On Wednesday and Thursday of last week, I had a plan to visit the eight Millennium bridges in mainland Great Britain: seven listed on Wikipedia and an unlisted one in Ayr that I learnt about from pals. Along the way, I would keep a blog of my progress on Tumblr.
As I had such a strong idea about where I would be at certain times and what I’d be doing, I was actually able to draft a substantial chunk of text in advance and simply copy it over to my travelogue.
Real life, of course, frequently has other plans. For instance, my first stop was to be the Millennium Bridge in London. However, my train from Edinburgh Waverley was cancelled at Newcastle. By coincidence, I’d planned to stop there on the way back for the Gateshead bridge, so I hastily wrote up a revised entry explaining the situation.
The planning did pay off, though. When reached the Big Smoke, I’d also planned to make a quick side-visit to the former London Weekend Television Tower and I’d already written and edited a block of text about why I was going there.
It was helpful that most of the trains had at least a USB socket, if not a 230-volt socket, so I rarely worried about running out of power. It was also helpful to have an All Lines Rover, which lets you travel on almost any National Rail line for a week, as it was necessary to be very flexible about my plans.
That was especially true when I cut the tour short after the seventh bridge at Ayr. The Glasgow one was within sniffing distance, but Storm Éowyn was closing in. There were already some cancellations that day, and no trains the following day, so I couldn’t risk being stranded.
By complete coincidence, I missed the bulk of its effects. The same day, I’d already arranged to be in York, where I’d booked a hotel before the full tour was planned, with it being somewhat central. I was then heading further south to visit a pal in Rhos on Sea. I did catch the fringe of Storm Herminia as I visited Penzance and Land’s End, but that was rather tame in comparison.
Some of these journeys took hours at a time, allowing me to make a lot of progress on a fantasy fiction series I’m writing. I write different projects in different ways, and this one uses a Google Drive document in a browser so the formatting of the text matches the paragraph spacing of the website, meaning I can copy over the text wholesale.
Even today, phone signal is still patchy on many parts of the nation’s railways. I’d assumed Google would simply cache my text locally during dropouts and post it when I next reconnected. What happens instead is that the browser won’t accept any more input until the signal is present. To work around this, I made a local copy, which I hope has maintained the correct formatting.
My next piece of writing will be less fun: an email to Great Western Railway, who sold me the train ticket. While the staff accepted it, all but two automatic ticket barriers failed to recognise it, and those two were only at exits rather than entrances.
That was the second time I’ve been on a tour of the Millennium bridges, the first being in 2023. Although I’ve no plans to do that route again. I’ve learnt a lot about how to prepare for such a tour and how to write about it. Once I think of a new challenge, I’ll build on that even further and tell you about it nearer the time.
Gavin Cameron 