I have to confess I am not a fan of Northern, the rail operator that made my life an absolute misery for month after month after interminable month.

I consider myself fortunate I no longer have to use its services and even when I was still working in Manchester city centre, I had the blessed relief of being able to work from home during the pandemic.

My tales of woe were all too typical for those who had to suffer the Warrington to Manchester commute.

I was meant to be at my desk by 9am and theoretically there were trains leaving at reasonable times that should have got me to either Piccadilly or Oxford Road (it didn’t matter which to me, the office was equal walking distance in plenty of time).

But experience quickly told me I couldn’t rely on them so, like a lot of other people, I had to get up at the crack of dawn to catch an earlier train just to make sure I got to work on time.

The litany of problems was truly dispiriting including last minute cancellations, disgracefully old and slow trains, late departures and equally late arrivals, and the dreaded short-formed trains when dangerously overcrowded express trains that should have had four carriages turned up with just two.

My dislike of Northern is visceral, born of bitter experience.

So excuse me if I sneer a little at its latest campaign – No Battery, No Excuse.

According to Northern, some passengers have told on-board inspectors that they had bought an electronic ticket but that their phone died and they are unable to present it.

Northern admits that although some genuine customers may be caught out by their phone dying, many are simply attempting to avoid paying for their journey and therefore there will be a blanket ban on the using this as an excuse – with passengers facing fines of up to £100.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not in any way condoning fare-dodging and I am quite sure that some unscrupulous passengers will try to get away without paying but could I suggest to Northern that before it starts rolling out huge fines to all and sundry, it ensures it has enough staff at ticket counters and enough working ticket machines so passengers can buy paper ticket instead of having to use Northern’s app.

Because it looks to me that to a greater or lesser extent this is a situation Northern has engineered for itself, forcing people to rely on digital tickets because let’s face it, you need to pay real people to sell real tickets, and real people cost money.

For the record, I absolutely refused to use the app, no matter how much Northern tried to persuade me to.

On another topic, I was intrigued to see the designs for the proposed new housing estate on the vacant farmland at the end of Mill Lane in Houghton Green.

For those who don’t know, the site is on land right next to the M62. And when I say right next the motorway, I mean right next to it.

There has been some planning to-ing and fro-ing but permission was granted to applicant L2 Property Ltd in January for 27 dwellings, 15 of which will be three-storey townhouses and 12 will be two-storey semi-detached houses.

The developer says the project will be a ‘100 per cent affordable housing’ scheme with Muir Housing Group.

There’s a lot to dislike about this scheme, not least its proximity to the noise and road pollution from a busy motorway, but good grief, if the artist’s impression of what the houses will look like is accurate, the word bland doesn’t do them justice.

They couldn’t be blander if they painted them beige.

I thought we had moved on from such characterless design but apparently not.

Surely we can do better.