Never again! Never, ever, EVER again am I going to catch the 16:38 Liverpool to Norwich train to get home after work.

Actually, I very seldom do catch any of the Liverpool to Norwich trains. Normally I catch the London train, which has the significant advantage that it departs from Sheffield, so there is no unseemly haste to try and get on, nor any barging about trying to get a seat. However, Sheffield station on Friday was absolute bedlam. There were queues waiting to join the queues waiting for the ticket machines and the even longer queues waiting to go to the ticket offices. So there was no chance of catching the London train.

It didn’t look too bad on the platform for the Norwich train. The problem is that the trains are almost always only 2 carriages long, and they are among the very few trains which stop at Dronfield, so more people catch the commuter trains than otherwise might. On a Friday afternoons, of course, they are extremely crowded. I was among the last to get on and moved across to the opposite door, just to keep out the way. There were three huge suitcases there, which was irritating, but I guess they have to go somewhere. And it was busy, but not unpleasantly so.

Suddenly a whole crowd of people surged on – I presume from further down the platform where there were a lot of people waiting to board. It was such a surge that I nearly got squashed. I would have got squashed, had there not been the three large suitcases providing a buffer between me and the opposite door. We all jiggled around so there was breathing space, and discussed amongst ourselves the lunacy of running a two carriage train when the operators know that it is dangerously over-crowded on Friday afternoons. You not only have the regular commuters, but also the weekly commuters, not to mention the students who tend to go home for the weekends. Plus, of course, Norwich is a holiday destination. Lots of the people who travel on this service do have large pieces of luggage.

But I have to say that it was amongst the very most unpleasant train trips I have ever endured. And I won’t be doing it again. Next time it proves impossible to catch the London train, I shall catch the Plymouth or Nottingham train. They may not start in Sheffield and they may be busy, but at least they have considerably more than two carriages.

Apart from that little excitement, it was a fairly quiet weekend. We did a bit of shopping on Saturday and went back to the Three Horseshoes for lunch (We are planning to go for dinner on the 12th of December with Bea and Steve and took in our menu choices). They are definitely giving the pub up, though I think Margaret and Damien are less sure whether they are doing the right thing than Mike is. I assume they are intending to finish during December – they are still not taking bookings for Christmas Day or for New Years Eve.

Mostly, we ate well over the weekend. We had steak and garlic mushrooms on Saturday evening. We had a slow roasted slab of belly pork for Sunday evening (came from the half pig we bought in the summer. We are now out of small pieces of pig and lamb and only have large slabs left. Better start saving up for more for when the large slabs also run out!) I made a rather nice apple and cinnamon cake. We had rather nice wine. On Sunday we had our weekly gin/vodka and tonic. We sat in the lounge room and read and messed about on the internet. We sat in the dining room and watched telly. Marlo has greeted the reappearance of his radiator hammock with enthusiasm (more so than last year, but I’ve put it on a different radiator and I think it’s more stable).

The only downer over the weekend was The Builder’s tax bill, which lobbed in looking large and scary on Friday. He has definitely decided to sell Oscar. This will (we hope) more than cover the tax bill. But realistically we don’t need two cars any more. And we also can’t afford to run two cars any more, especially when Oscar is hardly ever used.

Came to work in The Vixen this morning. Took me nearly ten minutes to scrape the ice off the windscreen so I could see to drive. Took some time to persuade the door to open too – it was frozen shut. I think it might have been a tad on the chilly side last night.