Thirty years on, this week fate, if not the Lord, brought me to Runcorn. Its station had presented itself as the most convenient place to drop my daughters to catch their evening train to London. There had been a bit of grumbling from them, questioning the logic of this plan – my daughters have scant appreciation of what goes into my decision-making. There is near algorithmic complexity involved in weighing up such a range of factors – road conditions, routes, traffic, weather, train timetables, even football fixtures (Everton v Leeds Utd that evening, so potential for nonsense around Liverpool Lime Street station). I fed all this information into the dad-computer and this was what came out. We were Runcorn bound.