have gone unnoticed, since the temperature would more than likely have remained about the same. Be grateful you didn’t have to sleep in it (and for anybody wondering, I will be back in a real hotel when I return on the seventeenth and for each future visit too – no more budget beds), although the temperature control at Kings Cross station was top-notch as was the new and colourful imminent-alien-abduction themed light show, even if my zombie-like state meant that I had to look again at my phone photos the next day just to check it was actually there in the first place.
Aberdeen (with which I will be hopefully getting reacquainted later, not having had time to leave the hotel yet) is the first stop of three Scottish destinations this week, a much-anticipated return to post-Commonwealth Games Glasgow being the next and a couple of days in fringe-stuffed Edinburgh the last before home time; knowing absolutely nothing whatsoever about the festival or what it’s fringe entails, normal service will be maintained throughout! A change of scene after all the shenanigans at home is already doing me the world of good, and with Frightfest beckoning at the end of my London trip (the trailers on Film4 have already started, I notice) it’s looking like an exciting month – no big announcements yet, but hopefully we’re not too far away now…
So a very brief update and off to look for butteries it is, the last time I managed to get any being a while back in Inverness. I might find a macaroni pie or two along the way.
More soon…
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