Started the day (almost) in Weardale, where my mother's drive was completely covered in black ice even at 10:45AM, passed through York at noon(ish) where the sun was momentarily blinding, even if snow was glistening on the tops of the dales in the distance, finished it in Kent at twilight, where it's grey and miserable.
My conclusion, having experienced a significant sample of the country today, is that it's bloody cold.
But my house is warm.
I booked my train ticket to visit my folks over Christmas earlier. I knew there would be issues because I normally travel about the 17th to beat the rush, but that's slap bang in the middle of the scheduled national train strike (Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday out of the week after next, and each one messes up travel the day after as well, so basically the whole week is gone), so that's pushing a lot of people's travel into Christmas Week. I did mean to sort it out a week ago, but reasons. Anyway I started trying on Thursday, cheapest ticket £51. I could get in to LNER's website to book that, but every time I tried to reserve the wheelchair space, "Computer Says No!" - and I tried to book several different services over several different tries, so it wasn't just the one train having an issue. Primary (catastrophizing) hypothesis: everything's already booked, I'm going to end up having to travel next week and stay up there for a month!
So this afternoon I rang passenger assistance (which is the other thing you're told to try when the computer refuses the booking) and the guy on the other end says straight away "I can book you on the noon train out of London", which is a bit earlier than I'd prefer, but any wheelchair space in a storm. So we go through all the details and he transfers me to their ticket booking line. And I sit and wait. And wait. And wait. Now in their defence they did have some rather tasty Spanish guitar playing as elevator music, and they were offering a call back if you wanted it - "you won't lose your place in the queue" But they also kept telling me "You are number 1 in the queue", so the temptation to hang on was there, even if nothing was actually happening. I finally did go for the callback, and sat and waited. And waited. And waited.
I think it was probably the better part of 45 minutes before "You are number 1 in the queue" turned into "We're actually calling you." But that did go through relatively straightforward apart from "And you realise you'll have to pick up the ticket from the station?" The online booking system can mail your ticket out to you (for £1), the telephone booking system can't *facepalm*. Oh, and the cheapest ticket left was £81.
And at some point I have to go through it all again because that was only the ticket up, not the ticket back as they don't seem to have released the post-New Year tickets onto the booking platform yet. It was exactly the same last year. (And there's another strike scheduled for the first week of January).
I support the strikes, but they do make life complicated!
So problems on my trip North started even before I set off when I woke up and found I'd broken a tooth (molar) in the night. I'd actually lost about three-quarters of it during lockdown when I couldn't do anything about it and by the time we were out of lockdown it was completely healed and there didn't seem any point in doing anything about it, but now the remainer had been reduced to something uncomfortably like an upright chisel blade. As I was already committed to chasing about after other medical stuff that day and don't currently have a local dentist (previous dentist kept sending me to the top floor of their four storey steep stairs-only building and just no) I didn't have a chance to do anything about it before the journey. And while the tooth wasn't causing any pain, that chisel blade kept slashing the underside of my tongue when I tried to eat or speak. Which was less than ideal.
The journey itself went smooth enough, at least until I got to Darlington. I have a forty minute wait for the local train to Bishop Auckland, so at one point I swapped out of the chair onto a bench in order to dig into my bag for my drink. Which is when I noticed the zip of my bag (rucksack hung over the back of the chair) was completely open down one side. One frantic check of my rucksack contents later I concluded that my toiletries bag had conveniently stuck in the gap and stopped anything else falling out.
That was until I came to set up my laptop after getting to my mother's, which was when I realised that half of my laptop charger was missing. And of course it was the bit with the transformer, not the bit with the plug. *Headdesk*
(I suspect the rucksack zip came open right at the start of the journey when I had a momentary fear of 'Did I forget X?' and had to stop and check it halfway to the station).
So on the Friday morning my sister rang around all the local dentists - she was definitely out to a 10 mile radius, possibly even 20, and no one could take on a non-local emergency patient, half of them didn't even have a dentist in*. This was a pain because by this time the underside of my tongue was pretty thoroughly raw and for some reason people (family) kept talking to me and expecting me to hold up my side of the conversation.
On the plus side I did manage to order a replacement charger, (kudos to Laptop Chargers Online who had it waiting for Royal Mail pick-up about 30 minutes after I pressed send on the order). I think it took longer to work out the precise model of my laptop (turns out it's inside the battery compartment) than to find and order the charger (£30 plus an extra £3 for 2-3 day delivery rather than 3-5).
No point in trying to ring dentists at the weekend, so I tried NHS 111** on Saturday afternoon and was told a dental nurse would call me back, but that they were 'very busy'. The call back was about four hours later and the nurse quickly ran me through an assessment, then decided I didn't meet their criteria for hospital emergency dentistry, mostly it seems because I wasn't taking over-the-counter painkillers. Pointing out that I was taking an opioid painkiller strong enough I might not even notice the kind of pain someone might use an OTC painkiller for didn't get me anywhere. And telling me "Even if you did fit the criteria we don't actually have any appointments" didn't really help. Not entirely impressed there.
On Monday my sister tried again, and this time she got one dentist who said "We don't have anything, but try our other branch after 9:30"*** And they did have a slot. So that was a 20 minute drive to a village the other side of the next town over. And I have to say they had a very slick operation - quarter of an hour filling in forms on my phone, then through to see the dentist, who agreed with my feeling that what was left had been wrapped around a now missing filling, and in fact what was slashing open my tongue turned out to be a pin left over from the filling rather than actual tooth. Five minutes with the glorified dremel**** and a touch of dental putty stuff over the remnant and it was at least temporarily fixed.
And we were amazed they took me on as an NHS out-of-area patient, meaning I was only charged the NHS dental emergency figure of £23.40, we'd fully expected I'd have to pay private prices. (UK dentistry's an unholy amalgam of NHS and private, with fixed charges for NHS patients, some dentists are NHS only, some are private only, and some are both).
And when I got back to my mother's my charger had arrived - ordered 2:30PM Friday, arrived Monday AM - can't argue with that!
Which was when I discovered I'd left the dongle for my wireless mouse at home. *Headdesk* *Headdesk*
And that was it for problems.
The other end of the holiday was more about finding things. First I found my copies of Bujold's Captain Vorpatril's Alliance and Cryoburn, which I've been looking for for at least six months and which it turns out were in the Calibre library on my laptop (I hadn't used Calibre in ages), so it looks like I didn't buy them from Amazon after all, and no wonder I couldn't find them on my Kindle. And there were a bunch of other ebooks I've bought or downloaded from various venues over the years buried in odd folders here and there that are now similarly in Calibre. Then when I came to pack I reached into my rucksack and noticed there was a very faint bulge in the padding. It took me a few minutes to work out which pocket it was in, but yes, there was the missing charger. *Headdesk* *Headdesk* *Headdesk*.
There's a thin pocket the full size of the main body of the rucksack, which I never, ever use, because why? And of course it was in there. But why would I put half the charger in the main body, and half in a different pocket? Ah well, at least I can now leave one at my mother's and not have to worry about carrying it there and back.
Mostly smooth journey back, though I did get deposited at the diagonally opposite corner of Darlington station to where I needed to be (even the driver didn't know why we were there) with 8 minutes to make my connection and a guard who needed to lie down on the floor to work out how to get the ramp in place. When the on-station passenger assistance guy caught up with me he explained what was happening - they'd just had a freight train break in two (eek!) on the line my local service was continuing onto, and it would probably be turning around and heading back to Bishop, rather than continuing on to the coast. I suspect the trains were probably disrupted for hours afterwards, so just as well I wasn't on a later service (or headed to the seaside with a pack of screaming kids).
* The UK's having a post-Covid dental crisis, two years worth of deferred treatment and loads of dentists leaving the profession.
** The NHS advice/triage/referral line, by contrast my sister rang 111 at 11pm a few days later and got a doctor's appointment in the middle of the night for her husband without any drama.
*** No idea of the significance of 9:30.
**** While the dentist was working he told me that he'd visited his father in the South of England between lockdowns only to find his dad had just come down with an almost identical problem to me and him without any tools, which ended with him down in the cellar among dad's model railway layout fixing it using an actual dremel!
.... with my mother in tow (it's five and a half years since she last visited, rather than me going to Durham)
I spent days cleaning before I left the house pre-Christmas. I've already been banished from the kitchen after a demand to know where the cleaning products are.
Send a rescue party if you don't hear from me again!
So, having been back for a week I've now spent four weeks at home out of the last ten. That's clearly not ideal, if for no other reason than I've forgotten how to do the home thing and am gradually re-indoctrinating myself into things like "You need to do shopping" and "but first you need to defrost the fridge, because that's enough ice to sink the Titanic".
Not strictly about forgetting how to home, but probably related. Standing outside the front door thinking "I know I've forgotten something, what the hell is it? Oh, wheelchair. D'oh!"
The weather has been hovering around almost hot enough to sit out, I tried sitting out for tea yesterday as it was sunny, but had to come back in when I started shivering. Hopefully today has tipped over the edge into acceptable.
I did mean to post about the end of my trip North, but keep forgetting, so I may as well segue into that. Despite being back North for a fortnight I only got to see my Dad during the first week, and the last visit was just 10 minutes prior to the meeting about him. My sister wasn't available for a lift on the Friday or Saturday, and on the Sunday we arrived at the home after a good Sunday Pub Lunch at the Copper Mine near Crook (Oh, god, that mash looks stolid, OMG, but it tastes excellent! - though their Yorkshires were just too thick and weirdly chewy) to find that the care home had had an outbreak of (presumably) norovirus and was asking people not to visit. We could see Dad sitting in the garden, and actually had to call my sister back as she'd gone in through the garden gate, but spending time with him was out. That continued through until last weekend, well past the point I came home, but fortunately Dad never caught the bug.
One advantage of being barred from visiting is that it meant we had greater freedom to take my mother out (it was half-term so my sister was free). Mam didn't want anything special doing for her birthday, and through sheer incompetence I'd booked to come home the day before her birthday anyway, but we took her out to Seaton Carew (on the coast near Hartlepool, also widely known as Seaton Canoe after a famous faked death a few years ago), for lunch. The weather could have been better, there was a heavy sea fret and you almost couldn't see the sea from the other side of the promenade, in fact with the wind blowing the fret into your face it was downright miserable. But we spent an hour in the penny arcades (total expenditure between the three of us £5) and then found a fish shop for lunch - normal practice would have been to eat them out on the prom, but given the weather we went for the sit-down option. Service was slow, but the fish and chips were excellent when they finally did show up.
We came home via Seal Sands, which despite the name is primarily an oil refinery, complete with an oil rig sitting on the shore (a quick google tells me it's the 24,000t Brent Delta production platform, which is in the process of being scrapped https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-business-39747670). Despite that we did actually see some seals, about a dozen basking on the banks of a creek the road ran across.
All in all a pleasant few hours, even if the weather could have been better.
Books Read:
Burn Bright, Patricia Briggs
Latest in the Alpha and Omega series. As I've been catching up on both Alpha and Omega and the Mercy Thompson series, which is interlinked, I'll save the full review and do all four recent books together when I have a chance.
The Flowers of Vashnoi, Lois McMaster Bujold
Set before Cryoburn, this is very much a thematic sequel to At the Mountains of Mourning, about the Young Miles discovering the hangovers of the Time of Isolation and Barrayaran intolerance of 'Muties'. This time it's Ekaterin's turn. Beyond raising two toddlers (and a teenager who never actually directly appears), and wrangling Miles, she's also helping out with Enrique and Martya's latest butterbug project, which, inspired by Miles, has the aim of cleaning up the radioactive ruins of Vorkosigan Vashnoi (nuked by the Cetagandans in his grandfather's time). The idea is the bugs munch through the various plant life in the Vashnoi Exclusion Zone, concentrating radioactive chemicals, and deposit them at set points for collection and safe disposal. Ekaterin's part of the project is (as usual) to manage the bug's external presentation, in this case by highlighting how radioactive they are, which she and Enrique have encompassed by turning the bug's thorax into a representation of the radioactivity trefoil, lit by bioluminescence. They've just reached the point of field trials in the zone, but it never occurred to Ekaterin that someone on radiation-conscious Barrayar might find the trefoil pretty, or that the intersection of the Vashnoi Exclusion Zone and someones is not the null set.
Overall it's fairly slight, there's not much mystery to the mystery, it's more about Ekaterin being Ekaterin and inately good at people-wrangling in a very different way to Miles. (Miles could lead a Children's Crusade, Ekaterin is much more likely to bring them home and feed them).
French Destroyers: Torpilleurs d'Escadre and Contre-Torpilleurs, 1922-1956. John Jordan and Jean Moulin
Excellent book on the history of France's interwar destroyers and super-destroyers, fully up to the same standard as the books on their British equivalents by Norman Friedman and (with wider focus) D K Brown (unsurprising as Jordan is the editor of Warship International). Fascinating, but ultimately depressing as more were lost in combat with Britain and the US than against the Germans, and most were scuttled at Toulon. So good I had to talk myself out of buying Jordan's books on French Cruisers and French Battleships on the spot, and they'll definitely be bought in the near future. Searching them out on Amazon was an exercise in frustration, I've not found one search that will actually get me all of the books in the series, I actually stumbled on a fourth one, Battleships pre-1922, quite by accident earlier this week.
Back home, after an interesting journey (in the Chinese sense of the word).
I was on the 12:02 from Darlington to Kings Cross. As usual Passenger Assistance at Darlington got me on the train without problem, though we did have to move three people from the wheelchair space and my first reaction was 'Gosh, this is crowded'. There was also an elderly lady being assisted aboard and as there were no seats obviously available I dropped the aisle side seat that gets folded up when the wheelchair space is in use so that she could use it - that one is just usable with the wheelchair in place, the window side one isn't (that's where my feet are). As we got chatting, she explained that the previous train, which she had a reservation on, had been cancelled. That explained the people standing in the aisles.
Things got worse at York, lots of people wanting to get on, and in the middle of them, a wheelchair user. Cue five minutes of the guy from Passenger Assistance shouting "Will you please move out of the way" at the people in the vestibule. Fortunately the new wheelchair user was pretty good at manouevring their chair as getting them into the other wheelchair space, once they got to it, required moving seven suitcases, three adults, and two toddlers. And once they were in all of that luggage then got piled back around them. They literally could not move their chair, there were multiple bags leaning against it's side and a huge one in contact with the footplate at the front. I'm less than convinced that this was safe. Certainly neither of us could move without other passengers moving themselves and their luggage and getting to the toilet would have been an exercise in futility. It turned out that they should have been on the train two before ours, both the intervening ones having been cancelled. So we now had nearly three trainloads aboard. Another passenger asked if it was possible to use the other seat in the wheelchair space as they couldn't stand for long, and when I explained there physically wasn't space for an adult to use it they burst into tears. Fortunately someone volunteered to stand and let them have their seat.
So the other wheelie and I swapped anecdotes about travel by wheelchair - I can't beat their story of going over backwards in a wheelchair accessible taxi (but only because I stuck my toe under the seat in front to stop it happening the one time I've used one). Confusingly they sounded almost exactly like ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaberett - same pitch, similar accent - which was doing a cognitive dissonance number on my brain given voice and chair but visibly not Kab. I got a text from my sister after a while, having reported the crowding, saying "At least you have a seat", which got a laugh from everyone around, doubly so when the other wheelie reported an identical one from their mother. They were getting off at Peterborough, not going to the end of the line like me, so I suggested that if we saw the guard they grab him and demand help when we got there. We never saw him close enough to speak to, though apparently he did pop momentarily into view when the disabled passenger alarm started sounding - it wasn't either of us, we suspected the kid in the loo at the time had pressed the wrong button. Disturbingly he didn't check the toilet, or us, just reset the alarm, then disappeared again.
And inevitably we got to Peterborough, and not only wasn't the guard about, but neither was there any sign of passenger assistance with a ramp. Fortunately we were able to repeat the seven pieces of luggage, three adults, two toddlers and one wheelie sliding block puzzle to get them out, and they were able to stand unaided for long enough to get off the train and rely on other passengers to hand their chair down, but that's really not good enough. SOP needs to be that the guard ensures there's both access room and assistance in cases like this. Actually that needs to be standard in all cases, but doubly so when trains are massively overcrowded.
We were just over half an hour late at Kings Cross, which should mean I can reclaim half my fare, but it could have been worse, the woman doing passenger assistance at St Pancras told me they'd had to suspend all services for four hours yesterday due to a trespasser on the line, who they only managed to snare when they finally brought a helicopter in.
And just to cap everything, I made a complete pig's ear of coming down the ramp at Rochester, having to be saved by the guard and the passenger assistance guy when I braked harder on one side than the other and nearly went off the side of the ramp - I seem to have slightly sprained my wrist at some point and I'm not quite sure if it was the cause of the skid, or a consequence.
Still, I'm home, at last.
Committing to travel was ridiculously last minute. We'd decided I'd try to get home Wednesday as that works best for cheap fares and availability of my brother-in-law for lifts to the station, but my sister couldn't get hold of her school's head to confirm she could attend the meeting I'll be back up for in late May as she wasn't in school on Monday. In the end we decided I'd just take the risk. I decided against booking online and picking up tickets at Darlington station (Bishop Auckland station doesn't have the needed machine) as I'd either have a ridiculously short time (10 minutes) to find the machine, get my ticket out of it and confirm that passenger assistance were ready with the ramp to get me on the train, or be sitting about for potentially an hour and a half. Trains from Bishop arrive at Darlington at 51 minutes past the hour, the online system would sell me a ticket on the 12:01 from Darlington if I booked from Bishop, but only on the 12:31 if I booked from Darlo - computers!.
So my brother-in-law ran me down on Tuesday lunchtime to get my hair cut and buy the ticket directly. Haircut was simple, it's not as if I have a lot any more, but it had reached the point I was having to consider combing it - the horror! "Number 2, all over" soon sorted that, and for half the price I pay in Rochester. So a quick lunch at a local cafe - sausage sandwich, a plateful of chips and a coffee, £5:40 for both of us - and then we whizzed over to the station. I popped into the bank, conveniently co-located, then over to the station, thinking "Do they normally have the shutters down like that?" only to find a notice on the doorway "Closed due to bereavement between 1:30 and 3PM. It was, of couse, 1:50PM.
You could still access the platform if you needed to catch a train, but the waiting room and booking office were shut. Ironically the guys who run it may have been at the same funeral for a friend of my dad's that my mother was attending. So we had to head home for an hour, then come back later, at which point I was finally able to buy my ticket, and as an added bonus reserve the wheelchair space without any fuss - the last time I tried that in person it caused the guy at Chatham station so much cognitive dissonance that I was trying to book the wheelchair space while not actually in a wheelchair (I was using crutches) that he almost refused to sell me the ticket and I gave up buying face to face. But the instant I told this guy I'd be travelling by chair when he asked about seat reservations he was "Right, let me book you the wheelchair space". As an added bonus that meant the phone call to Virgin East Coast to arrange passenger assistance at Darlington and Kings Cross was over and done with in a couple of minutes, where normally having to book the wheelchair space via them (you can't do it online) takes ages as they wait to log in to the booking system. So I finally had everything sorted barely 16 hours before I was due to travel. Which isn't exactly my favourite way to arrange things.
The journey itself was almost an anti-climax, everything worked as it should. I was chatting with the woman doing passenger assistance at Darlo while we waited for the train and she checked if I'd need a hand to get up the ramp (which is pretty steep).
Me: "Yes, I might just make it up with nothing on the chair, but not with my luggage on it."
Her: "Most people need a hand, though Tanni Grey-Thompson gets up on her own"
Well yes, but unlike TGT I'm not a ex-paralympian wheelchair racer!
There was a young woman with a sub-1yo sitting on the opposite side of the carriage and facing me for most of the trip, he was doing the wide-eyes looking at everything around him thing, so I got a big stare when I wheeled in, and a smile when I waved at him, but otherwise she kept him entertained constantly - singing, reading, chatting (not always in English, possibly Polish). I was impressed at her energy, it was like being in the next room to a channel tuned to children's TV!
(And while we're on the subject of unbearably cute, I looked out onto the school field on Monday, and spotted a teacher doing their "forest school" thing with a class of 5yos, all in matching waterproofs and wellies, d'aw!)
I was finally home by 16:30, which was exactly on schedule, though I thought for a minute I was going to have to change taxi as fitting my chair in the first one in the rank's boot looked extremely dodgy, even with wheels off. He finally managed to squeeze it in, just - I'm convinced other people with the same model have given up before now. And the only problem after that was forcing the front door open past the snowdrift of mail that had built up.
My sister rang last night to confirm that she has the meeting date confirmed, so now I get to book to do it all over again in about four weeks! And, just to prove the CCG hasn't had a sudden outbreak of competence, to ask me what she should do about the fact they still apparently have a meeting scheduled in for today - that would be the same meeting we've rearranged for four weeks time {sigh}.
sovay was asking if there were any shots of Durham cathedral being created from fountains dueing the Kynren performance, I knew I'd seen a pic last night, but couldn't find it again, which turns out to be because it's on a youtube clip - not great quality (people had been told not to use cameras and phones), but it'll give you an idea. The arches are about the 30 second mark, and if you watch through to the jousting, I was sitting directly in front of the target they're tilting at:
Anyway, Kynren. There's a linking narrative involving a young boy named Arthur, who boots his football through the pre-war Bishop's window and is rewarded with a lesson in British history, which in 90 minutes covered:
Joseph of Arimethea and the Holy Grail - complete with tree emerging from the lake
Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table
The Roman Withdrawal from England - with four horse chariot, Roman cavalry, legionaries, slave wagon.
St Cuthbert and the coming of Christianity to the North. The Lindisfarne Gospel.
The Viking raids, the wandering of St Cuthbert’s remains and the founding of Durham Cathedral - they built a cathedral from fountains, I was awestruck, so was everyone else.
The Battle of Stamford Bridge - Arthur gets the crucial role in the story the Viking on the Bridge
The Battle of Hastings, Harold and William - which features a crewed Norman ship emerging from the lake
Medieval Life and Tourney - complete with sheep, goats and geese, and with knights tilting at targets no more than 15 feet in front of you if you're in the wheelchair row
Battles against the Scots - flaming drumsticks!
Henry VIII and the Field of the Cloth of Gold
Queen Elizabeth and William Shakespeare meet at Auckland Castle - this is apparently historically attested, blew my mind!
The Civil War and the execution of Charles I
The coming of the railways - from Bishop Auckland to the world! (The Stockton and Darlington railway was built to service the Bishop Auckland coalfields). Complete with working Locomotion.
Mining disasters - very poignant, especially as many of the cast and audience will be descendants of miners, our family certainly is.
Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee
WWI and the Christmas Truce - I may have had a tear in my eye here
The Durham Miner's Gala - first time I've seen the Charleston done in wellies
WWII, Arthur goes to war.It is non-stop, often with four or more layers of activities happening at once - track, field, lake, terrace. My brother-in-law kept prompting me which way to look.
It absolutely peed down all day, including during the performance, but it was so good it really didn't matter. Though I did have to practically hose down my chair the next day to get rid of the yellow dust that it had picked up from the chippings used on the paths. Car parking would have been good, properly laid out disabled spaces in a dedicated car park, but the car park volunteers were telling people to ignore the markings and park closer to the next car (someone said something about part of another car park being flooded). Advantage of knowing someone in the cast was the feedback that this is a problem for disabled people, especially wheelchair users, and the gaps between cars are there for a reason, was on the official system by Sunday lunchtime.
There've been some stories about the car parks being jammed until midnight, but we managed to get back to the car, out of the site and be in the pub by 10:20, complete with my sister, who'd had to do a quick change and find us.
There's a handful of almost sold-out performances left this year, Fridays and Saturdays 'til September 17th, but they're already planning for next summer. It's pricey, but if you get the chance, go, you won't regret it.
timeasmymeasure
