"Pleased to meet you Mr Ironside"

I have a friend who is obsessed by bus routes, numbers and  timetables and also the Catholic Church. Spending time with them can sometimes feel like being trapped in a 'Rain man / Song of Bernadette' mash-up. Any conversation and I mean any, can quickly be turned around to an in-depth discussion of the local public transport providers and services It's endearing and exhausting in equal measure. Earlier this week, my friend had travelled to the city centre (McGills 950x. Port Glasgow to Buchannan Street. 10 past and 20 to the hour) and was walking along the river. He noticed a large crowd gathered around the entrance to St Andrew's cathedral. He first assumed that this was probably a wedding but, on closer inspection, discovered that it was in fact an event to celebrate Saint Therese of Liseux. My friend makes a quick mental  calculation (ditch the 950x, jump on the subway to Buchannan St and pick up the Dunoon Flyer at 14 minutes past the hour) and decides he can spare...

Do you think that train spotters are born with their compulsion or do they learn it? I'm with Lady Ga Ga on this subject as I have personal experience. Scientist have proved...(can't say that without picturing Dougie Squire's Second Generation wearing lab coats and glasses, dancing on a stage lift at the Talk of The Town in that TV advert for some washing powder or other)..they have proved that young brains, male brains in particular, go through a kind of growth spurt around the ages of 3-5 where, any and all information is sucked up into the cerebral cortex and regurgitated at will. When I was 5, I could name every make and model of car on the road. To be fair, there were probably not that many makes of car on the road to Fleetwood in 1968 but it proves mine and Dougie Squire's theory that young brains are eager to absorb. There was a young lad in my home town of Blackburn who had memorised the entire street map. His father would trundle the boy out to impress his pa...

In Lancashire, rolls are known as 'barm cakes'. A kind of flat floury white roll as big as a toolmaker's hand. The ones with very dark brown undersides are called 'oven bottoms'. The joy of this food begins at the point of sale, as they would normally be purchased at the local bakeries which in Lancashire are called 'confectioners'. Most of these establishments were family run affairs selling bread, pies and cakes. The pies are generally awesome with rich crumbly pastry and generous highly seasoned fillings with cakes of the desiccated coconut and butter cream variety and those individual strawberry tarts with the highly suspicious red jelly. Loaves come in large, medium or Hovis. None of your artisan sourdough nonsense here! Buying it ready-sliced was considered go-ahead. The interior design of these shops is always at least a decade behind. It's the rules and part of the joy to enter a world of shiny brown wood-grain patterned melamine, glass fronted...

I sailed into Whittier on the second cruise ship ever to visit the port. It was the time of year where the sun never really sets and we had to make do with a couple of hours of dusk from around midnight to 1.30 am. The ship docked at around midnight and, while the passengers were mainly in their cabins sleeping off the prime rib and baked Alaska dinner, myself and Brad the Canadian sound operator ventured ashore. The dock consisted of a slab of crumbling concrete and absolutely nothing else. We walked through a gap in the sagging perimeter fence into Main Street which, in fact was the only street. The best way to describe the vista was 'post apocalyptic'. The town was dominated by what looked like a massive soviet era apartment block where, I was to learn later, almost all of the town's 214 population lived. A handful of low level buildings clad in timber and metal sheeting lined the streets, including the fire station which was  a burnt out shell.  The town's arsonist ...