Tying up loose ends

Don’t you just hate those articles where they pose a question at the end and then don’t follow up later and tell you the answer? Or leave a story half told? No? Oh well, this is just a few of the loose ends that I’ve scattered around this place tied together for the purpose of tidiness.

The last word on my Christmas deliveries that were exercising me so much in the week before the event, for example. The gadget company iwantoneofthose.com produced the thing I ordered back in November on Tuesday this week: a small keyring sized USB card reader which apparently necessitated a very large box for delivery. I can’t now remember why we wanted it and in any case it’s missed the Christmas stocking filler role it was due to have. I’m still being bombarded by emails from the company promising 24-hour delivery… but of course I know better than to believe that kind of thing.

The other delivery that was problematic was the Christmas pudding and brandy butter from Fortnum & Mason, and the pud did just manage to arrive before Christmas (and pretty good it was too). This morning’s post has brought a second delivery from Fortnums. It’s not addressed to me, so I haven’t opened it. But I kind of assume it’s the brandy butter, for which there isn’t a lot of use in mid-January. Or, perhaps, a hamper-sized compensation for the earlier failure? Probably too much to hope.

Another follow-up I ought to record is from my post earlier this week on HS2, when I worried that the original London & Birmingham Railway terminus at Curzon Street in Birmingham was looking in danger of dereliction. Well, apparently as part of the HS2 scheme the old station is due to be incorporated in the new Birmingham terminus for the high-speed line and the older building is meant to be safeguarded: it got a ministerial visit as part of the announcement promo. We’ll obviously keep a watch on that and hope it happens: it’s 50 years since Hardwick’s Euston Arch and the other architectural delights at the southern end of the route were swept aside in the kind of brutalist act that was commonplace on the railways in the 1960s and for which we’re still paying. If the same architect’s work in Birmingham can be part of the future, that’s got to be good.