"It's been a bad week..."

Well, that was an odd week...

It's been a strange week, and not entirely for good reasons.

The first minor thing is that my kitchen tap is knackered but I've not had chance to fix it yet.

Second thing is I've got tonisilitis. I first started getting a sore throat just before the Web Security lecture I was giving on Monday. At the end of two hours the right hand side of my throat was killing me. Joy. So, by Wednesday morning off I went to the GP, who said that it looked viral, with no glandular swelling, and that it would probably just pass with an eye kept on it.

I was due to go to Liverpool for a Facebook seminar yesterday, travelling down on Thursday evening. I gave a lot of thought to not going, but I figured that my throat would get better and it was best not to waste the hotel and train fare. So it was that I got on the train at Scarborough last night and had a fairly nice, quiet canter through to Lime Street, including a faintly surreal interlude with a very pretty girl who asked me if the guy sitting behind her was a nutter. He wasn't, he was just looking for the toilet. Badly. At least some of the time he was looking for one in the luggage racks.

Anyway, the train dragged into Lime Street by about nine and the hotel, a Holiday Inn, was right across the road. I checked in and went to getsomething to eat. Unfortunately, by about 9:45 the restaurant was closing so I ended up having a chicken tikka in the bar, which wasn't awful by any means. And then I went to bed. Except by now of course my glands had decided they weren't going to play nice. As a result, I didn't get too much sleep at all as the right hand side of my face decided to play at disturb Darren all night.

All of which meant that when i did get ready to go to my symposium today, I wasn't in the best of moods. The session wasn't bad though, with some interesting things coming up. I thought the morning session was more useful for me however, even though I think the tone was more culturally focused than my tech genes were comfortable with. Lunchtime and the mingly networking sessions were more of an ordeal, seeing how I felt like a newly laid dog turd and couldn't really speak at all. So, sorry if I looked like an anti-social bastard.

I did get a quick look around Liverpool city centre hough. And it was sunny (though chilly). What a place. Lime Street itself is quite phenomenal, St George's Hall, The Empire (apparently Cilla Black's doing panto there this year, so it's not all good), the Walker Gallery. All fantastic. Both Liverpool and Newcastle score high on the scale of beautiful architecture sitting a little incongruously smack in the middle of a bustling modern city. I like Liverpool a lot on first sight. I must go back at some point.

But not on a train if I can avoid it.

I did plan to go back on the 1720 from Lime Street but, because I wasn't feeling up to a protracted wander around I ended up getting on the 1622. Bad move. Even as we were getting on it was very busy. I had a seat reserved on the 1722 but wouldn't get one here. I didn't actually get a seat until Huddersfield. Worse than this though, running a three carriage train on the Friday of the start of half-termlooked short-sighted to say the least. Trying to squeeze all those people onto the train, Japanese-style, took a fair bit of time. So much so that, by thetime we got to Leeds, we were running 25 minutes late. I felt like a veal calf. Then came the conductor's announcement: there had been a points fallure between Leeds and York (Micklefield, as it happens), sa we would be running a little bit late. Another 25 minutes late as it happened. They coupled another train onto us to get to York via the diversion. We were crammed so tight we could have been on the run to Dachau. Finally, at York, I got a seat as the hordes of people thinned out. And only then did the journey become faintly bearable.

Eventually, four hours after getting on the damn train at Lime Street, I finally got out at Scarborough. Getting home from there was the least hassle of it all. The bus turned up bang on timw and got into Whitby just as it was was supposed to. Fairly refreshing, as well as a change for recent Arriva services.

But by this time my throat was still giving me grief (not quite as badly as yesterday, but still bad). So, as I write this I've been back from the A&E for about an hour and have just taken my first antibiotic. It won't be long before I'm off to bed in the hope of actually getting some sleep tonight.

Not a great week really.