Monday, July 13, 2020

Tuesday, July 14th

Time is dragging now as we work through the difficulties of isolating ourselves together with the interminable waiting for the house sale to resolve itself.  We console ourselves with the thought that we would be a lot worse off if we lived in Brazil or USA or even UK.  At least we can still do our own shopping, go for a walk or even have a cup of coffee at a favourite cafe.

We've been watching some shows on TV, with titles like Mighty Trains and Extreme Railways.  There's a bit of heroic talk about how big the trains are and how much load they can carry but, in reality, the programs are set in some of the most exotic locations in the world, so we've become armchair travellers.

Some programs are a bit more mundane than others.  One we saw this week showed the trip on a little 2-carriage train from Inverness to Edinburgh.  I did this trip when I went to the UK but I fell asleep after we left Aviemore, so I have no memory of the places we passed.  It was good to fill the gaps in my recollections.

I was missing one series of Extreme Railways and checked whether our local library might have a DVD of it.  No luck, but there was a book about the whole program so I borrowed it.  It's interesting enough but some nit-picking, pedantic, train-spotting anorak who had borrowed the book previously has gone through and made some alterations and corrections to the text in cheap blue biro. 

In the chapter on Australia where the driver of the Ghan says, "God, you look rough!" the critic has carefully scored out the word 'God'.  In another section, the author  says "the Russian alphabet is different to any language" and the anorak has crossed out 'to' and written 'from'. Maybe he's suffering more from the social distancing than we are.

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