Janet is walking well – today was a long day, almost all of it on a canal towpath. In my shuttling job, I met the West Coast Mainline unexpectedly, not having looked at the map thoroughly.
Even more unexpected was my first sight of a shiny new train due to be introduced to the Huddersfield transpennine services. It was running up and down the line for practice. I had been hoping to see these trains working through Huddersfield before I left the town, but because of a cock-up over the brakes*, that was not to be. But now, I have seen the promised train. I even took a photo of a twig with a blur representing the train behind it.
As I walked back towards Janet, I saw this written on the side of a bridge: “repent”. I wished the writer had been more specific. Repent of what? John the Baptist and Jesus both urged people to repent. Sometimes people asked the same question – repent of what? What must I change in my life? And Jesus (and for all I know, the Baptist too) would sometimes answer. One day I’m going to trawl through the gospel stories of incidents like this, but in the meantime, working from memory of stuff to repent of, I can recall nothing about homosexuality, and a lot about clinging to wealth. BTW, when I read anyone talking about an “adulterous generation” in the Bible, I read it as about cheating on God, not on one’s spouse.
*This is my theory about the brakes. As the train slows, the friction brakes on the whole train have to progressively take over from the electrical brakes on the locomotive. The characteristics of these braking systems have to be matched. My theory is that someone in the UK said to the manufacturers in Spain, we want the train brakes to be of such and such a strength, meaning “for the whole train” and the people at CAF in Spain took that to be “per carriage”, meaning the the friction brakes were dramatically too strong. Idle speculation of course, but maybe that’s what retirement is going to be like.
Anyway, boats on a canal are much slower than trains, and they have a charm of their own. But I imagine there’s a lot to worry about, like leaks.