This week I'll be mostly on the train

"Leaving on the midnight train,
Leaving, never gonna come back again"
- Rossi/Young

It's been around 10 years since I last did a regular amount of commuting on the train.  Back in the early 90s I was getting the Brimsdown to Harlow for a couple of years.  It was a nice little half hour journey, and I didn't appreciate how good I had it.  By the mid 90s I was doing Broadstairs to Tonbridge, one and a half hours on a good day, two changes, one at Margate and one at Ashford.  It was a nightmare, but not quite as bad as driving.  By 2001 I was getting the 4:30 Margate to Victoria, which took two and a half hours to get into London, two and three quarters to get out.  When 9/11 happened and we all emptied out of London expecting to find planes flying into Canary Wharf or whatever, I had a carriage to myself.  The train at platform 5 was due out already and people were quite literally fighting to get on.  Me and handful of other people just went and sat on the later train on platform 7.  When our train left on time with a dozen passengers on it, the platform 5 was still bursting at the seams and the guards still couldn't get all the doors closed.  Since then, I've driven or flown to every place I've worked at.  But we digress.

This week I'll be mostly writing again

The pen is mightier...

Erm, hello.  Again.

It's been 7 months since my last 'Mostly'.  In fact, now that I look, I see it's been 6 months since my last vaguely meaningful post of any kind (other than a quick bit of wedding anniversary prose and a Christmas video).

So first, let me say 'thanks' to all of you who wished me a happy birthday 5 months ago.  Sorry I ignored the lot of ya, but I was embarking on an episode of cyber-phobia.  Not for the first time.  The less said about it the better.  Probably.