At 11.30am today I set off from home for Manchester, a journey that should have taken around 3 hours and 20 minutes including an hour long connection.
At 4.30pm I arrived at Birmingham which is 90 miles south of Manchester and not even on the same railway line. The cause? Wind has wrecked havoc across England today causing severe disruption to the transportation network, damage to several train stations and seven deaths.
I never did make it to the BBC Manchester blogging workshop Richard Fair and I had organised for this evening but at around 6.30pm I did manage to find a train – the first and only one I’d heard announced in the two hours I spent at Birmingham New Street station – heading south.
My apologies to anyone who went along to the Blogging workshop and were disappointed that I couldn’t make it. I really wanted to be there and had all sorts of great screenshots, websites, sample blogs and other stuff to show you. Hopefully we can do it again very soon.
Some of my photos have been used by BBC Birmingham and I also found myself being interviewed for use online and on Radio WM as I stood and waited for a train back home.
Update: I arrived home at about 21.45. Richard Fair has posted about the blogging workshop that I missed and I’ve uploaded a podcast I made on the train towards the end of my hellish journey to nowhere.
Hi Robin
I couldn’t even get to the BBC event from about 10 miles south of Manchester.
If we are going to have more crazy weather thanks to this global warming stuff, then the UK better work out how to handle it better.
Ah well, already looking forward to Manchester BBC Blog workshop 2.0 ;-)
All the best
Craig
I had almost exactly the same journey in totally clement weather once. I feel your pain.
Hi Craig – I’m hoping we can get a date pinned down for sometime in the next two weeks to have the session that was originally planned. It does sound like the few people who could make it last night and Richard Fair had a nice evening anyway.
Alan – Hi! I wondered where you’d got to. It would seem that, yesterday at least, the answer to that question is a resounding nowhere. Drop by and say hello sometime if you’re ever in West London.