I travel by train a lot these days, so you’d think that – like Smidge Manly – I’d be an expect in the ’istries and mistries of the railway – but sometimes I still stumble on something that baffles me.
Yesterday I boarded a train and found this. I cannot explain it.
13 comments on “Welcome portrait”
I would like to know two things here:
1) There’s a place called Pulborough? Sounds pretty fake. Have you ever been to this Pulborough
2) Why is the display at the top asking you questions? Your name can clearly be seen in the top right-hand corner.
1. There is. It is here. I have passed through it on a train, shortly after taking this picture, and in the last year I have driven through it two (2) times.
2. Modern trains offer a very personal experience to travellers. If you are not being directly addressed by electronic displays and tannoy announcements, then you should complain.
Do people get super angry if they’re not directly addressed by electronic displays, kind of like when we get to a Tube station and have to wait thirty seconds for the next one because they’re “running a smidge late” and you use a pipe to smash up a billboard?
Extremely angry. It makes for very noisy and tedious journeys on my way to work, when I’m on a 12-carriage train that’s at full standing capacity, and the automated announcements have to address each person individually by name before reading them the list of stations. When we all arrive at Waterloo we have to stay on the train for another 40 minutes or so to wait until it finishes before we’re allowed off.
If people from a hundred years ago could see us now boy would they be impressed at how far we’ve come.
I don’t know what you lot get up to in Newcastle, but down here that is the very hallmark of civilisation.
We’re not exactly Hallmark, we’re more Card Factory than anything else. Maybe Shoe Zone if Shoe Zone made greetings cards, a bit like Card Factory.
Are you saying that Newcastle is the Card Factory of civilisation?
You’ve been to Shitley Bay. You know exactly what I’m talking about.
That’s true. I think, if I’m honest, I was just trying not to remember it.
If Newcastle is the Card Factory of civilisation, I think Shitley Bay might be the Merrion Market of civilisation. A sad closed-down marketplace that permanently smells like something has gone off. The Merrion Market is gone now, of course, but Shitley Bay will last forever.
For those viewers, listeners and gawkers who aren’t au fait with our usual trash talk, is that the Merrion Market from the good ole’ Merrion Centre?
Yes. The weird market part full of closed-down stalls and run-down businesses and odd smells. Awful. Just like Shitley Bay.
The poster boy for grim, The Merrion Centre, until Shitley Bay ousted it. I tell ya, that must have been one giant elbow to push that eye-watering monstrosity out of the way.