There and back

After blogging about my great-great grand-dad I looked out of the window and saw that it was a lovely day for a bike ride.

So I packed a picnic and a bottle of water, shouldered my backpack and set off on two wheels towards Lancaster.

Two and a half hours later (including a coffee with Andrew Pye at his house in Claughton) I was sitting on a bench admiring the view of the Bay from - Morecambe!

Yes, I had ridden more than twenty miles by the time I got there. The last half of the ride was on a cycle path all the way from Caton. It made things so much easier. I didn't have to deal with road traffic, just pedestrians.

I celebrated with an orange juice at the newly updated Midland Hotel and rode back to Lancaster and caught the train back to Bentham. This was another first. The first time I had taken my bike on a train. What a day!

I'm on the train!

I'm always up for something new, and this is it. I'm writing this on a train.

It's the National Express 1205 service from Leeds to London King's Cross. We have just left Doncaster and the next stop is Retford.

I'm on my way to the British Library to do more Sherlock snooping. This time I'll be reading letters that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote to his mother in Masongill.

Will it hold any clues? Elementary, my dear reader, elementary.

Meeting People

If there's one thing I like to do it is to meet people.

I met a guy at Bentham Station and got to know him on the train. He told me two interesting things:

1 There is a course about Digital Photography starting at Hornby Institute on 6 June. Perhaps it would help me improve pictures like the one I took of Lancaster Station yesterday. You can see it at the top of this blog.

2 He is a mortgage broker and could help get a better deal for our buy-to-let mortgages.

I've got his contact details.

At the University MA Seminar I read out my paper calling it a deconstruction. But irony held the day. The Professor told me that I had put a new historicist critique together with a post modern expose but had not actually gone on to deconstruction (!) Talk about the blind leading the blind!

Anyway, I did mention the prophet Ezekiel in it and he was mentioned again in the afternoon seminar which was a discussion on Modern Painters 2.

I borrowed one of Keith Hanley's books explaining what Modernism is. I found it fascinating.

Lynn helped me pick up some books about Modern Literary Criticism from the University Library. I hope to devour parts of them this week.

I met some more people in the afternoon. One was a Canadian Librarian who was visiting Pauline and the other a lady from a URC Church in Lancaster.

The day ended with me watching Jim'll Fix It Strikes Again on UKTV Gold. Last one, sadly.