Overnight sleeper Paddington to Penzance, and back again

Part One: (this post) 
Part Two: Day trip to the Isles of Scilly (well, one of them) on the Scillonian III ferry from Penzance
Part Three: On the Isles of Scilly (for one day only) - day trip to Scilly part three



From L: train at Paddington, corridor on sleeper car, room with berth on left. More pics.

There are two overnight sleeper trains in the UK (that I know of) and both have London as one of the termini. The Caledonian Sleeper travels from Euston to Scotland and I have enjoyed it many times, and the Night Riviera runs from Paddington to Penzance.

One of the nicest things about travelling on a sleeper train is periodically waking up through the night and remembering "I'm on a sleeper train, woohoo!" so if you're a light sleeper, or likely to be woken by gentle rolls, occasional lurches or rattling over points it might not be for you.

Neither sleeper train has a service on Saturday evening so if you go somewhere on Friday night for the weekend you can come back on Sunday evening and arrive on Monday morning.

I travelled to Penzance on Thursday night and came back on Friday so this was really more of a day trip. Cost was £183 (outward £104, return £79), cheaper versions are available (shared cabin or a mildly-reclining seat in a regular carriage). £184 for travel AND accommodation all in one - two journeys and two nights 'in a hotel' so not bad value I think.

Getting tickets
Make sure you're buying a SLEEPER ticket and not just a SEAT on the train! I bought over the phone and was given an eight digit code with which to collect my tickets from any machine at any station (I collected my tickets from Cannon Street station). Recommend collecting the tickets a day or two in advance as if there's a problem it can be a bit difficult to fix at half past eleven in the evening. 

Outward-bound journey from Paddington to Penzance
The train leaves at 23:45 but you can usually get on board by about half ten and get settled in. Costa was open so I was able to get a snack, but they have a buffet car on the train anyway. One of the train managers will come round and check everyone in, check tickets, answer any questions, explain how it all works and what time you'll arrive - and the time by which you'll be booted off the train. If you find a train manager get yourself checked in as early as possible then you can relax undisturbed for the rest of the journey until breakfast.

There is only standard accommodation on the Night Riviera (it's slightly different on the Caledonian sleeper), but you can pay a supplement to have the cabin to yourself, which is what I did - effectively turning this into a first-class journey (any sleeper berth ticket also entitles you to use of the first class lounge at Paddington).

The train arrives in Penzance at 07:52 and you need to get off promptly. Slightly annoyingly the latest breakfast order to your cabin is 06:40 because the poor train manager needs to collect and wash all the crockery before leaving the train with everyone else. I had my breakfast at 6 and then lazed around for the next couple of hours - breakfast isn't compulsory of course, and you can grab something from the buffet car, and there are cafes open at Penzance.

General information about the cabin / train
Your cabin will be set up with the lights on, the temperature to minimum and the blind down in front of the window. If you want to maximise sleep leave the blind down, if you want to maximise gazing at stars and the general eerie spookiness of the countryside in pitch dark-grey-ness then leave them up. As you'll also be stopping at several stations en route you'll also get blinding lights coming into your cabin - I don't mind this but be aware. To open the blind you need to pull it down and slightly forward to then release it and lift it up. I've not tried having it half down / half up (that would work to cut out much of the station lights which shine downwards), maybe next time.

The view from my cabin window at 1am ;)

A thing I'd have found useful would have been a list of stations and the approximate times of arrival. There appear to be quite a lot of them on this journey, and I think they can include the following, pinched from Wikipedia.

 


Bed position - left or right
Cabins are mirror images of each other with some having the bed on the left as you go in, others having it on the right. If you have a strong sleep direction preference you might want to consider this.

Some have the bed on the right which means when sleeping on your left hand side your back is against the wall (and when turning over less likely to fall out as nearly happened when sleeping on my left on a left bed with my face against the wall). I travelled from Paddington in G 15L (coach G, room 15, lower berth) which had the bed on the left and found I slightly preferred the return journey from Penzance in E 09R (coach E, room 9, lower berth) which had the bed on the right. There doesn't appear to be much information when booking online about the L-R position of the bed, or on the ticket, so maybe ring up and ask (GWR https://www.gwr.com/help-and-support/contact).

Charging phones
Update 2019 - the latest train I travelled on had proper electrical sockets for charging as well as USB charging sockets, but I tend to pack an EU adaptor just in case.

Happily you can charge your phone in the Shaver Only socket, though I'm sure you're not supposed to, using the two pin adaptor that we might once have taken to Europe ;) I was unconfident about the arrangement as the socket has three holes and my 2-pin (UK to EU) adaptor has two, but you 'pick a side'. The left and middle holes for 110V and the right and middle for 240V. Timidly I went for 110V and charged slowly, but the 240V would have been fine, from conversations I had on Twitter.

2-pin adaptor goes into either left (110V) OR
right (240V)  depending on voltage desigred

Temperature
You can use the dial to change the temperature but I usually keep it on minimum, though did find the air a bit cold on the way out and made use of a very thin blanket that I'd brought with me around my neck. It was very toastie under the duvet anyway.

Lighting
Each berth (my arrangement used only the lower berth) has its own light switches for the main light and the bed light. There are also light switches on the opposite side, high up, for a bluey teal night light and a low-level white light as well, so you needn't sleep in pitch darkness if you don't like that (I do). You'll always be able to see the phosphorescent emergency sign above the window illustrating the position of the hammer though.

Food and drink
There'll be a small bottle of water in your room, above the window and you get a choice of items for breakfast (cereal, coffee, tea, orange juice, croissant butter jam) brought on a tray. Plus buffet car.

If you're having tea make sure, when your breakfast tray arrives, that the FIRST thing you do is pop the tea bag into the hot water to brew. Don't pour yourself a cup of hot water without realising there's a bag in the cup.

Ablutions
There was a towel and a bar of soap.  

Wifi
Haha. You can apparently connect to the wifi if you're near the buffet car but I didn't see a whiff of wifi on either of my journeys. In fact I had fairly poor signal (E on occasions) in Penzance and nothing but GPRS when on Isles of Scilly. 

Loos
They have two of them at each end of the carriage, doors are quite a bit narrower than usual (if you happen to have your bag on you). You can flush them when the train is at a station as they're 'fully tanked' apparently.

Security
If you're leaving your cabin with valuables in you can flip the lock so that on pulling the door closed your cabin will be locked. Make sure you ask the train manager where they're most likely to be so that they can let you in again. I had only my iPhone, wallet and keys with me of value so kept them on me when I went to the loo and left my cabin unlocked with no problems. If I have a laptop I either bag it and take it with me or lock the door. If you can't find the train manager you can ask the buffet car people to radio them for you.

The journey and the sleeping
You're on a moving bed travelling quite fast for most of the journey with stops at stations, changes of direction, pitching and rolling. Apart from the regular station stops I found I slept more on this journey than on the Caledonian one - that's not necessarily a plus though, as I quite enjoy the waking up and going back to sleep bits ;) There are no stops between Reading and Taunton.

First-class lounge at Paddington
If you've paid to travel in a sleeper cabin (whether by yourself or shared) your ticket will grant you admission to the first-class lounge at Paddingon where you can get food, drink, charge up stuff etc.

Children, dogs, bicycles, couples
There were quite a few small children on the train (they were very quiet), presumably they slept in the upper bunk as I used to when little. According to the excellent Man in Seat Sixty One website smaller babies can be plonked in a bassinette on the floor, there's plenty of room for them. Dogs can go in the guard carriage but I'd want to know how dark and spooky it was going to be - even inside the cabin it's quite noisy and rattley and I can imagine a dog being quite frightened. Bicycles need to be booked in advance but can also be taken. Couples - as far as I can tell the Night Riviera doesn't seem to have the same gendered carriages that they have (or used to have) on the Caledonian Sleeper (where I've always been asked for my gender on booking, that didn't happen here) so presumably people can share a cabin, though good luck sharing one of the tiny beds!

Inward-bound journey from Penzance to Paddington
We were allowed to board at 21:15 for a 21:45 departure so there was a bit of standing around at the station where nothing much was open. I'd had a very nice Indian meal a few minutes walk away to tide me over. Arrival in Paddington is at 5:08 but you get booted out at 7am and the last breakfast is at 6am.

Stations we stopped at on my particular journey were -

• Penzance
• St Erth
• Camborne
• Redruth
• Truro
• St Austell
• Par
• Bodmin Parkway
• Liskeard
• Plymouth
• Totnes
• Newton Abbott
• Exeter St David's
• Taunton
• Reading
• London Paddington

Further reading
Wikipedia's article on the Night Riviera
Fabulously detailed information from Seat 61
Great Western Railway (GWR's) own page about the service.
Night riders: aboard the Paddington-Penzance sleeper train (The Guardian, 2013)

Romeoed and Julietted - and Stephen Warbeck's lovely score for Shakespeare in Love

Written on evening of Wed 15 June but published Thur 16 June cos I forgot to press Publish before going to bed ;)

I've unintentionally (didn't make the connection til later) intentionally (obviously I chose to do the activities!) binged on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet today. The wonderful four part 'School Drama' play from BBC Radio 4 / Goldhawk Productions written by Andy Mulligan will soon be fading from iPlayer (catch it while you can) and so I've been enjoying it again before it goes, then this evening I saw a screening of Shakespeare in Love at the Barbican followed by an interview with its composer Stephen Warbeck.

School Drama
School Drama has Tom Hollander in it, who I have been moony-eyed over since discovering his occasional column in The Spectator last month - I'm not alone, everyone thinks he's a brilliant writer and I certainly don't think any text I write will do justice to the play.

Acutely observed, funny and moving it's about a failing school trying to put on a performance of Romeo and Juliet and get their performance entered into a schools competition. The script is peppered with little things familiar to anyone who's worked in an office environment - at one point the kettle disappears (presumably for PAT electrical testing) but fortunately reappears later having passed, someone's miffed about a borrowed mug, the entry and security system keeps people out but also stops them from getting food. Geoff (Tom) is a currently-not-acting actor who agrees to come in and direct the play and throughout he is at the mercy of unfeeling bureaucracy and is hampered by the layers of over-protection put in place between him and the students... but perhaps all is not as it seems.

At one point a musically-inclined student joins the production and writes some cheesy songs and there's a wonderfully awful moment where it looks like a dance routine might be incorporated but fortunately it isn't. You can hear the full horror in the 'Capulets Montagues song' in the Soundcloud below. The music is by Jon Ouin of Stornoway and I love his title music for the play. I was also really struck by how many layers of meaning Tom Hollander can put into simple words / phrases like 'Yes' and 'Thank you' - it's a bit like he's speaking a tonal language, though I'm not sure if that makes sense. As if the words had their own invisible subtitles. Fairly impressive for a solely audio-medium I thought!

It's such a lovely play and I will miss it when it rolls off iPlayer - ep 1 falls off in a day or two, ep 2 a day later and so on. There have been lots of really lovely tweets about it and I hope it wins all sorts of awards (I also hope the BBC leave it on iPlayer as permanently available). The final episode is a performance of Romeo and Juliet by the cast and students of Deer Park Academy (actually students at Portsmouth Grammar).

I'm sure no-one would be surprised that I loved the use of sound design - especially how the sound of the person speaking over the tannoy (announcements to the school, used as an ambient sound) was picked up and used in the final episode, really cleverly done.



Shakespeare in Love
The Barbican is celebrating Oscar-winning scores by having screenings of films and interviews from the people who scored the film. It was only when I'd taken my seat last night in Cinema 3 that I realised that I was back in Romeo and Juliet-land, and also back in the land of a play within a play. Shakespeare in Love also has a clever, funny and heartbreaking script (by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard).

It turned out that quite a few of the film's production crew (including the director) were in attendance so it was a rather nice reunion. The interviewer, Gary Yershon (also a film composer), introduced the film's musical motifs (it was a pleasingly nerdy event) singing a few bits of the melody's themes and pointing out to us how they were used and where they appear in the film. After the film he welcomed Stephen Warbeck to the stage and asked him questions about his method of working and about the film's score in particular.

Composers can be involved in a film from the very start but I think it's more common for them to add music towards the end of the process, once the film's been shot and likely been edited. But because Stephen was writing music that would be performed in the film (for example the dancing sequences) he was involved very early on. He wanted music that referenced the Elizabethan period but also reflected the modern sensibilities of the film.

Apparently there were lots of music students in the audience so Gary asked on their behalf about the use of musical assistants, and how they might get involved. It seems people need quite a lot of technical computing skill as well as their music skills and Stephen mentioned the Tonmeister course as a useful thing. He writes his music often on paper and then it might get tranferred to Sibelius (software) - it used to be developed first on piano but this is becoming less common, something I've heard other screen composers say.

An audience member asked a question about musically literate directors and Stephen again echoed other composers I've heard speak on this topic - that it doesn't particularly help for directors to know lots about music, as what the composer wants to hear from them relates more to the emotion they want conveyed rather than 'a bit faster' or 'more minor here'.

I missed my chance to ask a question in the room but wandered over and caught up with him in the bar afterwards. He'd briefly mentioned performing the pieces live (I attended his concert at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse a couple of years ago, candlelit, lovely) and asked him if he had any plans to screen the film with a live orchestra ('live to projection' aka 'live to picture'). He said it was a nice idea and that he'd certainly consider it at which point I expressed disbelief that it hadn't come up before. I'm sure he was joking but he suggested that I was, so if true I'm very glad I floated it! He'd very much enjoyed a similar treatment of Ratatouille (music by Michael Giacchino) and agreed that Shakespeare in Love might work well in that format (not all films would but SiL definitely would) so I really hope that can happen. Fingers crossed. Meanwhile I'm looing forward to Independence Day Live and Jurassic Park in Concert screened with live orchestra at Royal Albert Hall later this year.

I suppose I really ought to go and see the actual real-life play performed now ;)

Incidentally Tom Stoppard who co-wrote Shakespeare in Love has a new film out in July called Tulip Fever (set about 40 years after SiL I think) Tom Hollander's in it :) And the music's by Danny Elfman!

Further reading / listening
Why Romeo and Juliet is the most "subversive" play ever written - Andy Mulligan (who wrote School Drama)

Shakespeare in Love - soundtrack / OST by Stephen Warbeck [Amazon UK] [iTunes UK]

More about the Oscar-winning scores series at the Barbican
[press release, PDF] [programme and tickets]

Live movie concerts a cash cow* to orchestras - Jon Burlingame (*yippee!!)

Twitter's new update - blocked people can still see your tweets, but it is harder

People can always see your public tweets, even if you've blocked them, by just logging out. Other workarounds include using a third party app to view your tweets, or using a secondary account (or even searching on Google). Twitter's released a new update in the last few days (people can now retweet themselves, which might prove interesting) and they've really tightened up the block function - but claims that 'blocked people can't see your tweets' are, and always will be, incorrect. The only way to stop someone (even one person) from seeing your tweets is to make your account private.

The conflict between people's own experiences of using Twitter, the information Twitter gives about the block (and other news reports) and what is actually possible when using the service is the reason for this update / post.

I used to think I had a reasonable handle on Twitter's block but how it is implemented (how it appears to the user) has become increasingly app- and platform-dependent so it's really not possible to say with much confidence what someone will see if they're blocked / if you've blocked them.

On official Twitter apps such as desktop / browser Twitter and Tweetdeck (owned by Twitter I believe) it seems that you can no longer see anything, no profiles, no tweets in search. If you've blocked someone you'll no longer see their tweets, even if retweeted - this is a new and positive step for most people. But...

Remember that third party apps (Echofon for iPhone, Twicca for Android etc) often behave very differently from official apps and can let people you've blocked see your tweets.

Every time Twitter updates block I see a lot of tweets from people commenting that others now can't see their tweets - but they can, always have been able to and always will be able to. Please let anyone that needs to know, know, thanks.

More detailed information for block function enthusiasts (can't just be me, surely!)
I've done a quick test with a couple of accounts and apps and, thanks to a handy alternative medicine quack who's blocked me and who helpfully provides a testing ground, I present my results below ;) Feel free to share your findings too in the comments... especially if they're different from mine.

Desktop / browser platforms 

Twitter for desktop / browser (ie twitter.com on Firefox)
Profile view: I can't see it if I try and visit, it says they've blocked me.
Search results: their tweets don't show up, and clicking on a reply no longer brings up their tweet in the conversation thread. This may be different on other browsers. A friend reported they could see conversation threads on Chrome (though only on multi-person tweets, not one-to-one conversations) however Twitter's had another update since the latest one and this may no longer be the case.
Embedded RTed links: Clicking on a referred link also fails to show me the tweet and returns "you are not authorised to see that status". In fact the referred tweets don't show up in search, only on profile of sender (tweet shows as 'this tweet is unavailable' and message is "sorry you are not authorized to see this status."

Dabr.co.uk - basic functionality Twitter app
Profile view: not visible
Search results: namesearch: their tweets show up, hashtag search: tweets show up
Embedded RTed links: Not seen specific examples but given their actual tweets are visible anyway...


iPhone apps 
Twitter for iPhone
Profile view: I cannot see the profile of an account that has blocked me, it says that I'm blocked.
Search results: I can't see any tweets they've sent in search results. Clicking on other people's tweets in response to the blocker's tweets also doesn't show their original tweet in conversation.
Embedded RTed links: These are where the blocker's tweet is retweeted as an embedded link. Clicking on these referred links shows "Error loading Tweets (401)" - previously it would have displayed the tweet and any conversation.

Echofon for iPhone
Profile view: I can't see any tweets (the message given is that they've made their account private, though that's not true) but I can see their followers / following list
Search results: their tweets show up in search results. Clicking on the tweet lets me reply to it or retweet it (comment RT only).
Embedded RTed links: Tweets show in search and appear as normal embedded tweets, rather than "this tweet is unavailable". However clicking on the tweet brings up a blank page.

Osfoora for iPhone
Janetter for iPhone
- both show tweets in search results

Android apps
Twitter for Android
I don't have an Android phone so can't test this myself but discussions on Twitter suggest that profiles are now properly blocked. I don't know about search results or conversation threads. Let me know, thanks.

Fenix for Android
I'm seeing reports on Twitter that this no longer shows tweets

Twicca for Android
Reports on Twitter suggest that tweets from blocked accounts are still visible. 


Conclusion
It's now a lot harder for someone to see your tweets if you've blocked them (or for you to see the tweets of someone who's blocked you). But it's not impossible and I often wonder if making it look as if it's harder just misleads people a bit. If your account is public, it's visible to everyone. 

Hay Festival's very pretty, but very very far from London

I've had quite a long day :) I decided in the last couple of days that I'd pop along to the Hay Festival to cheer on Tom Hollander who was one of the actors performing at Letters Live, which is a lovely thing that I missed in London this year (though have managed to go to a one a year or so ago). And also see the Hay Festival for the first time.

My first surprise was how busy the Jubilee Line is at 7 in the morning on a Sunday. More packed than it is on a weekday, surely. I missed the 8 and 8.07 train from Paddington with ease (it didn't help that the Bakerloo line from Baker Street won't be stopping there until August, wish I'd paid more attention to that!) and so I risked the later, but direct, 8.42 train, arriving in Hereford at ~noon. Paddington didn't have that many trains today - normally when I'm there as you walk up the stairs there's a sort of whum-whum-whum of lots of engines all echoing around that beautiful hall, but today it was much quieter.

The train journey to Hereford was lovely, then it was a random shared taxi to the Hay Festival - another 40m journey. Unhelpfully the taxi driver dropped us off at 'How the Light Gets In' festival which is about a 15min walk from the main festival so I arrived just after the event began and found a rare seat. A word to people on pavements - get into single file people. Also you always walk facing the direction of oncoming traffic so if I'm on the outside keeping an eye on the cars don't crowd me off the kerb please. A massive 'thrrrppp' to everyone who got in my way today.

Holy crap Hereford and Hay are pretty though. I spent the entire taxi journey smiling at trees (top faves - ash with their lovely little leaves), hedges, wild flowers, some sheep, meadows, great big hills over there in the distance, fields and general countryside accoutrements (tractors, adverts for potatoes). Then as we approached Hay on Wye - bunting! I love bunting. They had great big white marquees, and oodles of bunting and flags. Perfect.

The Letters Live event was heaving and for some reason I'd been expecting a much quieter and smaller affair. It was a huge venue and of course, being late, I was at the back and couldn't see much so was grateful for the big relay screens. It was all very lovely with a range of letters (funny, poignant, frivolous, devastating) read by different people. Benedict Cumberbatch (unbilled) did four of them!

Apart from lovely Tom, who could probably entertain just by reading the yellow pages ("not much of a plot, but what a cast" *ba-dum-tish*), possibly the audience favourite was Bruce Robinson who managed to misread the word 'flunk' for a word less suitable for the 1pm family-friendly slot. He then got the giggles which made it all the funnier.

Toby Jones (go and watch him in Berberian Sound Studio, he's brilliant) did one of my favourite letters - that from Evelyn Waugh to his wife about a subaltern who made an out-by-10 error in clearing away a tree stump. My mum used to read it to me and we'd fall about laughing at it, so it was lovely to hear it read, and all in different voices. Tom read a couple, including the rather sweet 'Love what you love' from Ray Bradbury.

Anyway, I'll sleep well tonight after all that travelling ;)

Enjoyed @LettersLive at Hay. Bruce Robinson hilarious. Needed much more Tom Hollander though :-) Hay also v pretty. pic.twitter.com/ZKFsGPaIuS

— Jo Brodie (@JoBrodie) May 29, 2016

Everyone loves Tom Hollander - I've only just realised quite how talented he is

Edit 16 May 2016: Things he has coming up include a role in the film Tulip Fever and he's doing a BBC Radio 4 play from Wed 18 to Thur 21 May at 2.15pm, called School Drama which gets a nice write-up in The Guardian. He's also appearing at Letters Live at the Hay Festival on Sat 28th (sold out) and Sun 29th (tickets).

---

http://fuckyeaholiviacolman.tumblr.com/post/116079899162/olivia-colman-tom-hollander

I've always liked Tom Hollander. I remember really noticing him in 'The Lost Prince' (in which he was brilliant as King George V). Loved him in Rev. and In The Loop too, among others.

Enjoying BBC2's Ambassadors, also the theme music. Tom Hollander is in it, and Mitchell & Webb :)

— Jo Brodie (@JoBrodie) December 29, 2013

Last week I discovered that he's also a very good writer and has had a column in The Spectator for years. I'd completely failed to hear about this until he recently wrote about meeting Prince and the tweet below found its way into my timeline, piquing my curiosity. His back catalogue is funny, thoughtful and honest and I wondered what everyone else thought of his writing... so I had a look on Twitter and realised that liking Tom Hollander (as an actor or writer, or just people having met him) appears to be everyone's default position. Quite right.

I think this tweet's how I discovered that he'd written something.

@holland_tom @empiremagazine someone tweeted Tom Hollander's meeting Prince article and I read the whole thing thinking it was by you.

— Pete Deveson (@PeteDeveson) May 2, 2016

Assuming this is real he's also rather good at whistling...



...and he was absolutely incredible as Patrick Moore in 'Far Side of the Moore'. My amazed face looked a bit like this :-O on hearing his 'impersonation' of him (I'm not sure that's quite the right word) though. He's bonkersly talented.

I collected a bunch of tweets in this Storify and have embedded it below. There are quite a few tweets so wait for it to fully load (or just view it at Storify).