Weekend In York

So as I was saying in a previous post, I spent the weekend in York. York is a bit like my hometown, in that it'd be a much nicer place if they rooted out the few good eggs and shunted the rest of its inhabitants off to some sort of concentration camp. A good proportion of the population are chavs. I went in the local Tesco Express thing - it was small and dirty and was apparently having a no-uniform day. This made me chuckle since one of the staff was wearing this horrible fake-leopard-skin kind of thing and another looked like he'd auditioned for Blazin' Squad (or whatever the modern equivalent of Blazin' Squad is - I don't know what such a thing would be like but you'd probably have to have murdered several old women to get in it, kids today and all that) but failed.

Out of the remaining non-chav population, a further good proportion were irritatingly old. I've got nothing against old people but too many of them and you end up being reminded of your own mortality all the time. Plus they all had a kind of smug look that I didn't like the look of. Maybe I'm just overly judgemental.

So yeah, have those two groups of people put to death and York'd be lovely. The architecture's quite nice. Oh, and there's a weird purple statue thing. Yeah.

York is home to the National Railway Museum, which I obviously went to otherwise I wouldn't be talking about it (there's no point blogging about tourist attractions you haven't been to - down that way madness lies. Can you imagine it? 'Went to York for the weekend. Didn't go to York Castle. Didn't go to the Viking Centre. Didn't go to York Dungeon. Didn't go on the Yorkshire Wheel. What if... what if I never get to visit these places before I die?... All the experiences I'll never have... [cue quiet sobbing into hands]'. Yeah, not pretty, is it?)

Anyway, one of the attractions at the National Railway Museum is part of a bullet train from Japan. You can see it in the picture. You're able to go inside the carriage and you can even sit down in the carriage chairs and watch this little slideshow thing on a screen. Thing is most people in there, and this included me, ended up sat there stuck in a kind of melancholic trance. It was as if everyone in the drab plasticy cabin had forgotten that the train wasn't actually real. All the people were sat there with a look of expectation, as if they were expecting it to set off any minute. But it never did. There seemed to be an element of tragedy about the whole thing really. It's not even as if people were going there to have a sit down, there was seating everywhere.

Speaking of tragedy, there was a little shop dedicated entirely to Thomas the Tank Engine merchandise. Dear me, they've really ruined Thomas the Tank Engine. All of the toys are plasticy and shit compared to the ones I used to have, and the originals books are horribly overpriced. Browsing the wares there was like writing the word 'childhood' in big letters on a piece of paper and then having to watch as a businessman in a suit wrenches the paper away from you and shits all over it, before rubbing the piece of shitty paper in your face. Well... actually it was nothing like that, but you get my point.

I guess the moral of the story is that capitalism is rubbish because the end result of it is a load of chavs (using their consumer power to buy the 'wrong' things), nasty old people (who, in the olden days, would have been dead by now), depressing mass produced trains, and the rape of everything we held dear in our childhoods. Boo capitalism! Boo! Let's all live in fields and beat each other up with sticks. That'll be a better world to live in, right? Right?! No? Oh, alright then, have it your way. Cunt.

[Insert bakery-related title here]

In a fit of absent-mindedness I managed to miss a connecting train yesterday, leaving myself stranded in Worksop for an hour. I ending up walking into the town to get some food. Two things occurred:
1) I realised what a horrible place Worksop was and resolved never to go there again.
2) I took my custom to a Greggs bakery.

Now you wouldn't imagine everyday bakery to be the most exciting of professions. The bakery people put together some stuff, put said stuff in an oven, take said stuff out of oven and then hand it over to people in exchange for money. There might be some occasional excitement, a broken oven perhaps, or a mild burn to the hand, but otherwise you'd imagine the whole process to be a bit boring. Well you'd be wrong.

Apparently Greggs have tried to sex up the traditional bakery. The bakers dash to and fro behind the counter, barking orders at each other. The people at the counter scream at the customers, perhaps trying to raise their voices above the noise of imaginary gunfire and explosions. A women desperately shrieks "two minutes to cornish pasty!" as if this were some kind of absurd bakery-based version of 24, and said cornish pasty were about to appear in the sky above the town and raze it to the ground. It's quite stressful if all you want is a sandwich.

Oh, I almost forgot, something else happened yesterday: I was on the train, reading a magazine, when a guy on the other side of the carriage answered his phone. "Oh, I'm having such a shit day," he said to the other person, "the dog literally ate all my money." I wanted to hear more but unfortunately we'd reached a station and he got off.

Additionally I came upon this video the other day:
YouTube link

At the time it was the most incredible thing I'd seen all day, although I should point out that on this particular day I never left the house, and thus my opportunity for sighting incredible things was somewhat reduced.