The Other Side Of Hollande’s Troubles
The letter writers in The Times have been telling tales of President Felix Faure and his mistress Marguerite Steinheil. His death is described here in Wikipedia, with this being the first part.
Faure died suddenly from apoplexy in the Élysée Palace on 16 February 1899, at a critical juncture while engaged in sexual activities in his office with 30-year-old Marguerite Steinheil. It has been widely reported that Felix Faure had his fatal seizure while Steinheil was fellating him.
Read the whole section, as there are a lot of good jokes about pompe funebres.
Today’s episode in The Times, is from John Julius Norwich, no less!
It described how Steinheil was feted by admirers after being accused of murdering her stepmother and husband. it also disclosed how he met the femme fatale.
Francoise Hollande has a lot to do, to leave the same note in history as President Faure.
Perhaps, they’ll give his name to a Metro station, as they did for Felix Faure.
Is Bristol Left Behind?
I travel all over the UK watching football and visiting cities. Go to Hull, Brighton, Nottingham, Liverpool, Newcastle, Glasgow and many other places and you’ll see shining new stadia and public buildings.
This article entitled Why Does Bristol Never Build Anything? got me thinking. I have been to Bristol a couple of times to watch football and Bristol City’s stadium at Ashton Gate was one of the worse in The Championship.
Bristol is the sixth’s largest city in England and over a million live in the catchment area, so it is up there in size and population with some of the biggest.
It deserves better! The city is missing out as this piece from the article says.
When England hosts the Rugby World Cup in 2015, a number of games will be played at Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium, as well as at 12 stadiums across England. No games will be played in Bristol, though, because “there is no decent stadium”, says Rhodri Morgan, Wales’ First Minister from 2000 till 2009.
It certainly, isn’t a city that keeps calling me back like Nottingham, Brighton, Liverpool and Leeds do!
The only other large city, that seems to not present its best face to visitors is Coventry, which again has stadium trouble.
Changing Trains At Liverpool
To get from Birmingham to Preston, I took a London Midland train to Liverpool, from where I got a local service to Lancashire’s County Town.
The first train was excellent, as one of the pictures shows. It cost me £24.10 in First, but I had a big table to myself. I’ve used the company before when travelling between Liverpool and Birmingham and I prefer them to Virgin for that route.
Liverpool is a good interchange, as the station is close to Liverpool’s magnificent Civic Buildings. You can also walk down to the Mersey and then get a train back from St. James’s Street. I know that I know Liverpool well, but it must be the only city in England, where the iconic sites can be reached by walking downhill. But then it seems that few city centre stations are close to the shops and attractions. Some like Leeds and Nottingham mean an uphill walk.
On this trip, I’d picked up some sandwiches in Birmingham New Street Station, so all I did was visit the Walker Art Gallery or the National Gallery of the North, as it is sometimes called. We need more attractions like this, close to major interchange railway stations.
The poor part of the trip, was the train from Liverpool to Preston. it was one of Northern Rail’s Class 156, which after the two other trains of the day, was a real drop in standards.
Hauled By A Diesel Locomotive To Birmingham
Since yesterday, I’ve tried to think when was the last time I was hauled around the country by a diesel Locomotive. You may get the occasional diesel multiple unit, but rakes of carriages hauled by a diesel locomotive are pretty rare, and even more so in Europe.
Except for a trip on a sleeper, it must be in the 1980s, when I was last hauled by a diesel locomotive, probably between Ipswich and London.
So yesterday on my trip North to Birmingham, I decided to go from Marylebone for a change.
It was definititely a smoother and more comfortable ride in a Mark 3 Coach hauled by a clean Class 67. Compare the engine, with the blood spattered Class 90, I got for the trip to Ipswich on Saturday.
It was also nice to see Mark 3 Coaches laid out in Standard Class how they had been designed, with a table and a window for all passengers.
If all Standard Class coaches were like this, would anybody pay the extra for First Class?
And when will we be seeing comfortable Mark 3 coaches with sliding doors on London to Norwich?
I wonder how many people, who travel between London and Birmingham on Chiltern Railways, realise that they’re sitting in a coach that dates from the 1970s or 1980s?
What this line now needs is electrification and some appropriate electric locomotives to haul the trains between the two cities and probably on to a few places beyond Birminhgham. If for no other reason, we’ll need extra capacity, if and whilst Euston is rebuilt for HS2.
Next time, I go to Birmingham, I’ll use Chiltern from Marylebone. It is slower at one hour and forty-four minutes, as against one hour twenty-six on Virgin, but it avoids Euston, the trains are more comfortable, wi-fi is free and outside of the peak, I can lay my paper out to read it properly.
Light And Dark Over The City Of London
I was in the Members Room of the Tate Modern and took these two pictures.
I’ve talked before about the views from this room here. I must take a few more!
A Delicious Way To Cook Salmon
Last night i cooked one of Lindsey Bareham’s recipes. it’s called Roast Salmon with Paprika, Garlic And Parsley.
I just put the salmon in a dish and after brushing it with olice oil gave it ten minutes in the oven at 200°C. I then covered the fish with a mixture of paprika, garlic abd fresh parsley.
Roast Salmon with Paprika, Garlic And Parsley
It was delicious.
Some might not like the broccoli I served with it, but that is personal taste. C wouldn’t have put her mouth, nose or fingers near it!
lindsey incidentally, has a new cookbook out called Just One Pot. You can buy it here from her web site. I shall be getting a copy!
Brazil World Cup Doesn’t Seem Much Better
Under their report on Sochi and its troubles, there is an article with this heading.
World Cup protest threat as corruption bill hits £32bn
Given all of the other well reported troubles in Brazil, it does seem that watching sport on television in 2014, is going to be an interesting experience to say the least.
Is Sochi A Monstrous Scam?
I have just read this report on the BBC’s web site.
Admittedly it is from May last year, but in a few weeks time, we’ll see whether the Games will be worth the reported $50 million spent.
The Times had a news report yesterday, where Giuan-Franco Kasper, the Head of World Skiing, said that a third of the cost had been lost to fraud.
The 2014 Winter Olympics could be one of the best examples of car crash television for some time. Especially, after reading about the climate on Wikipedia and reading reports that there hasn’t been much snow in the area.
Is Beeching To Blame?
I remember the railways in the 1950s and 1960s well. Some will look upon that period as a golden age. But in truth trains and stations were terrible, with some of the diesel multiple units, like these Class 105, seemingly designed to remove the fillings from your teeth. Living in London, you used the Underground, where you could, rather than put up with the dirty local trains and stations. This was all before the Beeching reports, and it showed how bad our railways were. Very few people, who didn’t have to for commuting or work, used the trains and everybody preferred their new-found freedom given by a car.
Something had to be done, especially to cut costs and improve standard. The cuts are outlined here in Wikipedia.
When I was travelling up and down to Liverpool University in the 1960s, the trains were starting to get better, as electrification of the line was added. But still, it wasn’t anywhere near as clean, comfortable and reliable as it is now!
Generally, I believe Beeching was right to recommend closing many of the lines he proposed. They weren’t being used and the country couldn’t afford to fund a white elephant.
But it was the way that politicians and management did the downsizing of the railways, that is to blame for some of our railway problems today.
The way that line closures was done in a sometimes unthinking way, is illustrated by the problems of trying to restablish a rail route from Oxford to Cambridge. The original route was called the Varsity Line, and Wikipedia says this about its closure.
Services were withdrawn from the Oxford – Bletchley and Bedford – Cambridge sections at the end of 1967, even though the line had not been listed for closure as part of the Beeching Axe in 1963.
Although parts could still be reinstated, some parts are blocked by housing and other developments, and the Cambridge University Radio Telescope. The status of the line is described here.
So did an overzealous accountant or politician see the short term gain and lost sight of the future. As Beeching felt the line should stay, they must have thought, they had very good reasons to effectively close it for ever.
But now the government has stated that an East-West Rail Link should be built and they have funded the first part from Oxford to Bedford to open in 2017. The proposals for the link from Bedford to Cambridge are detailed here. Whatever happens, it looks like finding an acceptable route will be difficult.
In some places in the UK, rail closures were done, so that they could be reinstated. Scotland has recently recreated some of these lines and is currently rebuilding some of the Waverley Route.
Did the Scots have the vision, did managers and politicians not have a destroy policy or was it just luck?
London had a different policy. Both the Overground and the Docklands Light Railway were created out of the remains of old forgotten train lines. But then London was lucky, in that roads that could have used the space, were off the agenda and no-one had any decent vision on how to reuse the lines. So they were saved for their renaissance!
Lord MacClaurin’s Unworkable View
Lord MacClaurin has just suggested that the solution to the woes of English cricket is to cut the number of counties to twelve. Alan Lamb agreed and they went on to suggest mergers like Kent with Sussex and Northants with Warwicks.
It may be right, but can you imagine those that run and occasionally support the counties will take this. I have lived in both the old counties of East Suffolk and West Suffolk, which were combined with the County Borough of Ipswich to form Suffolk. The only thing that those in the new county are agreed on, is that you support Ipswich Town, but those in the west, still resent that Ipswich was chosen as the county town.
So will merged counties ever happen? I doubt it!
The Anonymous Widower 