I have exciting news. But I'm not allowed to tell. But if you email me and I know you, I'll tell you what it is. Can't say fairer than that now, can I?

Also, Go out and buy the new Belle and Sebastian CD. Do it now. NOW!

Here's a cool website, showing the tallest buildings in Singapore. I used to work in the Concourse, which is towards the right of the page.
Diagrams - SkyscraperPage.com

Third week in Leeds and the trains are really starting to piss me off now. The minor irritations I mentioned last time have continued, and now include the lights in the train not working and having to change trains at bloody Bradford.

But the worst thing that’s happened happened yesterday evening, when the train was 45 minutes late leaving Leeds. As you can imagine, 45 minutes is something of an achievement when the journey is only 90 minutes anyway.

These things happen, and once in ten days isn’t actually that bad I suppose. But it’s the fact that nobody sees fit to apologise or even explain why the train is late that gets me.

I’m working in Leeds at the moment. It’s about 70miles from where I live, which normally would be a long, but distinctly doable journey in the car. Unfortunately this is England – so I thought that rather than suffer the living hell that is the M62 trans-Pennine motorway, I’d get the train.

Now the trains have a very bad reputation here in the UK. But like the other things that people love to moan about, like the National Health service, the Post Office and the BBC, they’re not actually all that terrible. This is the sixth day I’ve gone to Leeds on this job, and I’ve not really been late once. Plus it’s not too expensive and I can’t really complain.

Except that, like a lot of things in Britain, there’s no attention to detail. Just about every journey I’ve made has had one irritating little thing wrong with it. The train’s been either sweltering or (as with this morning when the temperature was below zero) there’s been no heating at all. The platform’s changed just before the train arrived. A door wasn’t working. The train hasn’t been cleaned. The kind of things that are a bit of a pain in the arse. The thing is, nobody cares.

The railways in the UK were, for some inexplicable reason, privatised about five or six years ago. Unlike anywhere else in the world, a different company is responsible for the track and the trains that run on it. As you can imagine (and as you’d have thought would have been obvious beforehand), that leads to all sorts of problems. If anything goes wrong, it takes the lawyers an age to decide who was responsible, train companies get flak for things that aren’t their fault and so on.

The one good thing that the government has done about this (ignoring the fact they should have renationalised) is making sure that the worst train operators lose their franchise. Which is what’s happened to Arriva Trains Northern, who are the people I travel with to Leeds. They’ll stop operating these trains at the end of the year. Which is probably no bad thing.

Unfortunately, it means that nobody at Arriva Trains bloody Northern gives a toss about the service they’re providing at the moment – and they’re certainly not going to spend any money making it better, are they?

In a nice bit of (admittedly a bit anoraky) irony, GNER, who are the people that operate the service between Leeds and London, recently bought a few spare Eurostar trains. They’re essentially the French TGV, which runs at 300kph all day every day across France. France has a state-owned railway, which according to the prevailing wisdom in the UK should be inefficient, non-customer focused and just horrible. In fact, it’s the best inter-city railway in the world. On GNER’s private railway the Eurostar trains can only go at 200kph. The track’s not up to it.

Actually, there is one thing I need to write about. My parent have sold their house, and they’re moving on Thursday back down to Worcestershire, which is where they both come from. It’s a bit strange for me, because the house they’ve sold is the one I grew up in. And it means I won’t have much call for going to Wigan anymore. Not that I have much regard for Wigan – which is as I have mentioned before a dump, but it’s still a part of me that’s gone forever I suppose, and it’s made me feel a bit strange.

One interesting thing is that I shall be taking their cat down there for them at the weekend. Sensibly they’ve booked him into the cattery for a few days while they move. The thing is, this is a cat that throws up constantly and copiously if you put him in the car for a few minutes – so what it will be like going about 200km on the M6 I don’t know. I shall be opening the windows and buying a new air freshener though, I can tell you. It’ll be good though – because I shall get to see their new house.

Right. I must I must I must do my blog. After a four month hiatus, I think it’s time I caught up.

So… what’s been happening? Well, I still don’t have a permanent job, but I think I may well have by the end of this week. The two jobs in France fell through for different reasons which was annoying, and since then I’ve mostly been freelancing and spending time with my wife Samantha and daughter Isobel, which has been great

I actually think all this has been a bit of a blessing in disguise. After all, it’s probably not very many fathers that get to spend so much time with their children when they’re so tiny – and I’m sure we’ll reap the benefits later on. But having said that, I hope this situation changes. And soon.