Kristofer Keane

Mastodon - YouTube - LinkedIn - Facebook - Email


Portrait photograph of Kristofer Keane.

Hello, I'm Kristofer Keane. I'm a library worker and political activist from the town of East Kilbride in Scotland.

I've worked in libraries since 2014 - starting with public libraries in Walsall, then Coventry, and then East Renfrewshire. I then moved into university libraries and currently work on the library enquiry desk at the University of Strathclyde's Andersonian Library.

I grew up and now again live in East Kilbride - a "New Town" about ten miles south of Glasgow. I'm interested in the New Town heritage of East Kilbride - the planned expansion of the town from its original small village roots from 1947 onwards. I think East Kilbride is a great place to live thanks to the good planning built into its New Town design.

I also have a particular interest in public transport, and regularly travel around far flung corners of Scotland by rail and bus to explore.

Fleetwood

17 February 2024. This weekend I was down in Fleetwood, making use of another pair of amazing value £1 sale tickets with Transpennine Express. See the YouTube video for this trip!

An advance single train ticket from Glasgow to Preston that cost £1.

From Preston, it was around a two hour trip on a smart little Enviro 200MMC run by Blackpool Transport on route 74, a council-subsidised journey through rural Wyre. I'd also totally forgotten that the £2 bus single fare cap was a thing in England, and the bus journey was just £2 each way (normally the return trip would have been possible with a Blackpool Transport day ticket at £6.20, so a significant if not massive saving). The bus itself was surpisingly quiet given there's no direct rail route from Preston to Fleetwood, but it did have a decent number of passengers through the Preston suburbs and then picking up again from Poulton on to Fleetwood. The rural area was very pretty, though mostly just very small villages (Great Eccleston looked worth a visit, nowhere else had much more than a pub and a village store).

Interior of the Blackpool Transport Enviro 200MMC bus.

Like many former seaside resort towns, Fleetwood itself looked a bit past its best, though the actual seafront was still very impressive, with a huge sandy beach that was nearly empty on what was a pretty mild February day. An interesting building along the seafront is this former radar station that had recently been in the news when it was sold off by the council:

Fleetwood radar station.

I got my fish and chips from the Granada Fish Bar - a large cod and chips for £10. The cod was fried fresh and was actually pretty good, if not all that large. Disappointingly though it was paired off with some approaching-stale dry chips, in a large portion. Overall it was okay, but nothing great. I had actually been planning to go to another chip shop that had a higher review rating, but on the day it was closed despite being within the opening hours posted on the front door, so it may even have just closed down but nobody locally had thought to update the Google Maps entry!

Large cod and chips from the Granada Fish Bar in Fleetwood.

For the journey home I took Blackpool Transport's 75 - it takes a slightly more southerly route than the 74 serving more of the Blackpool suburbs and some different villages. The 74 and 75 provide an alternating half-hourly service between Preston and Fleetwood. Overall it's a nice little journey, and good value for a day out.

Tags: travel

Anstruther

10 February 2024. I started out my travel year once again with my traditional trip to the Anstruther Fish Bar! This time though there were some incredible waves battering the coast, something I've never seen in Anstruther before. Even more bizarrely, there was hardly any wind in Anstruther itself, so the waves must have been getting whipped up well out into the North Sea.

The trip started out with the X24 coach service from Glasgow through to St Andrews. We passed Cumbernauld town centre, still standing for now but facing an imminent threat of demolition. While the building may be incompatible with modern standards, it's still certainly unique and I am rather saddened that the proposed replacement looks like a generic boxy shopping centre that could be anywhere.

Cumbernauld town centre penthouses seen from the bus.

When I got to St Andrews, I had nearly an hour to pass for the next bus to Anstruther, so I figured I'd take a little walk around the coast to the far end of St Andrews where I could still pick up the bus. When I reached the coast I was totally surprised by how stormy the sea conditions were, when it seemed totally calm on land.

Rough seas at St Andrews.

By the way, I had my new camera with me out on a trip for the first time, and I recorded a lot of 4K video of the stormy seas, but I've since discovered that my laptop just can't cope with editing 4K video at all. I still have the files so I'm hoping to maybe get to edit together a video some time in future, but for now all the video I have to show from the trip is a funny moment getting hit by a wave I recorded on my phone, and one slow motion video I captured in 1080p. I'll need to stick to filming in 1080p for the time being!

I did get my Anstruther fish and chips, I was happy with those although they somehow didn't seem quite as brilliant as usual. It's also the quietest I've ever seen the place, there was only a couple of people in the queue, so I wonder if it just wasn't as fresh as usual.

Fish and chips from the Anstruther Fish Bar.

On the way back, I travelled via Leven and Kirkcaldy. The coach passed the new Leven station, due to open later this year, which is now taking shape.

Leven railway station under construction.

Tags: travel