Out of Focus

A few years ago, when Dan and Abi's mum decided it was time for a new car, I bought her old one, a Ford Focus, from her. It had given good years of service and I thought it would be a reliable car, a known quantity, for my older girls to drive around in. 

Now that the three older ones are in Manchester and London, and Milly is about to go travelling again, I decided now might be a good time to get rid of the car, although I didn't feel I could legitimately ask anyone to actually pay for it. You know how cars get; the back windscreen wiper doesn't work, there's a slow puncture in one of the tyres and so on. 

As luck would have it, Hannah's boyfriend, whom I really like, needs a car but, characteristically, didn't want to take the car for nothing, so in the end we agreed he'd pay for the repair to the exhaust, which I had fixed recently.

All that left was the logistics of getting it to him. The simplest solution was for me to drive it down to Hannah, so I did that, this evening. Having parked the car, we took the tram to Piccadilly for a bite to eat before I caught a train back to stay with the Minx. 

This, then, is the 'New Islington' tram stop, featuring Hannah on the platform. Maybe there's a legitimate, historical justification for the name. I hope so, and that they haven't picked the name in a half-baked attempt to gentrify the area. As was seen in London a hundred years ago, the inclusion of an area on the transport network will in itself take care of making an area more popular (if not necessarily nicer!).