A title shamelessly stolen from Chris Mullin’s excellent publication of his diaries during the Tony Blair government, it also describes current life.

These photos sum it up:

I know this one is upside-down:

The photo of the countryside was from a walk we took on Sunday, in the North Yorkshire Moors near to Helmsley. It was a gorgeous day for a walk and the autumn colours will fill my soul any day with warmth and happiness. It was a day well spent, seeing some gorgeous folks on the way back home, and collecting indulgent Italian take-away to refuel after 20+km of walking.

The other photo is a lot of what I’ve been up to otherwise – exhibitions (Thomas Cole at the National Gallery and Objects of Dissent at the National Gallery both excellent and provided many splendid postcards), a railway atlas (I’ll come on to that), Vera Brittan’s very thoughtful memoir about WWI, and a few other things. The railway atlas is interesting – it was published in 1998, which was the year I really started moving around the country. It was the year I went to University and sometime during upper sixth in 1998, I took the train from Bury St Edmunds to Hull for what would turn out to be the first of many, many times since. I applied for universities without really giving transport a thought. My main motivation was to get on to a course I liked the look of at a good university. I applied before even visiting a university and let the offers decide a bit. I also loved the look of Hull University so much from the prospectus and the additional options on language courses (this is before the internet, kids) that I applied for two courses at Hull. My first big train journey was to the University of Sheffield, which I liked but didn’t love. A month or so later, I took the train up to Hull and fell in love. I remember that it was on a Tuesday and I went alone, Mum having generously taken a day to come with me to Sheffield. Tuesday as it was General Studies and I missed the homework to bring in your favourite and inspiring songs the next week; I learned about it the following week and dashed home to grab 10 CDs – entirely brilliantly, we had moved house earlier that year (thanks Pixie and Ollie, still!) after 14 years in the sticks to be within quick-march distance of my school. Hull at the time had the rubbish bus station in town and my first memory of the city centre was seeing the C&A department store opposite the station. It looks a bit different now but I still smile at the memory. I navigated my way to the 103 bus and wandered around the lovely and, in stark contrast to Sheffield, flat campus, met some very friendly people including a local lass who wanted to stay in Hull and study, which I thought said a lot about the place, and decided that it was Hull all the way for me. And Hull even offered me a place that would include my A Level grade in General Studies! I loved General Studies, specifically the classes with had with ASV Williams – he was the Headteacher of our school at the time and this class was the only teaching he could fit in to his schedule by this point. They were lively not-science classes – usually some sort of sociology or political topic – and I got to sit in a class with my best mates (who were all busy taking other proper thinking A Levels rather than copping for cushy languages, like me) for one day a week. I still carry about the receipt we bought for our thank you present to ASV – a bottle of whiteboard cleaner, known as Nobo clean, easily mis-pronounced by hormone-saturated teenagers. It’s lovely having a train atlas from the time of the start of great railway journeys for me, learning very quickly that Peterborough has one of the dullest railway stations. This is still the case. I do the return journey once again this weekend to see the mothership. Can’t wait.

There will be more about great railway journeys on here – somewhere along the way, I fell in love with train travel and this year, and previous years, I’ve been very fortunate to undertake some splendid journeys, a la Michael Portillo but with more subtle taste in clothing. I do have editions of both the UK and European Bradshaws’ Guides.