Insanity

During a training course this week, one of my work colleagues defined insanity as 'doing the same things over and over again and expecting to get different results.' The moral was obviously that you have to change in order to affect change - apart from random external factors it isn't going to somehow happen.

I was thinking on that this morning as I parked in very nearly the same car park spot at Cambridge station, boarded the same carriage of the same 6.45 train to King's Cross, took the same Piccadilly route etc. Of course this isn't what the definition is about at all. It's about changing mindset rather than simple cosmetic changes that are just part of a larger, otherwise static, whole. You can change the way you view scenery, but you need to change your lines if your audience are going to perceive and then respond to you, the actor, differently.

First Capital Connect - Top of the league

I read about First Capital Connect in a Department of Transport survey in the londonpaper last night where commuter trains with the worst overcrowding records were listed.

First Capital Connect can proudly boast to top the league and, indeed, occupy four of the top six positions for trains running along my line from King's Cross to Cambridge and up to Ely and King's Lynn. Worst offender is the 07.15 from Cambridge to King's Cross, with 76% of the trains above capacity, quickly(!) followed by the 07.45. Two of the evening trains back - the 17.45 and the 18.15 are similarly appalling to travel on - officially.

It's been well-known to us Cambridge commuters for a long time that these trains are especially bad - you often have to turn up for the 17.45 in order to have any chance of getting a seat on the 18.15 - but great to see that First Capital Connect are finally getting the public recognition they deserve.

Landwade

I had a day off today and, though overcast, Nathan and I decided to go on a short walk. There is a disused railway line which used to run from Cambridge to Mildenhall. I wrote about it in a previous post.

We decided to explore and headed across the Suffolk border just to the south east of Burwell. Following a track adjacent to the old route we eventually became intrigued by footpaths running alongside vast cornfields which eventually led us to the wooded area of Landwade. In a clearing we came across the mid fifteenth century church and plan to revisit it one evening this week. Landwade was once effectively an 'island' of Suffolk within Cambridgeshire but is now fully within the Suffolk county. Because of it's disputed border, writers from Cambridgeshire and Suffolk have written about it.

I'll take some photos and post them after our next visit but, we eventually walked for about two miles through some lovely woods before crossing the Newmarket to Ely railway line and joining up with the tail end of the disused railway line we had originally intended to explore.

Shaving seconds

I've just shown our eldest son - Nathan - how to use my electric shaver. It mayt sound like a simple thing but, if you've never used it before...

He's sixteen and has been trimming various wayward hairs on his chin for some months now. Today, we bit the bullet and his days of odd, extraneous hairs will quickly become a forest. I suppose it's a rite of passage that all boys will go through at some point but, like so many of life's markers, it made me feel a little sad that the boy in him has long since gone.

My father showed me around his yellow electric shaver before I went off to Leeds University. He preferred to wet shave but I was always convinced that I'd slit my throat in doing this - I still think that - so the shaver was almost brand new. It lasted me for the next couple of years when it too needed replacing. I can see now the Christmas morning when he first received it and then, years later, him sitting beside me and showing me what to do, just as I've just done with Nathan.

Like the years, the hairs will continue to arrive and pass but, unlike the hair, we'll continue to remember times from our own childhoods as I hope our children will do.