Friday, October 27, 2006

At last, another post!

It's been a long time since I last posted to this blog, and a lot has been going on in my life ... if you don't know what I'm referring to, you can email me and ask. Suffice to say in this public arena, life is going very well and I'm very happy at the moment :o)

Two posts ago, I was musing that autumn had arrived and as I look out on South Parks road now, I can see that well over half the leaves have fallen from the Lymes , and cycling in this morning was certainly colder than it has been for a long while.

I'm poised to head home this evening, to spend most of Saturday helping my parents re-decorate my old room, and trying to salvage the data from their mal-ware infested computer. One thing I'm particularly looking forward to is trying out my new oyster card on the bus home from the station. I am particularly proud of having bought my oyster card online (I'm not a big buying-things-over-the-internet fan) and having had it speedily delivered in time to try it out this weekend (I was particularly aiming for the weekend after). The main advantage is the huge saving on fares (some are reduced by as much as 50%) but there's also the convenience.

One real niggle, though, is that the suburban train companies haven't really got on the oyster band-waggon, so although I can use it on buses in greater London, getting the train to-and-from town is still going to require me to buy a ticket or travelcard at the station, which given the queues is usually a great big faff; the only way round it being to carry around enough heavy coinage that you can use the self-service machines. I think this is just stupid: if the system can work across the whole tube network it shouldn't take several more years to roll it out over the rail network. But at least most of South West Trains' services run vaguely on time (when there aren't derailments at Waterloo!).