What is all the fuss about?!?

You may have wondered if, after several days of no entries, whether this born-again blogger had already decided to call it a day and retire those key-tapping fingers of his.

Well, fear not! For I am here.

I have spent the weekend down in sunny ol’ Wales with my girlfriend, where she has been performing Measure for Measure, the not-so-famous Shakespeare play about a corrupt man who is running Vienna for a well-liked Duke who decides to act as a monk for a bit while the corrupt man tries to execute a man for getting another woman pregnant, while telling the condemned man’s sister, who is also a nun, that he will set him free if she sleeps with him. You can tell its Shakespeare, can’t you?

Well, she was playing the nun, and a good nun she was too!

So, on a train I hopped and headed down to a not-so-sunny Wales and saw the dress rehersal and opening night of this wonderfully inexplicable play.

This morning, having done what I had come to do (watch the play), I hopped back onto a train heading in the opposite direction which brought me back to London. Both ways, I had a really good journey – all trains were running on time and no delays whatsoever.

But these were not the only trains I had ventured on this month. I had already previously been up to Wales once more, for the above mentioned girl’s birthday, and indeed had travelled from home to Leamington and back, twice, where I have been sorting out all things Student-House-ish. And once again, no problems with any journey.

This can only lead me to two possible conclusions: either I am an incredibly lucky man or everyone who whinges that British trains are no good are all lying. If it is the former, then I plan to get a lottery ticket on Saturday and Sunday spend the day counting my millions. However, if it is the latter, and you indeed are one of these ‘whingers’, then shame on you! You are lying!

Now you may say that a few journeys are not enough to be able to judge the entire British rail industry. Then let me point out to you that from the end of term last year, around the end of June, right up to my holiday in the States in mid-August, I was working for an insurance firm in London, as I had done for my gap year. Obviously this would require me to commute into and out of London each and every working day. I had the usual nine-five day so I mostly travelled during rush hour. During those seven weeks that I was working, I only recall having one problem with the trains – my usual train home was cancelled due to a power cable coming down. But instead of gasping with fright and then whinging about the matter, I simply jumped onto the next train, ten minutes later.

In fact the worst problem I encountered with these trains was a lack of somewhere to sit.

So ask me what I think of rail travel and I will tell you – I have far too many problems trying to catch buses, planes and even trying to drive. But trains – no problems at all!

I must confess I have lied slightly though – I did have one problem coming home from Leamington once. Our train was at a standstill on the tracks for 10 minutes because the train in front was not moving. The reason (according to our driver) – someone had just been taken ill. Not something to whinge about to the train companies really.

: 27 Sep 2006 00:25 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Someone read my blog!

Well it appears that I have been proved wrong. Yes, I can admit it, I made a mistake. People do read other people’s blogs.

So before we continue, I would like to give a quick thank you to those who left me comments for:
1. reading my blog
2. making me look like a prat!

Having looked over the various different blogs after I had posted my own, it appears that a lot of people do read blogs – at that point in time, myself included. Maybe I should have checked that one before I wrote anything! Oh well.

Though I must confess, that having read a couple of blogs and getting the buzz of seeing a few comments come my way, I can understand why 4,000 people do it at Warwick alone.

So I reckon I might give this thing a go…

Oh and for Ailsa who got excited over the word codswallop, there it is again, just for you!

: 21 Sep 2006 11:19 |  Comments (5) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Does anyone actually read a blog?

What is it about blogs then?

As far as I can see right now, blogs give the average person, like you and me, the opportunity to have ramble on about absolutely anything that takes their fancy – whether it is how often they wash their car to what they think of their local branch of the Monster Raving Loony Party.

Anyone who thinks that free speech is a good idea, which includes most people as well as myself, should be jumping up and down about blogs. A way to express yourself to as wide an audience as is possible through the astounding medium that is the world wide web.

Now I don’t know about anyone else, but I can immediately spot a fundamental problem about blogging. Surely, the purpose of a blog is the same as writing a novel, a letter or even a text message – it only really works if it gets read! There’s not a huge amount of point writing about something that you want people to know about unless there are people out there who are going to read it.

Warwick Blogs points out that it has over 4,000 blogs on its site. There must be hundreds, if not thousands of blogging sites that will have their own thousands of blogs. There are literally millions of blogs out there is the world of cyber space, ranting about the weather, calling for a change in government, declaring that their baby burped for the twenty-third time this week.

Can we really assume that each and every one of those blogs gets read at some point or another?

I decided that such a question really needs to be answered. And what better way to find out than by writing a blog ranting all about it! You have just got to love the irony of it.

So if you have made it this far and effectively read my blog, then it is clear that I am talking absolute codswallop. If you would like to prove that that is the case then leave me a message!

Thanks for reading!

: 20 Sep 2006 23:28 |  Comments (4) |  Close comments |  Report a problem