For the final few days of my week off, I went to Weymouth with Claire. We travelled to the south coast by train. The rail network has come under a lot of criticism lately. Well, ever since I can remember. While our train was on time, I did hear an announcement regarding another one which had been delayed. The man on the tannoy apologised for the delay. I just wonder how heartfelt this apology was, especially as it as a computer-voiced automated message.

Weymouth is a strange town. It has a beautiful coastline and is a really nice place to go on holiday. There is also a high street with all your typical shops. One minute you can be eating an ice cream and riding the donkey, the next you may as well be in Newcastle – although the locals are a little more “Oooh arrr” than “Howay the Toon”. Something Weymouth also has, like every other town and city in England, is chavs. Lots of them. This is probably because Weymouth has its own branch of Sports Direct. Whether the chavs came before Sports Direct, or Sports Direct came before the chavs, nobody really knows. It’s a little bit like the chicken and the egg.

Other strange sights included a woman with a pushchair. This may not sound strange to you. However, there wasn’t a child inside the pushchair, there was a dog. I have seen people carrying their dogs before. Whenever you see someone doing this, all respect for them is lost. Pushing a dog around as if it was a baby is one step further still. You just know the woman pushing the dog around has a photo of it in her car, lets it sleep in the bed and probably dresses it up. Oh dear…

Something else I realised about Weymouth is that it is actually quite a large town. You may be able to see from one end of the beach to the other, but to walk from our bed and breakfast to the harbour took ages. Google Maps tells me it was about a mile. Considering we made the walk a number of times a day, a lot of ground must have been covered. I always said I would never do a walking or adventure holiday, but think I may have inadvertently had one.

Now for something totally random, but spotted in Weymouth so technically it counts. In Tesco we saw Mince Pies. I am not going to get into the whole debate about shops selling Christmas stuff too early – we all know it happens and is stupid. However, I did find it strange how food designed to be consumed in December was out of date at the start of November.

Finally, the trip home. While the outward journey was nice, the return was not so pleasant. The train was busy, with people packed into the carriage like cows. Luckily we found seats. What made the trip a little unnerving was not the amount of people on the train, but the fact there was some bloke who had just been released from prison. He was boasting about his release and how he would probably be back in jail by Sunday. Needless to say, I turned on the passcode lock on my iPhone and hid it in my pocket. When he got off the train, you could tell every remaining passenger was thinking “Thank God for that”.