skyring

Shrewsbury. Place of public transport disasters. Ever since Thomas Telford knocked down any number of significant buildings and built over significant archaeological sites to put through his roads and railways.

Perhaps it is best to skip over my unexpected and expensive taxi tour of Wales two years ago. I was given precise instructions on how to get to Birmingham International and wound up in Welshpool, having caught the wrong train. I managed to catch my flight by the skin of my teeth and Elhamisabel, waiting for me when I cleared immigration, must have been astonished when I fell sobbing into her arms and refused to let her go for about an hour, by which time we had reached my hostel three trains and a bus later.

This time we had a delightful breakfast with Mr and Mrs FB – the ultimate darlings – and sorrowfully bid them farewell, promising to return and do all sorts of interesting things together. I’m going to hold them to that. The Great Skyring Barge Tour of Merrie England will proceed with the FBs providing the genial companionship and history lessons along the way, while I leave a trail of books and empty cider bottles.

We loaded our bags into the FB family wagon, squeezed into the small space remaining, Kerri suggesting for the ultimate time that I didn’t really need to travel with so many books and electronic gadgets. An all too short ride through Shrewsbury’s fascinating streets, including a quick look into the house where Charles Darwin was born.

“I’m not sure about that one,” Mr FB said, “but Darwin undoubtedly climbed the rest of the trees here as a boy.”

We saw a thousand year old yew tree the day before, so I wouldn’t be surprised that a stripling scaled a sapling two hundred years back and the branches are still bent from the event.

“The Tree of Man,” I mused, gazing at the garden.

And then we were unloading our bags at the station forecourt, the red stones of Shrewsbury Castle looking down. Sweet sorrow, as the poet says, but there was a hole in my heart for the friends I was leaving behind. Mrs FB is a sweetie of the first water, and Mr FB has a sense of humour that echoes my own, except that he knows how to tell a funny story and I don’t.

Tickets to London. About a hundred and seventy dollars for the two of us. Cripes. We could probably have hired a car and driven down for cheaper. Or maybe flown. Oh well.

Lift down to the platform, but that was pretty much the last one we saw on the trip until we got to Earls Court. Remember that we’ve each got a pack slung over a shoulder and a big wheeled case. Plus a big yellow BookCrossing tote for me, packed full.

A half hour wait on platform 5. Luckily there’s none of that platform 3A and 3B business that tripped me up last time. The platform announcements are muffled and garbled and all but lost in the diesel exhaust of a train standing on the next platform. Honestly, we did better in Paris, where they spoke in another language.

Train pulled up eventually and we manhandled our bags over the gap and along the corridor. Reasonably generous luggage spaces on this train. Heaven knows that if they racks were all taken we’d wedge the corridor closed to all traffic.

It was Saturday’s trip in reverse. We go from beautiful rolling green English countryside to the industrial suburbs of Birmingham. It seems to be true all the world over that the railway gets the worst view of a city. Rubbish strewn wasteland, weed-choked backyards. Graffiti on redbrick walls. My heart sank as we returned to modern Britain in all its glory.

Give me a hedgerow, a meadow and a distant farmhouse any day. England at her bucolic best. The warehouses and mobile phone adverts of the big cities may promise the earth but they cannot possibly deliver.

Birmingham New Street. I’m getting to be an expert now. We find the train to London – a Virgin Train – and of course it’s a couple of platforms over. A couple of flights of stairs to lug our bags up and down, and another carriage to find luggage space in. Space for the bags, but not for us – we move into the next carriage along where we find two non-reserved seats together and settle down to let the sweat dry.

The train manager is a cheery type, cracking jokes over the intercom and all the way through the carriages as he checks tickets. There’s three economy carriages, packed full, and three first class carriages all but empty. Given the cost of hauling them all the way to London, you’d think Virgin would have found a better business model. I shudder to think of the cost of going first class, given the hefty fares our standard seats are costing us.

The trip down to London is pleasant enough. We’re out into the countryside again after Birmingham’s ugly, and there are copses and canals, farms and fields, broken only by brief stops in Coventry and Milton Keynes.

A food cart comes around and at least the privatisation of the railways has seen the end of the British Rail sandwich. We get sangers that are fresh and tasty, albeit a little on the high side for fat. As ever, my choice has higher numbers than that selected by my wife. Less sugar, but, I gleefully point out, as if I can fool her into thinking bacon and chicken is a healthier option than egg salad.

Euston, and we’ve been given a short cut to Euston Square underground. We’ve also been advised to consider a taxi, but I disregard this, opting for the cheaper course. It’s a long way from Euston to Euston Square, especially if you have to halt every hundred metres to catch your breath.

Of course, it’s another flight of stairs down to the platform, but first I buy Kerri an Oyster and top up my own. Brilliant things, these Oyster cards. They automatically get you the best rate, often a fraction of the normal cash fare, and they are capped at a lower daily rate than the day pass. Brilliant.

We have to change along the way, and although it’s all on the one level with no long underground passageways, we still have to go clunkity-clunk up a set of stairs and down another to get to the Earls Court line.

A lift at Earls Court, and we’re at street level, with about five blocks to get to the hostel. Five blocks isn’t much when you are striding along, but when you’ve got sixty kilos of baggage, it might as well be five kilometres.

“Pant pant, pantpant pant?” I ask when we reach the reception area.

“Certainly. We’ve put you in the basement. Just go right and it’s errr, umm, down the stairs.”

The room’s all ours. Not a lot of amenities, but it’s big. I had visions of some tiny cell where the floor space would be taken up with our bags.

We collapse on the bed for about an hour. Unable to move. The word “taxi” is mentioned a few times when we get our breath back.

The evening is pleasant enough, and we go for a walk. Unencumbered by bags, we walk up to Kensington, check out the exteriors of the various museums, inspect the Albert Memorial, a staggering sight, and find our windy way to the Peter Pan statue.

The tube back, Subway for dinner – boy that hot tomato soup is welcome – and collapse into bed.