Good morning from King’s Cross Station in London.

I’m aboard a crowded train heading for King’s Lynn.  Cambridge is the first stop. 

The UK has many placenames which we take for granted. I have no idea what the ‘Lynn’ belonging to the King was, but it was important enough to name a good-sized town on the east coast of England after.

I put Chapter 56 of ‘The Half-Life Girl’ through the ProWritingAid app yesterday morning. Chapter 60 has been revised many times already because it has to lock into Book Three. So, I didn’t quite reach my target of completing it by today. Three chapters to go!

I didn’t intend to be in London this morning. I was in London yesterday to be with a writing group in Angel, Islington, meet a friend in Chinatown for lunch, and finally join the ‘English Conversation’ meetup group in Holborn in the afternoon. 

When I reached Kings Cross Station at 6.30, ominously, there were no train departures on the huge overhead screens. Then, an announcement that there had been an incident at Stevenage. The concourse inside the station was packed to capacity. People were waiting to catch trains to Newcastle in the north of England, and to Edinburgh in Scotland.

So I booked myself into a cheap hotel near the British Museum. And then ate a leisurely breakfast in the Hoxton Holborn Hotel this morning. Smashed avocado and tomatoes on a huge slab of toast. 

It was like a mini-holiday. Central London was almost deserted and just shaking off sleep. It was a beautiful spring-like morning. One of those mornings when it feels good to be alive. It’s very close to that part of London where you’d have found Jack, Billy, Bridget and the other characters that populate ‘Beyond The Shining Portals’ in 1793.