One of my colleagues recently went to watch the filming of the new Krypton Factor, and has mentioned to me that the new assault course is in a wooded area of the Yorkshire Dales. My thoughts (perhaps unsurprisingly) turned to Scargill, and I found myself wondering what happened with the sale.

Well, now I know.

For those who want a summary before clicking through, a group led by the Bishop of Bolton (who was a long-time Scargill Partner) has, with a certain amount of input from Lee Abbey, somehow raised the funds to buy Scargill off the old community, with a view to reopening it in its original form - i.e. a "Lee Abbey of the North".

I can't decide if I'm pleased that the buildings will be put back to their intended use, or saddened that a progressive movement in religious tolerance has been replaced with something that will inevitably be much more conservative. Still, definitely interesting news...

To be fair, the journey down yesterday was alright. The seats on Pendalinos are a bit uncomfy, and they curve in odd ways, but all told it was a reasonable journey, with the train running smoothly and on time.

The journey back, on the other hand, was not. We got to just short of Nuneaton before the train stopped, and sat there for a bit. Then an announcement came across that there was a major signal failure, and that the train was going to be reversed to Rugby, then continue forward through Birmingham and Wolverhampton, picking up it's usual route at Stoke. So we reversed all the way through Rugby station, then sat just outside Rugby for about 2 hours, perhaps a bit more. Occasionally the train manager came on to tell us that we were due to move in about 15 minutes, and we all laughed as 15 minutes came, went and was forgotten.

Eventually, of course, we did move, and when we did we went through Nuneaton and on up the Trent Valley: we'd been kept waiting for so long that they'd managed to fix the major signal failure and send us on our normal route. Needless to say, there was a general lack of impressedness in the carriage.

Still, I have my compensation claim forms, and work have confirmed I can claim it on my own behalf, so lets see when Virgin come up with...

got a ticket for my destination...

Apologies for the blatant S&G fest (just be thankful I haven't got a guitar with me) but that song always goes through my head when I'm waiting for a train, particularly early in the morning. So why am I on a train at 7.45? I'm travelling to London for a 2 hour meeting, followed by a half hour meeting. I've ben up since just after 6, I was out of the house by 6.45, and I don't get a train back until 5.35 (apparently I'm feeling masochistic today, getting two of the main commuter trains up and down...). At least I have a laptop for company - I can entertain myself and (once 9am rolls round) I might even do a bit of programming.

But for now - I'm mostly just distressed that I'm up so damn early.

nabbed from muskrat_john:

"Copy this sentence into your livejournal if you're in a non-same-sex marriage, and you don't want it "protected" by the bigots who think that gay marriage hurts it somehow."

I don't think there's an awful lot to add to that, really...

I don't kow if this is some new memeage I've not previously encountered, some very obscure spam marketing, or something completely other, but one of my recent posts garnered the following 2 anonymous comments. The post was this one about wines, and the comments are as follows (reproduced in full, honest!):

Subject: Just wanted to say
It's amazing

Subject: well done
Cognitive news.., brother

Now, the first one could be someone who tried the wine I recommended and wanted to give me some feedback, but if I was doing that I would've been a bit more explicit about why I was commenting. The second one is clearly pure improvisational jazz. I can almost smell the sweetly fragranced smoke drifting out of the screen while I read it!

Every now and then I decide to read back some old journal - maybe a specific set of tags, or a specific period in my life. Today, I've been rereading some of the observations (as in, those posts tagged with the word observations). I stumbled across this beauty, from June 2005:

"You know, I'm kind of starting to yearn for a small community to live in where everyone is nice to each other and shares everything..."

How incredibly naive I was, huh...?