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He got onto the Manchester train at Bletchley and settled down for the journey. It still went against the grain to get to York via Manchester! He still felt that get to Birmingham New Street and get onto one of the Newcastle or Edinburgh trains from the South West was the “right” way but the Manchester way was now at least a good hour faster. It also made it faster than driving up the M1, M18, A1M, and then the A64M! The last three were all plagued with 80 kmph speed limits as they were upgraded to “Smart” roads and the less said about the state of the M1 the better. However the plus side was that he could get the past papers done by his students marked on the way, which wouldn’t have been possible if he had driven!

The train had free internet access, so he was able to access the London Exam Board’s website with the appropriate Mark Schemes. A slight grin crossed his face, his niece who also taught Maths but at a school near York used the JMB. They still hadn’t put their papers let alone the Mark Schemes onto the internet so she was forced to use paper copies and cut and paste the old fashioned way (literally scissors and glue!).
The journey to Manchester passed with the usual delays with stops for signal repairs and so on and he managed to mark all the submitted papers. It was slightly disheartening how many still managed to differentiate when they should integrate and vice versa but somethings hadn’t changed in his twenty five odd years of teaching (certainly NOT the tea and coffee available on the train!). The change of trains at Manchester went smoothly and the newly electrified train passed quickly through the Pennines, into and out of Leeds and then onto York.

As they approached York he looked eagerly out of the window. Although there were some flooded fields there wasn’t anywhere the devastation that anyone who had seen the news either on the telly or on the BBC News Web pages would have expected! It was always that way! Most of York was actually built above the areas which were prone to flooding, even the old city. However that wasn’t as useful for propaganda as pictures of the flood waters running down Huntington Road or those areas which had been inundated when the Foss burst its banks (not helped by raising the Foss flood barrier!).

Yet another Passport control before leaving the station was a pain and again he had to show the letters confirming why he had travelled north but it was still faster than the border controls at what had been Woodall Service Station. It was raining again when he came out of York Station the symbol shining brightly against the gloom of a late December afternoon and he hurried across the road to the bus stops. They had changed the bus numbers again! Mind you his father had warned him of this and all he really needed was a bus that went into Acomb. He frowned at the bus stops. Why they had to put the bus routes that used each stop on the sign was beyond him. That was what the panels which showed the bus time tables were for! He hunkered under the bus shelter and waited. True to form, he waited 10 minutes and then three useable buses all showed up at the same time, their red livery with gold lettering of York-West Yorkshire glistening in the rain under the street lights.

The bus fare was cheap enough he just needed a 10 bob coin. This was just one of the advantages of life in the North! Not only was there a good public transport system but it was cheap too (the oil money had been put to good use unlike down south where it had just been used for tax cuts). He got off the bus outside the Mormon Church and walked down Hobgate to his father’s house.

His father welcomed him in and made a cup of tea and pushed the Evening Press property pages into his hands. It was going to be a wrench changing schools and moving the family but the offer from the York School had been too good to pass up and he would start in September (His head had been VERY unhappy but understood the reasons). The whole family would move during the summer (after the exams), luckily his wife also had close relatives in the North so there would be no problems in relocating away from the madness that southern England had become since the North had joined Scotland and left the UK.

(This has been bobbing around in my subconscious since Xmas. There are several PODs and I may get around to explaining them (if I can work them all out :eek: ))
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