train delayed - taxi involved!

(a new one on me, by way of reasons for train delays...)

My 12:15 train from Leicester was delay 100 minutes due to a 'police incident' at Birmingham (which turned out to be as below).

A spare train was parked up after about 30 mins while announcements explained the train crew were on their way from Birmingham by taxi.

Bomb alert in Birmingham after man found wrapped in canisters

Gov borrowing

The Chancellor announced in his Budget today:

• Public borrowing to increase to £175bn this year
• Borrowing levels to rise by £173bn, £140bn, £118bn and £97bn in years after

Boggling quantities and troubling thinking about the taxation (or spending cuts) needed to replay this lot.

(BBC at-a-glance)

"Let's not get too highbrow"

the top journalistic question du jour?

Let's not get too highbrow

BBC/WBD book list

This list is doing the round of blogs/Facebook, having originated with the BBC/World Book Day. I don't think much of it - so many great items omitted, and there are duplicates (poor editing) and there's too much bias towards recent stuff (always difficult to judge its classic-ness)

[r] - read
[s] - seen (TV/film/play)
[x] - avoiding (I have good reason to think I'll hate it)

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen [x]
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien [s]
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte [x]
4. The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling [s]
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee [s]
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte [x]
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell [r]
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman [s]
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens [s]
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare [x]
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier [s]
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot [x]
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell [s]
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald [s]
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens [s]
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [x]
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams [r] [s]
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll [r] [s]
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame [r] [s]
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens [s]
33. Chronicles of Narnia [r] [s]
34. Emma - Jane Austen [x]
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen [x]
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis [r] [s]
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres [x]
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne [r] [s]
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell [r] [s]
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown [s]
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins [r] [s]
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding [r]
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan [s]
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert [s]
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons [s]
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen [x]
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley [r]
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck [x]
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov [s]
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold [x]
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas [s]
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac [x]
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding [s]
69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie [x]
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville [x]
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens [r] [s]
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker [s]
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson [r] [s]
75. Ulysses - James Joyce [x]
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath [x]
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome [r]
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens [r] [s]
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker [x]
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle [r] [s]
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery [r]
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams [r] [s]
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas [s]
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare [x]
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Gt St Marys bells being craned out

I'd read that the bells were to be replaced but by the double chance of being on the way to the Arts Theatre at the right time and having my camera with me, I took these...

Pics - stills & movies

Great St Mary’s is ringing in the changes

Alumni article and follow-up about the new bells