Blighty 2025 - Down day my arse!

Today was supposed to be a down day, that is just leave the car alone a vegetate at the cottage. No such luck.

I needed a shirt for the upcoming weekend celebrations, so we jumped in the Carrot and made our way over to Marks and Spencer's in Witney, the first of five, nay six, stops on a shopping expedition. It's a small branch of M&S in Witney for sure, but the only dress shirts they had for men were either short-sleeved or black. Two small shelves, and that was it. There was a quarter of the upstairs sales floor dedicated to women's unmentionables, but shirts? Forget it. That knocked me back because I've always thought of M&S as infallible. 

We traipsed over to Next, where at least there was about one fifth of the upper sales floor's rear wall dedicated to men's dress shirts. That most were slim fit was not good (their customer base is a lot younger than me), but I did get a blueish, not particularly patterned, shirt in the right size and regular fit, so all was not lost.

Then it was off to Superdrug, followed by Waitrose, then Holland & Barratt. Goodies dumped in the car, we then motored over to Sainsbury's for groceries.

Waiting for Dear Wife to conclude her transactions in H&B, I was struck that there were a lot of people "out shopping". That is they were walking between stores and visiting a few of each to pick up a few things. People in Chatham don't really "shop" like that. They drive to the store they want, buy stuff, then drive to the next store. There are of course the "Malls", although our nearest is an hour away, There people move about in an air-conditioned retail palace, but our local malls are just clothes shops and cell-phone outlets. When I say clothes, I don't mean ordinary stuff, I mean expensive, branded items that only young people are daft enough to spend their money on. We don't go to the Mall very often.

That said, British shops are perpetually busy. Their floor areas are small, their shelves high and they're almost always busy. It's not that people spend more money shopping in the UK, but retail business in Canada survives on a much lower footfall than in the UK. Big stores in the UK will close if they don't get the footfall they're expecting, and they'd laugh at the footfall figures in Canada. That's culture I suppose.

Once we were done shopping, we went home, had some lunch, then climbed in the car again and headed over to Toddington, just a few miles north of Cheltenham. Toddington is the base for the GWSR (see yesterday's post), and has good little gift shop, something we missed out on yesterday. We also thought that there might be a model train shop, but the the sign Emma saw the day before clearly referred to a one-off sales event that had long gone by today. We watched two steam hauled trains pass through the station, spent a ton of money in the gift shop, then got back into the car to go to a model shop in Cheltenham. A very helpful (?) lady on the station platform suggested this, so naturally we had to go.

Fortunately Cheltenham wasn't far away, and the store was quickly located. I bought two used HO/OO gauge steam locos, but Charlie came away with a five-car, GWR Paddington Bear liveried, Hitachi bi-mode train in "N" gauge. I won't tell you how much that cost because it'll make your hair curl, but thank you great-grandparents.

Then it was a surprisingly swift run back along the A40 to Witney, and a sit down fish and chip meal at Smarts'. I had proper fish, but the others had variations on the theme, all plant-based. It wasn't too costly for the four of us, either, not compared with something like pizzas. Then it was home again.

That was the down day, and I'm knackered. We've been prepping for the weekend away this evening, and I even ironed the shirt I bought in Next. How's that for domestic?

The laptop's not travelling with me this weekend (a long story about a sticky lid/screen hinge), so the blog is going to have the weekend off. Enjoy!

Blighty 2025 - Full Steam Ahead, and other silly sayings

Today we made the fairly short trip to the Cotswold village of Broadway, and the Gloucestershire and Warwickshire Steam Railway, better known as the GWSR. For my North American readers that's the "Glostershure and Worrickshure Steam Railway".

Broadway is better known for it's idyllic main street, broad and lined with Cotswold Stone buildings, albeit that it's all gone a bit high-priced and touristy these days. But at the bottom of that street is the old Cheltenham to Stratford-Upon-Avon railway line, raised from the dead by a dedicated band of volunteers and now running regular jaunts between Broadway and Cheltenham Racecourse, with trains normally hauled by steam locomotives. Heritage railways are on the up in the UK, and the GWSR is an excellent example of how to do it correctly.

There is a good history of the line on the GWSR website, from it's original inception in 1899, to the present day, and you can read about it here.

Our drive over there through the pretty, if twisty, roads of the Cotswolds was easy, and the weather was set fair as well. There's a car park next to Broadway Station, operated by the local council, and it was there that we pulled in and I went to pay. Now parking in the UK is expensive, and these days dominated by parking apps for mobile phones; witness the parking at British Rail stations. But here it was either coins, of which I had none, or a parking app that I didn't have on my phone. I loaded the app using the data only e-sim I've been using to avoid the scandalous charges by my Canadian cell phone provider, but of course the app wanted to confirm the phone number by sending me an SMS message. OK, I switched e-sims and fired up Rogers Canada, only to find no signal. Bugger, I thought.

Dear Wife legged it on up to the station to buy our GWSR train tickets, while I nipped into a little petrol station on the roadside and bought a chocolate bar with a £10 note, asking for my change in £1 coins. Oh my goodness, you'd have thought I'd have asked him to sign his daughter into slavery! What a face on the man! Still, he did cough up the requisite coins. Back at the car park, I shovelled five coins into the machine and received two tickets, one to go on the dashboard of the car, and one to exchange at the station ticket office for a £3 discount on the train fare. Result. I was a wee bit crestfallen when Dear Wife and Emma expressed surprised that I'd had the gumption to read the tickets and bring one up to the station, how nice it is that people have confidence in my abilities.

The train was standing in the station, big green Merchant Navy Class locomotive at the front, Peninsular and Oriental (P&O for the ordinary folks), number 35006, ready to haul us down to Cheltenham Racecourse. The carriages, or cars, were not new but were considerably newer than the loco, and took myself and Dear Wife back in time to when we were taken on train trips as kids ourselves. Charlie of course was ecstatic.

The loco huffed and puffed and we set off south through the lush, and I mean lush, Cotswold countryside. The rail line has a lot of infrastructure that has to be maintained, stations, bridges, viaducts and tunnels, and everything looked so well cared for. The stations on the line had more or less been demolished when British Rail closed the line, but the GWSR has brought them back, from rebuilt signal boxes, to new platforms and old station buildings, and right down to some period signage and posters. For a train nerd, it is absolute heaven, and for us oldies, it really stirred some memories.

We had traditional card tickets, which were duly "clipped" by the train's guard part way through the trip. The sound and smell of the steam loco was magical and our stately progress allowed us to soak up the Vale of Evesham and the Severn Valley views, and the hills of Malvern and beyond. The weather was bright and sunny, and that added to the enjoyment.

At the Racecourse we alighted and watched the loco uncouple from the front of the train and trundle around to the back, to be coupled on there and be ready for the return trip to Broadway. We availed ourselves of snacks from the outlet on the station, which bore more than a passing resemblance to a garden shed, and boarded the train once again for the slow run north.

Back at Broadway, we watched the loco get relocated from one end of the train to the other again, only this time, when the loco was ready and they were waiting for the signal, the driver let Charlie, and a couple of other kids, up onto the footplate. You can imagine how delighted the little fellow was to be standing on a real, fired up and working steam engine. That was such a nice touch at the end of a day when everyone associated with the railway had been so lovely.

Heading home, we climbed (in the car) the very steep Fish Hill, and paused at the top to visit Broadway Tower, a folly built right on the edge of the escarpment and commanding amazing views. Of course it was just closing up for the day, but we stopped for a few minutes in the car park and took in the view, which was breathtaking, at least in a bucolic, English way. We were actually chivvied out of the car park by an anxious worker there, keen to lock the gates, so we climbed back into the Carrot and headed home. 

When the the lady in the Satnav became unexpectedly quiet at a key intersection, I naturally took the wrong road of the two available, but we enjoyed a short and pretty diversion through the tiny village of Upper Oddington which, apart from having the narrowest roads in the UK, was really nice.

A quiet evening in was capped by watching our beloved Chelsea Football Club win the UEFA Europa Conference League final, streamed for free through Discovery+, and shown through a nice TV in the cottage using a "borrowed" HDMI cable (I put it back when the game was over). A good day, I think.