Neil Turner

Posts that were elsewhere and are now here

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Since I started blogging, almost everything that I have written has been posted on here. But not absolutely everything; I occasionally wrote some blog posts and longform writing elsewhere. However, I’ve decided that I want to consolidate my previous writing here, and so there are some new ‘old’ blog posts available.

Medium

Over the years, I experimented with posting long-form pieces on my Medium account. This was primarily to see if I could reach a new audience, and also to see if I could get some money from Medium’s Partner Programme. Suffice to say, the most I ever made in a month was $1.14, and I haven’t earned anything in over two years, so I’ve republished everything here. It also helps to partially fill in the gap when I wasn’t blogging regularly between 2018 and 2022:

Stupid Evil Bastard

From time to time, I contributed guest posts to a blog called Stupid Evil Bastard, run by Les Jenkins. It was mainly focussed on atheism; back then, I identified more as a ‘capital A’ Atheist, rather than the more lowercase atheist that I identify as now. As such, some of these posts are more critical of religion than I would be now, and there’s a couple of posts I chose not to re-instate as it doesn’t reflect the views I presently hold.

Les sadly passed away in 2022, after being diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. His blog is no longer online, but you can read his final blog post and a tribute from his son on the Web Archive which thankfully preserved these entries. It also preserved my guest posts, and seeing as they’re no longer online otherwise, here they are:

V&A Cast Courts and Design Gallery

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A photo of the Cast Court at the V&A

This is the fourth of my blog posts about last month’s trip to London. After visiting the Natural History Museum, we walked across the road to the V&A, where we visited the Cast Courts and the Design 1900-Now Gallery.

As I mentioned in my write-up of Banksy: Limitless, I’m not massively in to art, and so most of what the V&A offers isn’t of interest to me. Christine likes it though, and she has visited the V&A more often than I have. This time, she insisted on taking me to the Cast Courts on the ground floor.

Cast Courts

These three rooms are huge, extending to the full 25 metre height of the building. Their size is by necessity, as they contain some of the largest objects in the V&A’s collection.

As the name ‘cast’ suggests, these are plaster casts of various famous artefacts that exist elsewhere. There’s a cast of Michaelangelo’s David, for example, complete with a plaster fig leaf that was put over his manly bits when Queen Victoria visited. By far the biggest is a cast of Trajan’s Column, which is so big that it appears in two pieces. The cast courts were built as part of the original museum in the 1870s, and are now rather tightly packed with various pieces.

They’re impressive spaces, and it would be hard not to be wowed when walking in to them for the first time.

A photo of an Apple II computer and disk drive on display at the V&A

Design 1900-now

Whilst art may not be my thing, design and architecture are. So we went upstairs to the Design 1900-now gallery, which features 250 objects that show how design has changed over the past 126 years.

As well as furniture (including a standing lamp designed by Salvador Dali), there’s also technology here. There were two Apple computers on show; an Apple II, and a much newer MacBook that had been deliberately disassembled as it contained documents from Edward Snowden. There are also examples of objects that have been recently acquired, such as a Lababu.

The information included with each object is concise but thorough, but by virtue of being in central London, the limited space means that many objects are not on show here. Indeed, V&A has over a million objects in its collection, and has recently opened the V&A East Storehouse in Hackney Wick to allow visitors access to more of its objects. There’s also the Young V&A in Bethnal Green, which we visited in 2024.

Accessibility

Entry to the museum is free, but like most free museums, some special exhibitions require paid-for tickets. The main entrances are step-free, but not the entrance from the Museum tunnel that links to South Kensington tube station which is the nearest. Knightsbridge is the nearest step free tube station.

There is step-free access to all parts of the museum, but as it’s an old building that has been added to over time, step-free routes may take longer than some more direct ones. Disabled toilets are available, but for a Changing Places toilet, you’ll need to go across the road to the Science Museum.

App review: Octo-Aid

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A screenshot of the Octo-Aid app

If you’re an Octopus Energy customer, then you should consider downloading Octo-Aid. It’s a smartphone app that links to your Octopus Energy account, and analyses the data from your meters to give you insights.

To use it, you need to:

  • be an Octopus Energy customer
  • have a working smart meter

I downloaded Octo-Aid ages ago, but as our electric smart meter stopped working last year, I’ve had to wait until it was fixed in January to give the app a proper review. Happily, this coincided with a re-design of the app, which now looks more like a standard iOS app. Before, it looked like a rather quick port from another platform – even though it’s iOS only. For Android users, there’s a different but unrelated app called OctoTracker.

Linking your Octopus account to Octo-Aid

To access your data, you’ll need your Octopus Energy API key. You can get this here; I’d suggest saving it somewhere as you may need it for other things. For example, I use mine with the SolaX app, and for the Octopus Energy Home Assistant integration. So, I have it saved in 1Password, alongside my Octopus Energy account information.

You can only have one API key per account, and once it’s generated, Octopus won’t show you the full key again. If you don’t have it saved somewhere, you’ll need to regenerate it and then re-link any services to your account.

Once you’ve copied and pasted your API key into Octo-Aid, it’ll start downloading your data. This may take a couple of minutes if you’re running Octo-Aid for the first time, as it’ll download a lot of historical data. In future, it should open more quickly. Whilst you wait, Octo-Aid will show you a little cephalopod-themed joke.

Data analytics

So what can Octo-Aid tell you about your energy usage? Well, it can compare your usage with previous days, weeks and months, and whether you’re using more or less. It can also give you a forecast of how much you may use for the rest of the month. There’s also an estimate of your home’s ‘base load’ – how much power your always-on devices need. These are things like your fridge and freezer, or devices that have a standby mode. Because Octo-Aid has access to your tariff information, it’ll also tell you how much this is costing you.

If you have some way of exporting electricity, such as solar panels, a battery or a wind turbine, then Octo-Aid will also display this data and include it in its cost calculations.

If you’re lucky enough to have an Octopus Home Mini, then this data will be in almost real-time for your electricity meter, and on a half hour delay for gas. We don’t have one yet (I’ve signed up for the waiting list but not heard anything) and so our data for the previous day normally appears around lunchtime.

Tariff comparisons

A really useful feature of Octo-Aid is to be able to compare Octopus Energy’s tariffs, based on your actual usage data. Octopus has a wider range of more advanced tariffs than its rivals, including its Tracker and Agile tariffs where electricity costs can vary daily or half-hourly respectively. It also offers specialist electric vehicle charging tariffs that can integrate with your home charger, if you drive a supported vehicle and have a supported charger installed. In our case, our car is supported, but our charger isn’t yet.

Octo-Aid was able to tell us that we’re on the best gas and export tariffs, but that Octopus Intelligent Go would be cheaper for us for electricity. Unfortunately, this is one that requires a compatible charger, and so I’m on a waiting list for that too. With energy prices likely to shoot up soon, and the withdrawal of many fixed tariffs last month, it’s worth using Octo-Aid to see if another tariff would be cheaper.

Budgets

There’s also a budgets tab in Octo-Aid, where you can set maximum monthly spends. You can set these yourself, or let Octo-Aid suggest values for you. You can then track how your energy usage compares to the budget. There’s some nice graphs, which overlay your current usage with the previous month. As we’re in spring, and it’s (mostly) getting warmer and sunnier, we’re obviously using a bit less.

Other tools in Octo-Aid

Octo-Aid includes an electric vehicle charge planner. You’ll need to tell it your car’s charge rate and maximum battery capacity, and then it’ll tell you when it will be cheapest to charge. You can even tell Octo-Aid to pop up a reminder notification when it’s time to start charging.

We’re on a fixed tariff, and so the cost doesn’t really vary for us unless it’s really sunny. But if you’re on one of Octopus Energy’s time of use or electric vehicle tariffs, then this is potentially quite useful.

Overall, it’s a handy little app, and it’s free to download and use. If you’re not already an Octopus Energy customer, here’s my referral link to join – we’ve been with them since 2023 and they’ve been better than any other provider that we’ve used. The referral link gives you £50 off once you’ve paid your first bill by direct debit, and I’ll get the same. That being said, Octopus has almost 25% market share in the UK now (not bad for a 10 year old company) so I’d be surprised if many of you reading this aren’t already customers.

Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2025

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Outside the Natural History Museum which hosts the Wildlife Photographer of the Year award.

This is the third of my blog posts about last month’s trip to London. Following our visit to Banksy: Limitless in the morning, and a bit of lunch, we strolled around to the Natural History Museum for their Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition.

The exhibition displays the top 100 entries for the competition. The gallery is dimly lit, with all of the photographs displayed in lightboxes to make them really stand out. They’re split by category, and show the winning entry in each category alongside those highly commended by the judges. Each photograph also has a bit of blurb about where it was taken, and the lengths that the photographer took to get the shot. In some cases, these photographs took weeks or even months of planning. You also get to see which model of camera was used, the lenses and camera settings used to take the photograph.

The two winners of Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2025 were announced in October, a couple of days before the exhibition opened. There’s an overall winner, and a separate winner for under-18s. Both winning photographs are then displayed on bigger lightboxes at the end, and there are video interviews with the winners and the judging panel.

Whilst the Natural History Museum offers free entry, this exhibition is a paid add-on. Tickets start at £15.50 each for adults at off-peak times – we went on a Friday so paid this lower rate. Full-price tickets are £18 for adults, payable at weekends and weekdays during school holidays. You have until mid-July to see this year’s photos.

The Evolution Garden at the Natural History Museum

Evolution Garden

This was the first time we’d been to the Natural History Museum since 2022, and so it was the first time we’ve seen the new Evolution Garden. The museum used to be surrounded by grass lawns at the front, but one of these has been replaced with something rather more biodiverse. As you walk through the garden, you can see various fossils, showing (briefly) how life evolved over millions of years. The planting fits the theme, with ferns playing the role of ancient plants that would have been common the time of the dinosaurs.

It’s a good improvement to an under-utilised area. As well as being better for biodiversity, it supports the museum’s role in education, and is easily accessible even if you don’t want to go into the museum itself.

Pokemon Pop-up Shop

If you can make it to the museum before the 19th April, there’s a Pokemon Pop-up Shop. You need to book a timed ticket to go in, and these aren’t normally available to book online. We didn’t manage to get a ticket when we went, unfortunately.

Accessibility

All of the museum’s entrances are accessible, and wheelchair access to all parts of the museum should be achievable. Disabled toilets are available, but you’ll need to go next door to the Science Museum for a Changing Places toilet.

South Kensington is the nearest tube station, and there’s a tunnel link to the Evolution Garden from the ticket hall. Knightsbridge, on the Piccadilly Line, is the nearest step-free tube station.

Changing EV charger speed terminology

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A Zapmap infographic explaining the different charging speeds for each type of charger

Zapmap recently published updated guidance about EV charger speeds, and the names that we give the different types of chargers. The same guidance has been supported by the Department for Transport, and now categorises electric vehicle chargers into these four categories:

  • Standard
  • Standard-Plus
  • Rapid
  • Ultra Rapid

I’ve put their infographic as the featured image above, and here’s how each category works in practice.

Standard charger

Standard chargers were often known as ‘slow’ chargers before, and cover speeds from 3 kW to 7 kW. These are the single-phase AC chargers that use a Type 2 cable (that you usually have to provide yourself). If you have a charger installed at home, then it will most likely be a Standard charger.

Renaming it from ‘slow’ to ‘standard’ is deliberate because ‘slow’ implies that these chargers are inferior. They’re not – I have one at home and so it’s the type of charger that I use the most. They’re also common as ‘destination chargers’, at places such as hotels or attractions where you would typically spend the whole day. As such, the slower speed is fine, and so ‘standard’ is a better term for these.

Standard-Plus charger

What are now known as ‘standard-plus’ chargers are those in the 8 kW to 49 kW speed bracket. Typically, these will also use Type 2 connectors, but will draw their power from a three-phase AC electricity supply. These were known as ‘fast’ before, but ‘standard-plus’ is a better name as they’re still slower than rapid chargers, and not all cars support the faster speeds.

For example, our Nissan Leaf can only charge at up to 6.6 kW. It’ll charge from a ‘standard plus’ charger, but at a ‘standard’ speed.

Both ‘standard’ and ‘standard plus’ chargers can be considered to be ‘level 2’ chargers, as per this guide I wrote in October. There exist a few older 25 kW DC chargers that would fit into this category based on speed, but these are in the minority and I haven’t personally come across them.

Rapid charger

Rapid chargers haven’t changed their name, and are still used to describe DC chargers that offer between 40 kW and 149 kW charging speeds. These will have a CCS-2 or CHAdeMO connector (or both), and are designed for fast charging. The charger units will include the cables, so you don’t need to bring your own.

Ultra Rapid charger

Increasingly, a new generation of charger can offer speeds of 150 kW or higher, and these are categorised as ‘ultra rapid’ – again, no change to the name. Like rapid chargers, these use a DC electric supply and will use CCS-2 or CHAdeMO connectors – although most that I’ve seen at this speed don’t offer CHAdeMO.

Our Nissan Leaf can only slurp down 46 kW using CHAdeMO, so whilst we can use an ultra rapid charger, we can’t take advantage of the faster speeds over a rapid charger.

Overall, I like the new categories, and I think they better manage the expectations for EV users needing to charge. Standard chargers are fine for even the biggest electric vehicles when staying overnight, for example, and so renaming them from ‘slow’ to ‘standard’ should mean that people aren’t discouraged from using them.

Bansky: Limitless exhibition

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A timeline at the start of the Banksy Limitless immersive experience

This is the second of my blog posts about last month’s trip to London. The first was about Kinky Boots, and this is about the Banksy: Limitless exhibition which was the other thing that we pre-booked before travelling.

You’ve probably heard of the pseudonymous street artist Banksy. This exhibition is an ‘immersive experience’ which has around 250 of his artworks on display. These are a mixture of prints and recreations of his works, and include those displayed at Dismaland, the Walled Off Hotel, Ukraine and his London animal trail.

I’m not massively into art, but I find Banksy interesting – not least because his true identity remains a mystery to most. All most people know about him is that he is male, white, and that he probably comes from Bristol where his earlier works appeared. He has been producing street art since at least 1999, if not earlier.

He’s probably best known for his stencilled street art. Stencils allow him to design his pieces in his studio; then, when he’s out in a public place, he can then quickly spray paint his works and move on before he gets in trouble. However, his art takes many forms and this exhibition covers lots of them.

Immersive experience

Banksy: Limitless is billed as an ‘immersive experience’, which made me think about that infamous Willy Wonka experience in Glasgow. Thankfully, it’s not a load of AI generated slop. Instead, whilst some parts are like a typical art gallery, others parts are laid out like a tube station, or a recreation of Dismaland. The web site says that you can expect to spend at least 80 minutes here; we spent well over two hours in the end. And, of course, you Exit Through the Gift Shop.

It’s important to note that Banksy himself hasn’t authorised this exhibition. Instead, it’s a collection of (mostly) privately owned pieces and prints that have been brought together. I really enjoyed it.

Accessibility

Banksy: Limitless is in Sussex Mansions on Old Brompton Road. It’s a short walk from South Kensington tube station on the Piccadilly, Circle and District Lines. The nearest step-free tube station is Knightsbridge, the previous stop on the Piccadilly line, which is a one mile walk.

The building is wheelchair accessible. The exhibition is across two floors, and there is a lift available. There are also toilets on site. The nearest Changing Places toilets are at the Science Museum, and the Royal Brompton Hospital, which are both a short distance away. Strobe lighting is used in the exhibition, and there is also an optional section towards the end that people with motion sickness are advised to avoid.

Ticket prices start at £20 each; Google’s AI summary offered me the discount code LONDONBY10 which gave me a 10% discount. Tickets are handled by Fever who we also used for The Art of the Brick, and you can earn points from your booking to use against future bookings (although this can’t be combined with discount codes).

Happy Easter!

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I hop you are having a good Easter break, if you celebrate it. As mentioned on Wednesday, we’re staying with my parents in York, having arrived yesterday and heading home tomorrow. Which, to be fair, is pretty much what we do every year – Covid years excepted.

The Easter weekend is a full two weeks earlier than last year, when Easter was unusually late – I wrote about the dates for Easter last year. Next year, Easter is even earlier, with Easter Sunday falling on the 28th March.

I went down with a cold last weekend, which, bearing in mind our trip to London, commuting to work and an Easter church service for our ten-year-old’s school, isn’t surprising considering how many people I’ve interacted with recently. However, it means that this may be a more subdued Easter weekend. A bit of rest is probably welcome.

The 29 WordPress plugins I use on this blog

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Whilst this blog is powered by WordPress, it’s far from being a vanilla version of WordPress. Whilst I’ve not directly amended any WordPress code (nor should you as it makes updates a pain), I have, over the years, come to rely on various plugins to enhance WordPress’ core features. Right now, I have 29 plugins installed, and so here’s a list of them all and what they do:

ActivityPub

ActivityPub makes my blog available in the Fediverse. So, it’s possible to subscribe to it in Mastodon, for example, and have my blog posts appear, in full text, alongside various toots from regular Mastodon users. Though I don’t use Mastodon as much as I used to, it’s another way of making this blog accessible to people.

I reviewed an earlier version of this plugin back in 2022.

Akismet Anti-spam

Comment spam has always been a problem since blog comments became a thing, and Akismet catches almost all of them whilst letting legitimate ones through. This is the only premium plugin that I currently pay for.

Album Photostream Profile For Flickr

This plugin powers my Photography page, by showing photos that I have recently uploaded to Flickr. Whilst I still pay for my Flickr Pro account, I haven’t uploaded any new photos there in a while.

Featured Images in RSS

This plugin ensures that a post’s featured image appears in the RSS feed. Almost every post has a featured image, and the GeneratePress theme that I use on here uses a post’s featured image as its ‘hero image’ at the top. There’s probably a far more simple plugin available than this one, but it does the job.

Fediverse Embeds

Fediverse Embeds allows you to embed people’s posts from Mastodon and other Fediverse services in a nice way. However, as mentioned before, I don’t really use Mastodon now, so this is just here for a few posts from 2023 and 2024.

IndexNow

IndexNow automatically submits your blog’s URLs to Microsoft’s Bing search engine, along with Yandex and some other search engines that I haven’t heard of. That should mean that new blog posts appear in search results more quickly, and don’t need to wait for a manual crawl.

IndieAuth

IndieAuth lets you use your WordPress blog to log into other web sites that support IndieAuth, and vice versa. To date, I have yet to find a web site that supports login with IndieAuth, but it’s there should I need it.

IndieWeb

IndieWeb is something of a framework plugin that needs to be installed to allow other plugins to work, such as the aforementioned IndieAuth, and Webmention, which is, erm, mentioned below.

Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Fixer

This plugin does two key things – it ensures your new blog posts are backed up to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, and also does the same for other URLs that you link to. This is a newer plugin that I wrote about in November.

Koko Analytics

I use Koko Analytics for, well, analytics. It tells me how many visits I get, and on which pages and blog posts. It also shows where people have clicked through from. It doesn’t do much more than that, but that’s a deliberate decision as I don’t want or need to capture massive amounts of data from web site visitors. Here’s my review from 2024.

MailPoet

You can, if you wish, get an email with my new blog posts every Monday, by using the email sign-up form below. This is powered by the MailPoet plugin, and I reviewed it in 2024. As an aside, since I wrote that I’ve switched to sending the emails via MailPoet’s servers instead of my own; I found that Microsoft blocks emails from this site.

Modern Image Formats

This plugin used to be known as WebP Uploads, and would convert any images uploaded as PNG or JPEG files to the more efficient WebP format. It’s now called Modern Image Formats, as it supports the AVIF format too. I also reviewed this one in 2024.

Performance Lab

Modern Image Formats is part of a suite of plugins called Performance Lab, which offer various ways to monitor and improve the performance of your WordPress install. In time, these may become part of WordPress core.

Posts On This Day

This is a simple plugin that adds a widget which shows posts that were made on the same day in previous years. You can see it on the sidebar (or below, if you’re reading this on a mobile device). Obviously, it’s only useful if you have been blogging for at least a year.

Pressidium Cookie Consent

This plugin is responsible for the cookie consent pop-up box that all web sites need to have nowadays apparently. Whilst I try to have as few third-party tracking cookies as possible, this should allow you to opt out of those. I installed and reviewed this one as recently as December last year.

Redirection

Redirection allows you to set up redirects from within the WordPress interface. I use this extensively, as lots of URLs on this site have changed in the 24 years I’ve been running it.

Share on Mastodon

Share on Mastodon is another simple plugin that automatically posts a new status message (or ‘toot’) on Mastodon with a link to new blog posts when they go live.

Simple Yearly Archive

Another simple plugin that is responsible for generating the Archives page, which lists every blog post, split by year, going back to 2002.

Two Factor

This plugin enables two-factor authentication for when I log in as an admin user. I, of course, use a strong and unique password for this blog, but should it ever be compromised, this is another layer of security.

UpdraftPlus

I use UpdraftPlus to take weekly backups of this blog, which are then saved into my Dropbox account. I reviewed it back in 2024, and it recently saved my bacon when I botched an upgrade.

VS Link Manager

Older versions of WordPress used to have a Link Manager, where you could add lists of links to create a Blogroll, for example. The code is still there, but it’s disabled. VS Link Manager re-enables it, and adds a newer widget for putting those links in your sidebar. This powers my blogroll.

W3 Total Cache

Whilst caching plugins aren’t always mandatory with WordPress, having one should make it faster. I’ve always used the free version of W3 Total Cache and it works fine.

Webmention

Webmention is part of the IndieWeb, and is designed to allow people to post comments on their own site that then automatically links back to the post they were commenting on. I use it to allow Brid.gy to work; it means that replies to my posts on Mastodon and Bluesky that have a link to a blog post have those replies posted as comments.

WebSub

WebSub is also part of the IndieWeb, and means that, when new blog posts are published, Superfeedr and WebSubHub are notified. I assume that there’s some kind of benefit to doing so.

WP Crontrol

WP Crontrol offers an interface that allows you to manage the various scheduled tasks that WordPress performs, for example making scheduled posts go live at the correct time. I think I installed this as, sometimes, scheduled tasks were missed and it allowed me to see why.

WP to Buffer

This plugin allows you to share new and updated posts via Buffer, which I use for Bluesky and Facebook Page sharing. I used to also share posts with LinkedIn using Buffer, but not everything I post here is fit for LinkedIn.

WP Toolbelt

WP Toolbelt is a multi-tool plugin which is a bit like Automattic’s Jetpack. However, it does more locally, rather than relying on WordPress.com, and it means that I can do several things without having to install lots of smaller plugins. I wrote about it a couple of years ago; it still works even though its development appears to have been abandoned.

WP-Sweep

WP-Sweep lets you clear out data from your WordPress data that you may not need any more. This includes deleted comments, old post drafts, previous revisions of posts and orphaned metadata. As such, it can reduce the size of your WordPress database. It needs to be used carefully; for example, you don’t want to remove drafts if you’re halfway through writing a draft post.

Yoast SEO

Finally, I use Yoast SEO. This gives you suggestions when writing posts, to ensure that you’re using the right key words, have an image and use headings. It also measures the readability of your posts, so that you can avoid over-using passive language and overly-long sentences. There are also some more advanced features that are designed to optimise your WordPress site so that it could, potentially, appear higher in search engine results.

Le Poisson d’Avril

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A photo of a clownfish in an aquarium. The French refer to an April Fool as 'un poisson d'Avril', which translates as an April Fish.

Something I learned back in secondary school was that the French call an April Fool’s joke ‘un poisson d’Avril’, which literally translates as ‘an April fish’. No April Fool’s Day jokes from me today though.

We’re part way though the Easter holidays here, with our ten-year-old having broken up from school last Friday. It would appear that not all schools are off this week, however; I had an email from Eureka about how they are running their Easter holiday activities over three weeks. Indeed, we would have loved to go to see Olaf Falafel’s Stupidest Super Stupid Show in Leeds on the 14th, but our ten-year-old will be back at school by then.

Christine is working on Good Friday, and so I’ll probably end up taking our ten-year-old to see the new Super Mario Galaxy Movie. Unless the weather ends up being especially good, and we end up doing something outdoors. We’ll then be spending the rest of the Easter weekend with my parents in York, as usual.

So far, my post about Kinky Boots is the only one about what we did in London that has gone live, but there are several more to come throughout this month. We packed quite a lot in to what was only a two-night trip; not having our ten-year-old in tow meant we could be a bit more agile. I also have plenty of other blog posts that I have already written to go live in the coming weeks.

Unblogged March

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A photo of works on the Transpennine Route Upgrade at Thornhill Junction, taken from a passing train

I quite like doing these little end-of-the-month round-ups. I used to do the occasional ‘miscellaneous’ things blog posts back when I used to blog regularly in the 2010s, but it’s good to make them a regular occurrence.

The Transpennine Route Upgrade

Our train to London departed from Leeds, and so to get there we took another train from Sowerby Bridge via Dewsbury. Whilst I commute to work in Bradford by train regularly, it’s been a while since I went the other way via Dewsbury, and so it was my first time seeing the work on the Transpennine Route Upgrade. This is a major upgrade of the North Transpennine Route from York and Leeds to Manchester and Liverpool, via Huddersfield. Overhead electric wires are being installed, to allow faster and greener electric trains to run, and additional tracks are being added from the west of Dewsbury to Huddersfield, to separate slow and fast trains.

One of the biggest pieces of work is the re-design of Thornhill Junction, which will see a new flyover built and a new bridge across the River Calder. When we went past, the bridge piers had been installed, ahead of the decking being built. This will allow fast trains from Leeds to cross over slower trains joining the line from Wakefield, and will see a replacement station at Ravensthorpe being built. All the stations on the line are getting accessibility improvements too – we saw the lift towers being installed at Batley station. It’s nice to see some major investment in transport in the north.

Fuel prices

I tend not to talk about international geopolitics on here, partly because I work in international student recruitment and so have to deal with it as part of my day job. However, the impact of the war in Iran on fuel prices has made us very glad that we have an electric car. We do the vast majority of our charging at home, and our electricity prices are fixed until August. Furthermore, our solar panels keep the costs down even more, and we’ve been lucky enough to have had some quite sunny days of late.

Our old car was a diesel, and diesel prices have shot up faster than petrol. Whilst fuel prices have yet to hit the highs of 2022, our local garage wants £1.82 per litre for standard diesel, and I’ve seen prices as high as £1.93 per litre at a motorway services.

I’m just hoping that everything calms down soon – not least for the innocent civilians in Iran and across the Middle East who are caught up in all of this. It’s all just so unnecessary.

Bolster Moor Farm Shop

On the recommendation of Paul Bigland, a railway photographer and fellow blogger who lives across the valley from us, we went to Bolster Moor Farm Shop earlier this month. It’s in the hills above Huddersfield, and offers a good selection of food. It does plenty of pre-prepared meals, and is well known for the quality of its pork pies, and for having a butchers counter that can (usually) offer more unusual cuts of meat.

We normally go to Robertshaw’s Farm Shop near Queensbury, which is larger and has a better fruit and vegetable range, and an outdoor area with farm animals. But, we were impressed by Bolster Moor, and will certainly pop back there from time to time.

La Porchetta Pollo Bar

On the Friday night in London, we had dinner at the La Porchetta Pollo Bar in Soho. It’s not a big restaurant, but it’s open from mid-afternoon until late and so ideal for a pre- or post-theatre meal. Whilst the prices are typical for London, the portion sizes are generous. It’s independently owned and run by an Italian family, and can trace its origins back to the 1950s. We went there with a friend from university who now works in London, and who recommended it to us.

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