Year: 2014

Taking the Megabusplus to London

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Leading on from yesterday’s post about our trip to London, here’s a little more about the Megabusplus service that we used. I’ve taken it before, when I needed to get down to London to fly to France for a holiday in 2009, but this was Christine’s first time, and also my first return trip.

Like the regular Megabus, it is run by the Stagecoach Group, and takes advantage of the fact that Stagecoach is also the current East Midlands Trains franchisee. So rather than getting a coach all of the way, time-wise roughly half of the journey is by coach and the reminder by train, with the switchover talking place at East Midlands Parkway railway station.

This is significantly quicker than taking a coach all of the way. Taking Halifax-London as the example, to do this by coach takes almost 6 hours in total. Megabusplus knocks this down to a little over four hours. You also arrive into London St Pancras railway station, which has much better onward transport links, than Victoria coach station. And I find that I can’t read on coaches (I get travel sick), so for me there’s less ‘downtime’ than a regular coach.

However, compared with a direct train Megabusplus is still slower – the 08:06 Grand Central train from Halifax left a few minutes after our coach and would have reached King’s Cross a full hour before we did.

The prices are about the same as regular Megabus, with fares starting at £1 one way, plus a 50p booking fee. I was too late to get it this cheap, but it was still much more affordable than the train at the last minute. Your ‘ticket’ is the reference number that you get by email when you pay – most people print this out but you can just show it on your phone to the driver, like I did.

The Halifax service actually starts from Bradford, then calls at Halifax and onto Huddersfield, before running direct to East Midlands Parkway. I say ‘direct’ – Huddersfield’s links with the southbound M1 are pretty poor and so we went on some very narrow and windy roads to get there. On the way down we briefly called at a service station, but this was only to change to a different driver and customers were not allowed to alight. East Midlands Parkway is effectively a service station though, with a café, toilets and a vending machine.

The Megabusplus coaches themselves are reasonably bog-standard – single-decker, space below for luggage, and a toilet. There’s no on-board catering, and seats aren’t allocated. Most of the people on the two journeys we made were travelling on their own, so if the coach is busy you’ll have to sit next to a stranger. Pre-booking is mandatory – there’s no facility to turn up and pay, although you can book up until the night before, as I did. On the other hand, this means that if everyone arrives early, then the coach can leave early – as happened on the return leg.

I would definitely recommend bringing a music player. Unlike trains, there’s no quiet coach, or any way of moving to another carriage if it’s too noisy. On the way back there was a very restless baby, so I was glad I had some music to listen to.

If you need to get to London cheaply, and don’t want it to take all day, then Megabusplus is worth it. But if you’re able to get a cheaper train ticket, then the train is a quicker and better experience.

27 hours in London

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St Pauls Cathedral

As I alluded to on Friday, I took Christine away on a trip which I planned at the last minute on Thursday night. We’d both booked Friday off work, but had nothing planned for Friday or Saturday, and couldn’t think of anything particularly interesting to do. So, whilst Christine was out on Thursday night, I set about planning something.

Though London has a reputation for being expensive, getting there at the last minute seemed to be cheaper than many other places. A backup plan had been to go to Birmingham, to visit Cadbury World, but getting there by train would have cost a fortune as all of the cheap seats had gone.

We managed to get tickets on Megabusplus, leaving from Halifax, for a reasonable price. Unlike the regular Megabus, you only travel by coach half-way, and then pick up a train for the rest of the journey. I’ll write more about this later this week; whilst it’s slower than a direct train, it’s faster than going the whole way by coach. Leaving Halifax just before 8am, we arrived at St Pancras at around 12:30pm.

Lunch was at Carluccio’s in St Pancras – we decided to have a big meal at lunchtime, as trying to find anywhere for an affordable evening meal on Valentines Day is likely to be an exercise in futility. And then we headed on to the Museum of London, to see the Cheapside Horde. We went to the MoL in September but the Cheapside Horde exhibition hadn’t opened yet, so this was our opportunity to see it.

Afterwards we headed over to Chinatown for some dim sum – despite the large lunch we were peckish – and had a mosey around the shops. Visiting just after Chinese New Year meant the area was covered in Chinese lanterns – one of which made its presence known by landing on my head in the strong winds. We also nipped into one of the theatre ticket agents at Leicester Square, to get some of the last cheap tickets for that evening’s showing of We Will Rock You.

Our hotel was in Croydon, south London, which took about an hour to get to after the show finished, and involved a tube and two trains. We would have stayed more centrally but were limited by what was available on our budget. Still, the hotel was fine, and breakfast was included.

After breakfast we caught up with friends at the café at Tate Modern, then headed back to St Pancras for lunch. Then it was a train, a coach and then a bus back home – and we were back home for 8pm.

Considering it was planned at the last minute, and on a shoestring budget, we managed to do a lot in two days. And, most importantly, we had a good time. Whilst I can’t see us doing this every year for Valentines Day, it was good to get away, even if just for one night.

Valentines Day

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Valentines Cards

Valentines Day

Today is Valentines Day. It’s the ninth consecutive one that I’ve had someone to ‘celebrate’ it with, but the first time that I’ve been able to celebrate it with someone that I’m married to.

By the time you read this, I will be whisking my dear wife Christine away on an impromptu trip away. It was literally planned last night, about an hour before I wrote this blog post. It’s not a particularly romantic trip – we’re going on the Megabus – and it’s only for one night. Oh, and we’d have got up at 6:15am to catch it as well.

So, Happy Valentines Day Christine. Hope you enjoyed the surprise!

Sunday afternoon at the movies

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On Sunday we had an afternoon at the cinema. We caught Frozen before it closes, and the previews of The Lego Movie.

Frozen

Frozen has been out for a while now in the UK, but Sunday was our first chance to watch it. We didn’t go to an earlier ‘sing-along’ screening but went to one mid-afternoon. Though it was in one of the smaller screens at our local multiplex, about half the seats were taken, and mostly by families with young girls. Because it’s a Disney princess film, of course.

I’ve been aware of its most popular song, Let It Go, for some time – as well as its covers and its parodies. It’s a great song but really you need to watch the film as well to make full sense of the lyrics. In particular, Let It Go isn’t sung by the main protagonist, as you might have expected.

Thankfully, the film really is worth watching – we both really enjoyed it. Yes, okay, it’s a kids film, but the characters are really relatable. Plus, there’s a surprising amount of innuendo to keep adults entertained; I had to tell Christine off for laughing out loud when Anna asks Kristoff to, ahem, ‘take her up the north mountain’. Fnar fnar.

Oh, and apparently it’s worth staying to the end of the credits. We found this out after leaving the cinema. Doh.

The Lego Movie

Conversely, we watched The Lego Movie before its official release in the UK, which is on Friday. I can foresee some ‘interesting’ Valentines Day visits to the cinema.

I think when The Lego Movie was first announced, a lot of people were expecting it to be rubbish. To be fair, there haven’t been many good film adaptations of toys or computer games. Thankfully, The Lego Movie breaks the mould and is actually good – funny, touching, and with an actual plot! For people like me who grew up with Lego in the 1980s, there’s a lot to like, and although it is computer animated it feels like it could have been made using actual Lego and stop-motion animation. Things like the references to Octan, the fictional petrol brand used by Lego, and the various mini-figures that have been released over the years.

There are, however, two scenes that stop the film from being near perfect. I don’t want to post spoilers, so read what Dave2 said about it. Obviously, anything below the spoiler warning on that blog post is a spoiler, so if you haven’t seen it, be careful.

I think this is the first time in many years that I’ve seen two films in a day – the last time was probably 2007ish. Generally, going to the cinema is something we do every other month, even though we now have a Vue cinema close by in Halifax and don’t have to go all the way to Bradford. Sadly it’s quite an expensive treat – tickets for the Lego Movie were over £10 each as we ended up seeing it in 3D, and Sunday is peak time. Nowadays we’re not so likely to go to the cinema unless it’s a film that we definitely want to see on a big screen, as even buying the DVD is often cheaper now, nevermind renting it from Lovefilm.

Gin

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Christine, my dear wife of nine months, has recently discovered that she likes gin. I’m sure most of you have heard of gin, but essentially it’s an alcoholic spirit, usually made with juniper berries, that is commonly consumed with tonic water. It can also be served with lime, bergamots or cucumber.

Gin used to be incredibly popular in England, in a period during the early 18th century called the ‘Gin Craze‘. Back then, even the average person would consume 10 litres of gin each year – roughly equivalent to six single gin and tonics a week. This was partly due to the fact that gin was safer than water, which was frequently contaminated. It had a renaissance in the 19th century, when ‘Gin palaces‘ started appearing, but nowadays it isn’t so popular.

Certainly if you were to go to a typical pub today, your choice of gin would be rather limited. In Britain, Gordon’s is the biggest selling brand, and frequently is the only one available. Though I don’t really like gin myself, Christine informs me that Gordon’s isn’t particularly good – i.e. Gordon’s is to gin like Foster’s is to beer.

A number of places will also sell Bombay Sapphire, which is distilled in England despite its name. Better pubs may have Hendricks or Beefeater. But if you’re lucky enough to happen across a bar with a bigger range of gin brands, then there are a large number to choose from. In fact, if you have around £100 to spare, then you can buy the Ginvent Calendar – an advent calendar with 24 drams of gin, each one a different variety. My cousin has bought this for two years’ running.

For those with a passion for gin, then there are gin festivals where you can try different varieties – like at a beer festival. Leeds played host to one last year, and the Manchester Gin Festival is on the 5th April.

I’m afraid I find gin a bit too bitter, although I recently tried Hendricks and tonic and it was quite nice. And I quite like damson gin. But unlike my wife, I can’t see myself drinking it regularly.

Doctor Who & Me at the National Media Museum

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Daleks

Yesterday Christine and I visited the Doctor Who and Me exhibition at the National Media Museum in Bradford. The exhibition honours Doctor Who’s 50th anniversary, which was in November last year. We’d been meaning to go for a while, and having realised that this is the final week that the exhibition is running we squeezed a visit in yesterday. It was also our first visit since the museum was saved from closure last year.

The exhibition is less about the show itself, and more about the relationship between the show and its fans. There are many quotes from fans, stating what the show means to them, and various objects that people have made or collected which are on display. In fact, apart from one Dalek replica, pictured above, all of the items on show have been donated by fans and are not from the museum’s own collection.

There are the usual official action figures, games, posters, annuals and video cases there, but there are also a great many items made by Whovians themselves. Some of these are drawings and paintings, knitted monsters, or hand-made TARDISes. And they all span the fifty years that Doctor Who has been on air.

It’s not a big exhibition and you can see everything within the half hour. Sadly it finishes on Sunday, so you’ll need to get there quickly if you want to see it. Like the rest of the museum, entry is free, but donations are welcome.

I’ve put some photos from my visit on Flickr. They’re all taken on my iPhone – although I did bring my Canon DSLR with me, I didn’t realise until I got there that the battery was flat.

Bradford’s Westfield shopping centre is finally happening

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Work resumes on the Westfield Bradford development in January 2014

I expect the people of Bradford breathed a sigh of relief when workmen finally returned to the site of Westfield Bradford earlier this month. This will see a new Westfield shopping centre being built, which will be the only one in the north of England (we’ll place Derby in the Midlands).

The shopping centre is due to open in time for Christmas 2015, by which point it will have been almost 12 years in the making. Demolition of the existing buildings on the site started in 2004, and was done by 2006. There followed many months where the remaining rubble was piled up and no activity, but around 2007 preparatory works began to dig a large hole for the foundations.

But after the foundations were constructed, nothing. The credit crunch, and then the recession, put paid to any further progress. The whole project was effectively mothballed. The situation was so bad that in 2010, the local council, with a financial contribution from Westfield, turned part of the park into a ‘temporary urban garden’ as there was no prospect of work starting any time soon.

All this time, the rest of Bradford’s city centre suffered. The recession didn’t help, taking with it a number of shops, but the range and quality of shops in Bradford has declined over the past 10 years. There are a large number of vacant units, and many of those that are occupied are by pop-up shops on short-term lets. There’s also been an explosion of pawnbrokers, payday loan shops and betting shops.

Last year, Trinity Leeds opened in Leeds. Though it too was mothballed for some time during its construction, it’s now open and successful, and has no doubt made Leeds an even more compelling retail destination than Bradford.

Whilst I really hope the opening of Westfield Bradford will be a turning point, and help Bradford get back on its feet, I can’t help but feel that it’s perhaps too late. What if the decline of Bradford’s city centre is actually terminal?

I’m also concerned that Westfield will kill off other parts of the city. Bradford’s existing shopping centre, the Kirkgate Centre, has generally coped well over the years, but has lost a couple of major tenants as some of the larger chain stores went under. Now it too has more than its fair share of poorer quality stores, including a recently extended Poundland. It’s also home to River Island and WHSmith, two confirmed tenants of the new Westfield centre. Marks and Spencer is opposite the Kirkgate Centre and will be an ‘anchor’ tenant in Westfield.

Still, overall I hope that Westdfield is a success. It’s a shame that a once prosperous city like Bradford has fallen so far. Not only has it dropped behind Leeds, but the smaller nearby towns of Halifax and Huddersfield, both of which have (in my opinion) a better range of shops.

Manchester Beer Festival 2014

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Manchester Velodrome Panorama

On Saturday we went to the Manchester Beer & Cider Festival, one of the largest beer festivals in the UK. It took place at the Manchester Velodrome, which is part of the National Cycling Centre and was a major venue for the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester.

The beer festival was the largest I’ve been to. Admittedly I haven’t been to many beer festivals, but with 300 beers and 75 ciders and perries (pear ciders), this was an order of magnitude bigger than anything I’d seen before.

Except, we went on Saturday, which was the last day – the festival ran over four days. The previous three days had been ‘unexpectedly popular’ and so by the time we arrived, around three quarters of the beers had been drunk and were sold out. Still, with 70-odd beers to try, there was still much to drink. At least until 3:30pm, by which point all of the beer had been consumed, leaving just a handful of ciders and perries to try in the half hour before time was called at 4pm – three hours earlier than planned.

Still, it was a really good day out, and it was good to visit the Velodrome, which will be 20 years old this year. Admittedly it wasn’t the best venue for a beer festival – the main festival floor with the bars was in the centre of the track, and most of the seating was around the edges of the track. To get between the two, you were required to descend three flights of stairs, pass through a subway and then ascend another flight of stairs. But it offered some great panoramic photo opportunities, as shown above.

I think it will be a while before I visit such a big beer festival again. The ‘big daddy’ of beer festivals is The Great British Beer Festival at Olympia in London, which usually coincides with a very busy period at work, although it’s earlier this year so perhaps not.

We also popped in to The Moon Under Water pub in Manchester, a Wetherspoons pub which holds the Guinness World Record for being Britain’s’ biggest pub (and rumoured to be the biggest in Europe). It can hold 1700 people and is even important enough to have its own Wikipedia article, which explains the origin of its name.

Exploring a new realm

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A screenshot of Hexorious, my World of Warcraft character

Around two weeks ago, I finally lost patience with the queues for the World of Warcraft realm that my main characters were on, and took advantage of an offer of free transfers to another realm.

Originally, when I started playing World of Warcraft almost eight years ago, I was on a ‘medium’ populated realm. This was where my then-girlfriend Hari and her friends had her characters, so I joined her there.

Fast forward a few years, and following the release of the Cataclysm expansion my friends all jumped ship, to a high population realm. I followed a few weeks later, firstly with my main character and then one of my ‘alt’ characters, paying £15 each time for the privilege.

Being on a high population realm has its benefits – a very active economy on the auction house, lots of guilds to join, and plenty of people to group with. But recently the population has continued to grow, to the point where the realm servers were running at capacity. This means that players have to queue until enough other players log off, and at peak times on week-nights these queues could be as long as half an hour.

If I was able to get home from work early then this wouldn’t be such a problem, but I don’t get home until the start of the peak period. Consequently, it just wasn’t possible to quickly log in for a few minutes on an evening – I’d have to wait in a queue, and then once connected, not log out because I wouldn’t be able to get back on again.

And, by now, most of my friends who I used to play with have either quit the game, or gone to other realms. So, all in all, I had no real reason to stay on that realm.

Thankfully, Blizzard Entertainment are all too aware of the issue with the realm (and others in the same situation). The realm has been ‘locked’, to restrict the creation or paid transfer of characters, and they are offering free character transfers to other realms. I decided to take advantage of the latter; by now I had three characters on this realm (plus a low level bank character) and I didn’t want to spend £15 per character to go somewhere with greener grass.

There are some restrictions for free character transfers. First of all, they can only be between selected realms, so I had to choose one of four destination realms. WarcraftRealms.com is useful for population estimates, and so I picked the one with the highest population and best Horde to Alliance ratio. Since I would be moving to another Player-versus-Player (PvP) realm, I didn’t want to choose one where Horde characters significantly outnumbered Alliance – I’m a big, wet, useless scaredycat when it comes to PvP.

There are also eligibility criteria for your characters. There were three main characters I wanted to transfer: my paladin (my main since 2006), my priest, and a rogue which I’ve recently levelled up. These were all fine – I just had to ensure that they had empty mailboxes and no outstanding auctions. But I also had a ‘bank’ character which I used for storage. This character was too low level – characters need to be level 10 to be eligible, and my bank was level 1. So, I spent about half an hour levelling it up.

The next issue was that this character was also a guild leader, with a guild bank full of various crafting materials. Guild leader characters are ineligible for transfer; as this character was the only one in the guild, I made the decision to sell just about everything in the guild bank on the auction house. This took a few weeks, but eventually just about everything sold and it netted me a few thousand gold in the process. I then had to disband the guild.

Finally, there are also limits on how much gold characters can take with them when transferred, which vary by level. My three high level characters were fine, and well within the limits, but my bank character had way too much. Level 10 characters should have less than 300 gold; mine had more than ten times that, thanks to all of the auctions. Of course, this was easily solved by distributing the money amongst my other characters before I transferred them.

So, I made the transfer, and have been playing on my new realm ever since. I’m pleased that I don’t have to queue any more, and I’ve been able to find a reasonably nice and active guild to be a member of. It hasn’t cost me anything, and means I can play the game more often and get more value out of my £9 per month subscription. Indeed, I would not have bothered transferring my bank character had the transfer not been free. Generally speaking the transfers only take around an hour to complete, so there’s not much downtime away from the game either.

If you play on a realm with queues and are offered a free transfer, then unless you have ties with people on that realm, I’d definitely recommend moving. After all, you’re paying for the game – so why not make the most of it?

Kickstarted: reviewing the projects I’ve backed on Kickstarter

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Screenshot of my Backer History page on Kickstarter

Over the past two years, I’ve backed 12 projects on Kickstarter. All 12 have reached their funding goals, and I’ve paid out approximately £40 in pledges in total.

Some of those projects have now produced the products that they were raising money for, so I’ve decided to look back at each one, over the next few months. I’ll be writing about why I backed the project, and what I got out of it.

I’ll post the first entry next Sunday, and then a new one every Sunday until I’ve reviewed all of the projects I’ve backed. Obviously, if I back any additional projects in the next three months, I’ll tag those on the end too.