My apologies this is a long one .....
Saturday 26/09 – Southern League Division 1 Central (Step 4)
Leighton Town 0 Kings Langley 2Admission £5, programme £1.50, muffin and tea at half-time £1.50.
Attendance – 100 (that’s per the league website, but it’s the default setting, which means someone probably forgot to count!)
What strange apparition is this? What unheralded event has set all the twitchers atwittering down in Bedfordshire? Yes, just three weeks after the first ever visit by the Ostrich to Leighton Buzzard – the Bird is back in Town!
Don’t blame me, blame the wretched Football Association. I’ve already blogged about the financially canny northerners and the effect they have had on pushing the Southern League boundary further south and east. But when last season ended, and all the promotions and relegations were in, I knew I would have two new teams to see in the South West Division (easy enough at Evesham, Banbury or Bishops Cleeve) and three in the so-called Central division (meaning lengthier car trips to Aylesbury or rail excursions down the West Coast Main Line).
But then someone decided, last June, that Clevedon Town didn’t have enough lux. No, not soap tablets - sufficient luminosity in their floodlights! So the club failed ground grading and were demoted to Step 5, and by a convoluted process based on final league positions and goal averages across all the Step 4 leagues, Redbridge were handed a reprieve from relegation and reinstated at Step 4 level. Redbridge (north-east London) is, of course, a million miles from Clevedon in Somerset, and couldn’t therefore be a straight replacement for the demoted team in the Southern League South West, so, in order to repair the imbalance of teams in the various divisions, clubs then had to be shifted sideways!
The upshot, after they’d sorted the London clubs out, was that Ware (Hertfordshire) got shifted into the Southern League Central, a reasonable enough decision, but then, for some unknown reason, the powers-that-be in the FA and the Southern League had a rush of blood, moving Fleet Town and Petersfield Town to Southern Central from the South West Division, with Burnham, Flackwell Heath and Marlow going the other way.
At which point Flackwell Heath (High Wycombe), who had just been promoted to the Southern Central, threw a spectacular hissy fit.
They’d been looking forward to life in the Central, with quite a few local derbies; now they were expected to travel to far-flung places like Bridgwater, Taunton and Tiverton! The club held an emergency meeting – and declined their promotion!
Back to the drawing board! Next in line for promotion, and hanging onto the phone awaiting the call, were Highmoor Ibis (a Reading based club). It never came! The vacant position was offered to Redhill – who said thanks very much, but no thanks. As for Highmoor Ibis, apparently the ground-graders had got them – they didn’t have turnstiles installed and a fence panel was missing!
So that final Step 4 place was then offered to Winchester City – as long as they paid off various outstanding fines – and they were duly put in the South West to complete the division for 2015/16! But when the dust finally settled, all this shenanigans left the Ostrich with only one new team to see in the South West – but now four new teams in the Central. So today, it was a necessary trip back to Leighton Buzzard to see the final one of those four – King’s Langley !
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But first, we must undertake a slight detour – a first viewing of the newly opened Grand Central shopping complex above New Street Station. The whole thing is now (more or less) complete, and the mall opened to the public last Thursday. I arrived by train from Sutton Coldfield and the first thing noticeable was that the walls of the escalators have now been finished a sort of dark duck-egg blue, rather than bare concrete. The escalators, however, have proved unable to cope with the amount of traffic and keep on breaking down. The next innovation is that the platforms are fully barriered and with an updated smart technology that means I now have to lay my OAP bus pass (which has local rail add-on) on a yellow disc to open the gate, rather than just wave it at some official and walk through the disabled exit which is the norm at other barriered stations in the region. I think this is a similar system as the Oyster in London, but as I haven’t been inside the M25 for at least 25 years, I wouldn’t know.
Now comes the confusing bit – walking in a straight line across the much-vaunted and huge atrium, you come to a second set of barriers. No problem, I’ve got to grips with the system. But then there’s a third set of barriers? WTF? Through those, and I’m now sort of at the Bull Ring exit, where there’s the much vaunted Five Guys outlet, a sort of superior burger joint. So I go left and left again round the atrium, and I’m back to where I first ascended from the platforms, but only having passed through one barrier. Anyway many helpful volunteers are directing people and there’s a big cardboard mock-up where they’re handing out maps, and suddenly the geography becomes a bit clearer. There’s a plug-hole in the middle!
The problem is that the atrium is bigger than the old concourse, but the escalators to the platforms are still in the old positions. So, at the west end of the atrium, where there’s the ticket office and the Starbucks we met at for the first VV Birmingham meet, the layout is broadly the same. But at the east end, the Bull Ring end, it’s been extended a fair bit, and the “Platform A” escalators are now slap in the middle of the atrium, like a plug-hole. And they are barriered, so what I did, effectively, was leave the station (barrier 1), re-enter the station at the plughole (barrier 2) and leave it again (barrier 3) before walking round the plughole and back to where I started. Confused? You and about 50,000 other Brummies!
The next problem is the train departure boards. The 11:36 to Plymouth will leave from the Yellow Lounge. What? Closer scrutiny shows the display is alternating between the Yellow Lounge and Platform 6. I think the idea is that if you are early, you can go through the barriers and park up in a Lounge before going down to your Platform. There are three lounges, Yellow, Red and Blue. Only one problem. Nobody has any idea where exactly they are, are they aren’t shown on the map!
But enough of this, you all want to know about the John Lewis store. So it’s up another set of escalators to Grand Central, which is a circular walkway round the eaves of the atrium, a bit like the circle at a theatre, with food outlets overlooking the atrium and shopping outlets opposite. Getting to the bottom of the escalators is the first problem. The authorities have introduced crowd control so you have to walk up and down a maze to get to the bottom of the escalators, rather like queuing for a Disneyland ride. It’s all rather unnecessary, because despite it being the very first Saturday, there aren’t really the expected crowds. So we all gently amble back and forth until we finally reach the escalators – “Have I reached Go”, I quipped to an attendant, “and can I collect £200?” – and off we all go upstairs.
Most but not all of the shops are open, and the food outlets aren’t exactly busy. There’s Japanese sushi and Mexican and something called “Pho” and a Spanish tapas bar that’s empty. The coffee shops are doing best, but most people are gawking rather than indulging. As for the shopping, there’s a lot of “names” – White Company, Monsoon, Paperchase, Neal’s Yard (organics and herbal), L’Occitane and stranger places like Obey Your Body, Steel and Jelly, and Fatface. I didn’t venture into John Lewis’s but I could see a lot of “concessions” on the ground floor. Oh, and you can also easily access Grand Central via the old ramp from New Street again, so some things never change.
The final comment I have is – bring your ear-plugs, it’s incredibly noisy. Goodness knows how they’ve worked out the acoustics, but it’s rather like being in one of those nature programmes from a remote Hebredian island, where you’re surrounded by a manic flock of 20,000 roosting seagulls. You find yourself having to shout, which only adds to the cacophony. It’s a relief to finally re-descend to the bowels and board the 11:33 semi-fast to London Euston.
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Emerging into the calmer waters of Leighton Buzzard, the first stop is the Chinese-run Linslade Chip Shop, where there’s a piece of battered cod with my name on it. Waving vaguely at the hot cabinet, I ask for the cod and get my £3.10 out. “£1.50” says the oriental gentleman.
“Err, I wanted a medium cod – that’s £3.10” I said, pointing at the board.
“What? You no want no sausage?"
“No, I no want no sausage. Fish”
“Ah, feesh!”
“Yes, feesh”
“Feesh!”
“Feesh!!”
Transaction accomplished, I retire to a bench near the canal to devour my feesh, before sauntering into the town centre. Leighton Buzzard is growing on me. There’s a Charter Market, Tuesdays and Saturdays, and I purchase two pots of Marrow and Ginger Chutney from the Leighton Buzzard Honey Man. “Did you make this yourself?”, I ask. “Oh yes!” he says, smiling.
The football match is predictable; Leighton Town are having a torrid time of late while Kings Langley are in the upper reaches of the league table. The result is 0-2, the second goal straight after half-time kills it off as a contest, and nobody can really grumble. The referee however, is another matter. We don’t get underway until 15:04, there’s a 50 minute first half despite only one short stoppage , and a second half resumption at 16:09. Not in any way helpful when attempting to catch the 16:57 Arriva bus back to the station to connect with the 17:09 London Midland service northbound, and I had to skip the last three or four minutes of the game – not that it mattered in the event because having just made it back to the station, I found that the wretched 17:09 had been cancelled due to “train crew not being available”!
The next one is 17:42 and it’s rammed to the rafters and running late. Additionally, the toilets are out of action. So we have an extended wait at Milton Keynes Central for any passenger needing relief to do the business. Milton Keynes is an busy station and about 150 passengers get off anyway. “Are they ALL going for a piddle?” wonders the Sarf-London 30-something male I’m sitting next to, horrified.
A further toilet break is arranged for Coventry, but the instructions here are “get off, if you must, and catch the train behind!” Arrival is at 18:54 and I find I’ve just missed making a Delay Repay claim by 6 minutes, which would only have been £3.75 but would have paid for the filter coffee I had at Leighton Buzzard station while marooned there. Or the feesh.
Finally, on the bus back home, the guy sitting opposite me is munching a raspberry donut. He has no idea how close he came to being mugged …..
by Ally » 20 Sep 2015, 06:10 
) and it will be easiest for us to get the bus into town and then wander "up the ramp" from the New Street / Corporation Street junction.
