I thought I’d start off with a Lee and Herring quote, as I don’t think there’s enough of them in this blog. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if that one was my first one. Anyway, it does have some relevance, as I have spent the day in York. Needles toupé I took my camera.

Several days ago, Coatesy made a reappearance on the scene, it was a nice surprise to see him on Messenger. It was the first time I’d heard from him properly since February 12th, after a trip somewhere got abandoned at the last minute.

We got talking (unsurprisingly), and arranged a meet-up and a trip out, to York. This sounded cool. I’d never actually been to York since I was a kid. In fact, I remember getting some type of colouring in / crayon set from there the last time I was there. And Treasure Hunt was still on telly.

Er, anyway. The trip was arranged. I was to meet him at his flat on Saturday Morning at approximately 8:30AM. I awoke at 6AM. After spending the last two days awaiting a text saying that he wouldn’t be able to make it, I was surprised to find my phone void of texts. Awesome!

Anyhoo. I set off, along the moderately short walk from Mercuyvapour Towers to Coatesy’s abode. It was a lovely morning, if a little chilly. In fact, I turned back because I thought it’d be cold enough to require a jumper.

This apparel change, unfortunately made me three minutes late for the festivities, and I arrived on his doorstep at 8:33. He was ready to go, and after picking up a Wispa and a foreign bottle of Dr. Pepper (which smelled oddly of cheese) from the local shop, we headed off towards the train station.

I was surprised to see that the station at Hartlepol has been slightly revamped since my last trip on an English train six months ago. Yes, it’s all been redesigned, and it really doesn’t look right. The platform is still a pigeon and chav infested mess, however.

I am happy to report, however, is that one of the possible reasons that the station hasn’t been done up yet, is because the fares are so damn cheap. £9.60 retun to York. Bimler.

We sat on the platform, awaiting the train which would take us the first part of our journey, from Hartlepool to Thornaby. It’s a journey of approximately six metres. In fact, it hardly felt worth sitting down for it.

My memories of Thornaby station aren’t good. I simply remember a vast expanse of urine soaked tarmac and bricked flower beds which uncomfortably acted as the only decent and non-vandalised piece of seating. I’m happy to report that this is no longer the case. There is a station building, ticket office, proper seating, and even destination boards saying when the next trains are due. These weren’t there last time!

Coatesy informed me of some of the things he’s been getting up to recently, including meeting Ricky Tomlinson, and getting his autograph. Unfrotunately, he didn’t get the pleasure of meeting Duncan Norvelle who was also appearing with Ricky Tomlinson. According to Wikipedia, Duncan Norvelle now lives in Darfield, a place which I have visited, and had a very nice bag of chips at. You may also notice that I didn’t complete that post about Barnsley. Oops.

Er, anyway. Back onto the present day, and back to the trip to York. After a few minutes loitering around the Thornaby platform, the second train showed up. A big, purple, comfortable looking train, manufactured by Siemens.

We picked two of the only seats available, sat facing some odd couple. It was not possible to look forward without staring them in the eye. I think I know every detail about the train carpet, walls, seat design, yet I wouldn’t be able to pick the guy who was sat in front of me for the hour-long journey from a police lineup.

The journey passed pretty quickly, thanks to the playing of the golf game on my mobile with Coatesy, and also the reintroduction of posting stuff to my twitter account.

We arrived at the station, just before 11. The first thing I noticed was… OLD STREETLIGHTS. Oh, man. I was in my element. More on those later, as I’m sure you’ll all be gripped in hearing about those.

It was at this point I whipped out of the camera, and began to take photos…

Yes, I was taking a photo of the streetlight. The Yorkshire wheel is just a bit of an added bonus. Speaking of which, we did go up onto the wheel. And it was great. Whilst up there, Chris rang me to see what I was up to.

I informed him that the trip had gone ahread, and we were indeed in York.

The ride lasts only 13 minutes (according to their website), so at £6.50 it was a bit expensive, but the views, as you can imagine, are stunning. Should you ever go, we were in car number 22. Just so you know that I have breathed in that very same car… oh, and the air conditioning doesn’t work in it. It’s supposed to be lovely and cool. It was more like an oven. This is one of the reasons I look like a beetroot in the above picture. That, and the fact I may have had the saturation setting up too high on the camera….

So, it was time for a quick look at the railway museum. This place is vast, and I’m pretty sure we didn’t get to see it all during our trip round there.

Now, for all of you going there to see the Flying Scotsman, well, you’ll be a bit disappointed. It’s in bits.

Of course, if you LIKE to see old steam engines in bits, then I’m sure you’ll be happy with the sight.

So, after another quick look round, we headed out of the museum and down the road towards York Mister. It was one of the reasons I wanted to go to York. Last time I was there, I wasn’t old enough to appreciate it, but I still remember shots of it burning down on the news.

Before we went there, we stopped off for some food. I opted for a pair of sausage rolls, whilst Mr. Coates disappeared up the road for a Subway. We walked along to a shady little square situated at the end of The Shambles to consume our food products.

Out of the corner of my eye, I spied a market. Now, these things normally mean one of two things… records and lots of cheap fruit. You’ll have to work out for yourself which one of those I’m more interested in. I didn’t really come to buy records, and even though I found a stall that sold records, I couldn’t really buy any. It was still early in the day, and although I was sorely tempted to buy one, I held off the temptation. After all, lugging records around on a day out really isn’t something worth doing.

Next stop was York Minster. This place is immense in every sense of the world. One thing I found really interesting was a “busker”, for want of a better word, sat outside, playing something called an autoharp.

I see that the guy is called Paul Jennison (or at least that’s the names on the CDs he is selling) but unfortunately, Mr. Jennison doesn’t have much of a web prescense, unless I’m just searching for the wrong things.

Onto the Minster itself, then. As I said before, this is one of those places that is just immense.

Remember my rant about Notre Dame being handed over to the gawking tourists, with camera flashes going off every six seconds? Well, I am happy to report that this place has got it right… You have to “buy” the ability to take photos. This means that your average Little Miss Snapalot will think twice about leaving her camera with full flash on, because you have to pay for the privelege! An awesome idea.

The full price for everything (that includes, photo rights, entrance to the tower, entrance to the lower levels) costs something like £9. Now, because there was a private wedding going on (seriously, a wedding in York Minster? How much money do these people have?), we got a discount, so the cost was £7.50. Unfortunately, we were unable to gatecrash the wedding, but I’m sure that Husband and Wife will have a happy three months together before it all ends up getting shat up the wall. Not that I’m cynical about marriage, or anything.

Our first stop was the tower. We thought it was probably best to get the excersise out of the way first of all. There’s a narrow 275-step climb up to the top of the tower. It’s the first time I’ve ever visited a church and had a health and safety warning, and been asked to declare that I didn’t have a list of diseases longer than my arm…

This now ranks third in the “most steps I’ve climbed in one go”. The top three looks as follows…

1. April 14th 2007 - Scott Monument, Edinburgh… 287 steps
2. July 17th 2008 - Arc De Triomphe, Paris… 284 steps
3. September 27th 2008 - York Minster… 275 steps

The walkway for the Minster is almost as thin as the Scott Monument, but not quite. You do also get the chance half way up for a nice view…

This was, however, only 108 steps into the journey. There was still a hundred and a bit to go. No mater how much I liked the view right there, it could only get better the more we got up. And if I’d have just stood there taking photos on a very narrow gangway, I’d have held everyone up.

Another very narrow corridor and set of stairs later, we arrived at the roof, and I’m sure you’ll agree that the views were absolutely stunning…

I mean, have YOU ever seen a CCTV camera that size before? I couldn’t BELIEVE it.

After eight minutes on the roof, we were ushered back down by a woman who seemed eager to get everyone down as quickly as possible. It became quite clear why. By the time we’d got downstairs, the queue was pretty much round the block. Talk about good timing, we only had to wait a few minutes, whereas the people in the queue… well, they’re probably stil there now…

We took a further look around the Minster, including taking in all of the sights of the underground section. This was a particularly interesting section, as you get to see all of the medieval / Roman stuff. It was amazing how it was preserved.

After that, we took one last walk around the minster itself before leaving it and heading towards the arrays if shops. At this point, I was gasping for a drink. The climb up and down those narrow stairs certainly took its toll on my body’s fluid reserves, and before I knew it, I was in a little paper shop buying a nice bottle of Ribena. This is one particular drink I have started to like again, despite not drinking it for approximately 10 years.

At this point, we decided to have a look at the boat trips. There’s a nice boat trip which takes you all they way up the river Ouse to the Tate + Lyle factory, and all the way back round again. When we got there, it was quite clear that the nice weather had influenced the entire population of Yorkshire to come out and have exactly the same idea as us - the queue was about half a mile long. It became apparent that we weren’t going to get on the next boat trip, and we wouldn’t have time to get on the one after that, so we just headed back to the station in order to get the next train. Unfortunately, Coatesy had to attend his place of Employment on the night.

Now would be a good time to mention that his old job involved the manufacture of many things including streetlights, and he could confirm that the Thorn Beta 79 ceased manufacture only a few months ago. Shame. It seemed odd that we were having a conversation about streetlights.

Oh, and I also think that now would be a good idea to copy and paste some links to the streetlight photos I mentioned umpteen paragraphs ago.

To start us off, here’s an example of an extremely rare Thorn Beta 9, gear-in-head…

I think it’s probably the only one I’ve seen in my entire life, so that was a nice surprise. I originally got the name of this lantern completey wrong. Bah!

Secondly, there’s this one…

It’s been identified as a “Thorn Grenville” floodlight. Oddly, if you google that, the only thing that comes up (apart from something about family names) is the reply to my request for identification in the StreetlightingUK group.

After heading back to the station, we nipped into WH Smiths. I was still dying of thirst, mainly because my clothing apparel consisted of black items, and considering this was one of the nicest days of the year, I was sweating buckets. I picked up a bottle of water, Coatesy picked up a paper.

We sat on the platform and watched a train undergo some emergency maintainence. Apparently, one of the doors had jammed, so I whiled away the few minutes watching them trying to fix the doors. I never found out of they managed it because our train arrived shortly after. Again, it was very similar to the one we’d got down there. Nice and comfortable.

After a short while, we were back in Thornaby. Now, it said that the 16:37 train to Carlisle (via Hartlepool) was cancelled, but the following screen said it was still running… how odd. Luckily, the ticket office was still open, so we thought it would be best to check. Coatesy volunteered to ask, and I wasn’t going to argue with that

Now, the oddest thing happened in the queue in front of us. Apparently, some old woman had just got a free ride from Northallerton to Thornaby, as nobody had came around to sell her a ticket. Fair enough, you might think. She’d just walk away with a couple of extra quid in her pocket… no.

She was demanding that she should be charged for this journey. The guy behind the counter looked about as confused as I did. Huh? She’s just got something for nothing because someone clearly wasn’t doing their job correctly, and she feels like she should be the one to cough up?

Eventually, the guy printed her a ticket out, she paid for it…

Guy: “Shall I just bin this?”
Her: “Well, it’s no use to me now, is it?”

Miserable old goat. I bet she’s the type of person that leaves your average customer service rep with a nervous tick.

However, there was still the matter of the cancelled train. Was it cancelled or not? After Ms Moneybags fucked off, it was Coatesy’s turn in the queue. The guy explained that they were testing out a new system, and the train WAS running. Hang on, surely if you’re testing out a new system, the information you give out on it should be ACCURATE? Otherwise, what’s the point of actually redoing the system?

At 16:37 and 2 seconds, the train pulled into the station, We boarded, and took the short journey from Thornaby to Hartlepool, taking in the wonderful sights such as the abandoned Cerebos factory and the various waste disposal sites. During this journey, I attempted to get Daddykins to pick me up from the station. He was cooking the tea, so he suggested I get a taxi and he’d pay for it. Awesome.

Coatesy and I went our separate ways, and I becan the mammoth task of uploading all of the photos, and eventually typing this blog.

All in all, an excellent day, and it has became apparent that if I am going to use this camera properly, I’ll need more than just a 2Gb memory card… all of the photos here!

Technorati Tags: camera, coatesy, duncan norvelle, lee and herring, Photos, thornaby, train, york, york minster

After seeing runours flying around the interwebs about the return of full sized Monster Munch, I was eager to give them a try. Whilst down the local shops, stocking up on essentials (beer and sausage rolls, mainly), I glanced over to the crisps shelf, and noticed them there. Yes, Roast Beef Monster Munch, in their distinctive old yellow packet…

Of course, the question is, would I be enough of a tight bastard to spend the asking price of 45p? Well, considering I actually have a photograph of them, in front of my monitor, I think you can safely assume that I did indeed buy them.

The bags are obviously bigger than they are now, and the packet has “Bigger Like They Used to be!*”… the asterisk points to some small text stating “as in 1977″. This clearly shows they’re not trying to corner the kids’ market with these, instead they’re going for the adult market, who grew up with them as kids, and were dismayed to find that Walkers completely destroyed their branding.

Now, I like to think I had a little part to play, after my rant on one of the UK newsgroups about the state of British crisps, and in particular Monster munch…

Someone in uk.culture.nostalgia.1980s asked “What do you miss from the 80’s that you wish were still with us?” My reply is the long-winded one below…

>>Cheese and Onion Monster Munch.

> Whatever happened to sizzling bacon flavour?

You know what, I can answer that with detail.

In the late 80’s (whee, just on topic), the short-lived extra flavours of Monster Munch were finished. Salt and Vinegar disappeared late 80s, Cheese and onion followed suit shortly after. In fact I consumed my last packet on 28th August 1989, leaving the Roast Beef and Pickled Onion flavours. Within a year or two, the Bacon flavour varieties were introduced in their distinctive orange packet. Oddly, orange is not a colour you’d associate with bacon crisps, even now.

In the mid 90s, the Monster Munch brand was “rejigged”. The packets for the remaining flavours were changed to be that little more monsterish. Therefore, the sizzling bacon variety were discontinued, in favour of the “Scary Spider” flavour. Basically, this was EXACTLY the same as the bacon flavour, but the packets were black and the crisps themselves had changed shape. These survived for a few years. Not many.

Shortly after, mid 1990s, I believe this was the time that Smiths Crisps became defunct and were swallowed up by the Walkers franchise. The packets changed from the clear plastic variety, to foil. The crisps changed their “shape” (there was more than one shape than just the “foot” they use now) to a much smaller version. Most flavours were ditched. A new “Hamburger” flavour was introduced, to replace the beef ones and pretty much everything else. I really disliked them. I can’t remember if the “Flaming Hot” ones came out the same time, or whether these were a later addition.

Either way, despite all of this uproar, the pickled onion ones stayed unchanged, except for their shape. I believe their bags have always been purple. They’re still strong (though not as strong as previous incarnations).

The “Roast Beef” ones returned earlier this decade, and always remind me of a long-forgotten brand”. They survive today, in their foil packets, along with the Flamin’ hot and Pickled Onion varieties.

Quite honestly, in the last 12 hours, I’ve pouched at least 6 bags of these particular crisps. I love them so much.

Is it pure coincidence that I wrote that on August 3rd, and here I am, a month and a half later, chowing down on original sized Monster Munch?

Technorati Tags: branding, childhood, crisis, memories, monster munch, newsgroups, Reminiscing, roast beef, snacks, walkers

That post below about the flickr meet was supposed to appear here yesterday, but I accidentally saved it instead of publishing it, so this post won’t make much sense.

Either way, yesterday, I did indeed attend a social event, which was rare for me. It was nice to meet some members of the group and put names to faces, etc.

My photos are here and everyone else’s will be here … possibly!

Technorati Tags: docks, flickr meet, hartlepool, teesside

You may be shocked and interested to know that today, I shall be doing something strangely sociable for my standards. Now, most of you know that I am absolutely addicted to flickr in every way, shape and form. I currently have over 11Gb of photos on there. That’s not important, however.

What IS important, is that there is a flickr “meet” from some of the members of The People’s Republic of Teesside. And, seeing as I have a decent camera now, I’m going to attend.

I don’t actually know any of these people personally, and given my track record of meeting new people, it should be an interesting day. Photos, etc will follow on my return.

It’s going to be a nice day weather wise by the looks of things which is always a bonus!

Technorati Tags: flickr meet, teesside

Hurrah! Finally, I have managed to get over the demons of the past 24 hours, and get everything LOOKING as if it’s running OK. I had fears of having to completely restore my installation of wordpress and all sorts of troubles restoring the database… thankfully, this looks to have been diverted.

It was all caused by a caching plugin which had, for some unknown reason, gone up the spout. I remember playing about with the configuration of it the other day (Sunday, I think it was), and I’d noticed that there were a few error messages coming up from the site, permissions issues, etc.

I didn’t give them a second though,as it sometimes happens if the site fails to communicate with the database. After showing Richard some of the features of Wordpress, and the post I’d made about his new blog, he suddenly said my site had stopped working. And, you know what? It had. Bugger.

It was, for whatever reason, trying to access a non-existant HTML file, resulting in my custom 404 message. I’d then remembered playing with the plugin, and the .htaccess file. Fair enough, I’ll just disable the plugin, and rewrite the .htaccess file.

Logical steps to take, wouldn’t you think? Well, I’m sure they were, but it didn’t help me out any.

Now, after trying everything I could think of, I just moved all of the files from here into another directory, including the .htaccess file. And, it was STILL redirecting to this non-existant HTML file, even on a different browser, on a different machine which has never accessed my website, on a different OS, etc, etc.

Piece of crap.

Oddly, it stopped appending this file to the end, and oddly enough, I was able to move the files back in, and the front page loaded and appeared as it should. That was when I updated my site to say that it was “partially” fixed. The directories on the ste are dynamic, so for example, isn’t actually really there. Luckily, the update fixed the problem, and everything appears to be working fine.

I’d normally ask for a quick email if the website misbehaves, but as normal, nobody ever does.

I don’t know why I would require a cache plugin anyway. This site is never going to get slashotted / dugg / regaularly viewed. The only time I have ever had a rush of hits was when Jeremy Beadle died. Everything slowed down to a crawl for 10 minutes, and I had a peak in my webstats like never before, but the hits soon withered away like Jeremy’s little hand… oh, that was terrible, I apologise for that.

Technorati Tags: broken, fixed, jeremy beadle, wordpress