Write Like An Egyptian

I was on toddler-minding duty today as my wife was assisting with a trip at daughter’s school so I pandered to Number-One-Son’s train obsession with a trip to Southport on the train, topped of with a visit to the model village and railway. We were unable to get him to sleep last night until he had watched all of Victoria Wood’s Great Railway Journey around Britain (courtesy of BBC 4). His shivers of excitement at any train are quite extraordinary, and watching the one we could not board with our cheap-day return, he giggled and shook until I though he would break out of the buggy straps. As you can see from the picture, I took in the bust of Dan Dare as well, which may give the impression that I was adjusting his jacket.

I caved in and bought a second copy of the new-look Guardian (the guardian), which the newsagents seem to be calling the Berliner in place of its real name. This was obviously a shallow design-led purchase rather than for any reason related to the content, a fact made clear in Private Eye this fortnight; there have been many lines written about the new format (mostly self-referential) but nothing about whether the writing is any different. But I am shallow and weak and just a tiny part of the blip in sales figures. Of course, we’ll have to get a Saturday edition tomorrow just to see what they’ve done to that. Back to the online edition next week: that’s exactly the same.

After the powerful and totally absorbing programmes that went to make up Coast, Nicholas Crane is straight back on the screen with Mapman, where he can demonstrate how he could also be called Madman. His attempt to traverse the dark heart of the Lake District using a century-old map and a seventy-year-old bike was folly for most people though I have to agree with the reply to a letter questioning the wisdom of his travels that he is probably the only person who should attempt this sort of thing. Anyway, he always had the crew, the mobile phone and the GPS to fall back on should he fall back on the track. This week’s programme was about a sixteenth-century map of Sutherland and points North. It started at Loch Maree, which we know from a trip there, in the same wintry weather that plagued our hero. This is a place and time to sit inside and listen to the surf and hail outside, not go yomping across the Scottish para-permafrost in search of lost mountain passes, last traversed by a hairy* clansman who took a wrong turn at Ullapool in 1532. Anyway, Mapman got all the disparate groups at work talking about the same thing at the same time, a programme to make you tingle with delight that the BBC can produce both this and Dick and Dom in da Bungalow.

I can safely end with Och A Vay today.

* He would have been hairy; it’s a fact so get over it! Of course he might have had alopecia. **

** My wife made me put that as she might be descended from that very man. ***

*** She doesn’t have alopecia by the way.