High tide

We were on the 11:45am FastCat back to Portsmouth. Walking up the pier, it was noticeable how high the tide was: it's almost touching the bottom of the railway lines in this picture. There's no extra height for unusual weather conditions: the tracks will be covered. It was a bit blustery, and we expected a much choppier crossing than we actually got.

We'd bought some items for lunch, so we had something to eat on the train. We ate that during the first hour of our journey into Guildford. I managed to finish Christian Wolmar's history of British Rail, which covers the nationalised years up to privatisation during the John Major administration. He makes an excellent case that, over the life of BR - especially from the end of the Beeching cuts to privatisation - the organisation had made significant headway to becoming a lean, well-run public service and that the sell-off that was to come didn't really improve on the state in the last years of its existence in public ownership. I learned that Upper Crust was originally a BR company and that Pure Leith used to be on the board. It's well written and very accessible and meant the journey - on a train - whizzed by.