Archive for ‘Travel’

21
Jul
2009
Categories
Travel

Strikes

Strikes, strikes, strikes (try saying that one fast). You’d think that at a time when redundancy is the order of the day the rail unions would be doing all they could to keep their members’ jobs safe.

But no. Drivers on East Midlands Trains are striking for six days, on three consecutive Fridays and Mondays, making for some nice long summer weekends (funny how it never seems to happen in the winter) because the above inflation pay rise they were offered wasn’t good enough.

Did you get that? Above inflation.

How can that not be good enough?

And on my line, too, there are eight days of strikes on the cards for National Express. Everything went suspiciously quiet for a while, but today the rail company put up a page on its site explaining that it still looked likely to happen, and that if it did then they ‘would not expect to be able to run any train services’.

Again, an above inflation pay offer was rejected and, to seal the deal, the unions demanded better conditions, too.

A statement on one of the union sites succinctly summed up its position: ‘This company [National Express] has made half a billion in profits out of our members over the past decade, it’s a scandal that they are offering their staff peanuts in return.’

The point they seem to be missing is that pay rises have to be met by us, the travelling public, many of whom have had their pay frozen this year. And the effects of strikes, too, are felt by… yes, us, the travelling public, so we lose either way.

As such, the best the travelling public can hope for is that the train operators call the unions’ bluff and refuse to give in. I’ll happily put up with the disruption until the union members realise that there is another way.

National Express is a publicly-listed company and, as such, the workers can buy some of the stock and share in the benefits of the company that has made half a billion in profits out of the union members’ hard work. Perhaps then they’d be happy to moderate the pay rises and avoid the kind of strike action that could lead to financial penalties that will impact their dividend payouts.

Oh, and yes, the company may have made a profit out of its workers, but those workers have also made a profit out of selling their labour to the company. You don’t see the company going on strike on account of the profits that its workers have made by selling their time and skills.

13
Nov
2008
Categories
Travel
Tags

Two days (not) running

One woman has already missed her flat viewing as she can’t get there on time. Another one got grabbed by a client in the next carriage who detained her for a chat on the way to the buffet. The woman in the seat across the aisle from me said that some embryos needed to be ‘put back into the injection tube’ (whatever that means) as she wasn’t going to get there any time soon.

And neither am I. Anywhere. We’ve been sitting at Harold Wood for close to an hour now due to broken signals all the way along the line between Goodmayes and Ilford.

Meanwhile, I’m stuck here answering my emails (hallelujah mobile broadband) listening to the inane details of everyone else’s lives as they narrate them into their mobiles.

Perhaps I’ll make up something juicy and broadcast it to the carriage myself.

UPDATED: 12h19 and I’ve finally arrived at work, over two hours late. On the plus side, a woman two seats back and one to the side from me managed to get her car insurance sorted out after a long time on hold, and the woman in the seat in front of her applied for a new bank card, in the process telling everyone at our end of the coach her name, branch, account number, sort code and birthdate.

12
Nov
2008
Categories
Travel, Work

The trains

It’s been something of a record this week. It took a good two hours to get into work one day on a journey that as the crow flies is a mere 35 miles. That was nothing compared to today. Rich got to the station and they were turning everyone back at the gates. The points had failed and there were no trains going anywhere.

So he came home and we worked from here.

Working at home is a bit of a mixed blessing. On the one hand you don’t have any of the distractions you get in the office – no ringing phones, nobody wandering up to your desk, no half-heard conversations going on at other desks. It means you get a lot done, and since eight this morning I’ve popped out 3,840 words, including most of a feature for the next issue.

So that’s all good.

But on the other hand you have to try and keep up with your other jobs, do your emails through a browser rather than a proper client and sit by a window looking out on the garden where you’d rather be pulling up carrots or harvesting this year’s beetroot or playing with the chickens, who have been standing at the front of their run looking up at the study window waiting for someone to come down with some corn for them to peck at.

You also end up working much longer as there are no defined ends to the day. I’m just packing up now, at gone 7pm, having not spotted that the end of the day – technically 6 – passed an hour ago.

So, let’s keep our fingers crossed for better trains tomorrow. For one thing it’ll get us away from the fermenter. We’re brewing wine this week, and its air lock is sputtering out a vaguely winey gas at regular intervals from where it sits in a corner of the kitchen. The cat’s not too keen on the noise and I can’t say I’m too enamoured with the smell. I’m sure we must have the whiff of a wino whenever we leave the house.

12
Aug
2008

Quiet round here

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Hardraw Force

It’s been a bit quiet around here of late. Things have been busy, but most importantly we had a week away. Volkswagen lent us a car from its press pool and we took it to Yorkshire with the rest of the family to buzz around the Dales, drinking tea and eating scones in the little hillside villages (below) in between treks up muddy paths to take photos of the waterfalls (above).

We’ve been watching All Creatures Great and Small, so naturally we hunted out the spots that had featured in the show – tiny little Langthwaite, for example, where Seigfried and James could be seen driving over the humpy bridge in the show’s opening credits, and to Askrigg, which was the setting for the surgery at the fictional Skeldale House, and then to Bolton Castle where James – in the series, not real life – proposed to Helen, and she said yes. One day we drove out of the Dales to the real surgery in Thirsk and visited the World of James Herriot, which turned out to be an excellent little hands-on museum, and where we discovered that he wasn’t really called James Herriot at all, but Alf Wight (he wasn’t allowed to use his real name as it would have counted as advertising).

One day we visited the Black Sheep Brewery and came out smelling of hops and yeast from the vats of beer that put our own brewing efforts to shame.

And eventually, of course, we had to come home and back to day to day life. The cat was very glad to see us.

And day to day life is quite full right now, which is the real reason why the blogging has been so quiet. The proofs of the book, which comes out in either September or November, depending on who you listen to, have just come back from the publisher and so needed reading and correcting while we were away. I’m working my way through those connections now, ready to send back at the end of the week. It’s already sold over 1000 copies in the US on pre-orders, and looking Amazon’s UK listings it’s apparently the 61st best-selling digital photography guide.

The second edition of the Independent Guide to the iPhone has just been published, after several weeks of re-writing and editing. And we’ve all just finished working on the Independent Guide to the Mac.

So it’s been a busy time, which means blogging has taken a bit of a back seat, both here and over at Blagger.

Hopefully, as things settle down, that should all change. Typing fingers crossed.

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Low Row

13
Jun
2008
Categories
Travel

Macworld Awards (and the journey home)

Last night was the Macworld Awards. A fun night at the Dome as a guest of Adobe.

Getting home, though, was another matter. They’d fixed the torn-down overhead wires and the morning’s slow-running was a result of ‘residual delays’ and trespassers on the track. Later in the afternoon, though, a freight train derailed a little way up the line from Chelmsford and the fragile timetable was thrown into disarray.

I got to Stratford at half 11, and there was little sign of anything heading in the direction of home. In a half-hearted attempt to clear his platforms, the only person I could see on duty there directed me onto an all-stations train back to Shenfield that was so old it was one of the models I used to take to school more than 20 years ago. Not comfortable. And full of people eating burgers and arguing.

We were all turfed off at Shenfield and left to mill around on a platform. By now it was well gone midnight, and getting cold. I was still in the tux, which isn’t really the warmest thing to wear. Over half an hour later, by which point the connecting service was 25 minutes late but still marked on the boards as ‘on time’, a busy train finally pulled in. It took all the platform staff by surprise and they shooed us off from platform 3 to platform 5 like collies chasing sheep.

I’m not surprised; the real issue throughout this whole sorry episode has been lack of information. And occasionally the availability of disinformtation. As ihatenationalexpress points out,

They told the press that this was the first time this had happened and blamed vandalism. It turns out that this is the third time the lines have fallen down at Ingatestone and no vandalism appeared to be involved. Their relationship with the press needs to be questioned.

I did make it to my bed, eventually, but not before two this morning. This has been one of the worst weeks I can remember on the trains. It has almost rivalled the months of go-slow that followed the Hatfield crash. At least then we knew that there would be trains, even if they were slow.

This week, there’s not even been the guarantee of any service at all.

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11
Jun
2008
Categories
Travel
Tags

The trains… again

Yesterday was another day spent working from home. The fourth this year caused by problems on the trains. This time around it was a mile of overhead cabling coming down one station down the line from Chelmsford, which meant not getting home until gone 11 on Monday night.

Today, two days later, they’re still trying to fix it, and will no doubt have been slowed by news that some of the engineers were injured after their equipment ‘failed’ and were taken to hospital. The line was closed mid-afternoon, just after the accident, and further repairs have been halted until investigators have found out exactly what went wrong.

So, predictions that it would be finished by eight tonight now look hopelessly optimistic. The latest estimate I’ve seen is early tomorrow morning, by which point it will be into its fourth day of disruption.

This wouldn’t be so galling had the penalties for these disasters not been so weak. Network Rail, which maintains the infrastructure, was fined £14m when overrunning engineering works meant a late return to work after Christmas for many commuters, but still managed to pay out £55m in bonuses to its staff last week, with the chief exec bagging a £500,000 salary, £305,581 performance-related bonus and additional £205,000 ‘incentive’. Clearly the £14m wasn’t enough if it can still afford such lavish rewards.

Meanwhile I’m off, with some trepidation, to see what state the trains are in tonight. If I get home before ten, I’ll be surprised.

29
May
2008
Categories
London, Travel, Work
Tags

Another railway cock-up

So I spent today working from home. Around quarter past seven last night something – and nobody’s yet saying quite what – happened to the new bridge just outside Liverpool Street.

You know – the one that they were working on over the Easter break that they guaranteed would be completed on time, only for it to over-run so that I and countless other commuters spent a day working from home. It’s the one that replaced the bridge they took out over Christmas and the New Year. You know – the one where they planned ahead so they would get the job done on time and we’d all go back to work at the start of the year without a hitch. Only for it to over-run and for me and countless other commuters spend another day working from home.

Are you seeing a pattern here?

They got fined for that Christmas cock-up. £14m in total, making it a very expensive bridge indeed.

So anyway, last night something happened, which blocked the track and cut off Liverpool Street. The inevitable outcome was radio pronunciations not to travel on the trains unless absolutely necessary, although why they think anyone would ride a rush-hour train to London unless it was ‘absolutely necessary’ is beyond me.

It couldn’t have happened on a worse day in terms of PR, as it coincided with a story on Railway People about what is going to happen to that £14m fine, which most commuters would probably like to see ploughed back into the network so we can get a better service.

Rail chiefs have reacted with annoyance to the news that ORR’s £14m, imposed on Network Rail for the New Year’s over runs, will not be ploughed back into the railway industry. Instead the money will be remitted to the Treasury…

Michael Roberts, ATOC’s Chief Executive, described the decision as a missed opportunity. He said. ‘While the ORR has clearly considered this matter seriously, train operators and passengers will find their decision disappointing. It represents a missed opportunity to use the money to deliver some real additional improvements to passengers. Instead, we are left with a ‘money go round’ where money raised from the taxpayer to fund Network Rail is just being ploughed straight back to the Treasury.’

So Network Rail will be losing some of its subsidy, which will have to be made up somewhere – either through cost-cutting, which risks introducing more problems as corners are snipped, or by the costs being passed on to the train companies. And we know what will happen then, don’t we: ticket prices will rise.

So ultimately the fine for those delays will probably end up being paid for by the people who were delayed in the first place, the passengers. And they say they want to encourage less people to use their cars to get to work…?

09
May
2008
Categories
Europe, Travel

Paris in the spring

Sacre Coeur

In all the times I’ve been to Paris (and there are many) I’ve never actually been in the spring – arguably the classic time to visit. So, it was a bit of a first for both of us.

It looked for a while like things were going to be dodgy weather-wise, and we even packed scarves and gloves, but in the end it was hot and sunny every day and we tanned to the point of peeling.

Notre Dame
Notre Dame in the sun

So what did we do? Well, it was Rich’s first time in the city, so we did the regular sites, walking between them rather than taking the metro as they’re all so close together.

The Tower was on the list, of course, and we chose to take the stairs rather than the lift. You can only go to the second level when you do that, but it was still 700 steps up, plus another 18 to get to the upper second tier. You don’t see quite so far from there, of course, but the guidebook assured us the view was actually better than it is from the top. Looking back at pictures I took last time around from the third floor, I’m inclined to agree.

Eiffel Tower
The Eiffel Tower

We went to Versailles, which I’d always ruled because I assumed it was too far out of the city. Turns out it isn’t; it’s a 20 minute ride on the RER from Austerlitz, and when we got there the gardens were free to enter (the chateau itself was closed, but neither of us was all that bothered about going in – we just wanted to get out of the city centre for a few hours).

The grounds are huge, extending for hundreds of acres and filled with statues and sculptures. The contrast between this and the way the general population would have been living at the time of the revolution must have been stark, and you can see why the royals were dragged back to Paris from there to have their heads lopped off. It’s ironic, though, that they then continued to spend a fortune on the place to keep it looking good.

Statue at Versailles
Statue at Versailles

We spent a relaxing afternoon walking among the grand tombs in Pere Lachaise cemetery, which had far less recognisably famous corpses in it than I remembered. Now that they’ve cleaned up and fenced-off Jim Morrisson’s grave (which has its own security guard) the new focus of graffiti seems to be Oscar Wilde’s grand Egyptian-styled resting place, which is now covered in waxy red lipstick kisses.

Pere Lachaise
Pere Lachaise cemetery

We toyed with the idea of renting a couple of the Velib bikes that are now almost as common as cars on the city streets, but ultimately chickened out. We didn’t fancy the idea of being squashed flat by the Arch de Triomphe.

Still, it was good to see them used so frequently, and it would be great to see something along similar lines in London, particularly as the first half hour of use is free. As the racks for picking them up and dropping them off are all so close together it means you could transport yourself around the city all day long without ever paying a bean, so long as you checked it in again every 28 minutes or so.

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Free-to-use (for the first half hour, at least) Velib bikes

We went to the first night of Kylie’s 2008 tour, at Bercy, just south of the river. It was a fantastic show, massively stripped down from the flamboyance of earlier performances. Feathers, sequins and grand sets were out. A simple lit stage, long dresses and lots of Kylie singing on her own were the order of the day. She started fashionably (45 minutes) late, but nobody seemed to care, and went on for over two and a half hours. We eventually left the venue with ringing ears just five minutes before midnight.

Kylie at Bercy
Tiny Minogue

But mostly we just enjoyed being in Paris, enjoyed the sun, enjoyed wearing our shorts again, enjoyed eating cheap set menus in the Latin Quarter and enjoyed dodging the Gayelord Minceurs and the strangely bestial adverts for Orangina.

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Paris in the spring. Highly recommended.

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01
May
2008
Categories
Journal, Travel, Work

Back from Morocco

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The bonus of backdating blog posts is that you can write up your notes when you get back from travelling and post them on the appropriate day.

The downside is that anyone using a browser rather than a feed reader will probably miss them by not scrolling down past postings that then appear above them.

So as it took the best part of a week to get my notes from Morocco online, here’s a link to the relevant entries for browser-based readers who probably won’t have seen them:

Day one: An introduction to sweet mint tea.

Day two: The Souq, the square and boiled cows’ heads.

Day three: Over the mountains by 4×4, donkey polo, and checking your bed for scorpions.

Day four: Hold-ups in Casablanca.

24
Apr
2008
Categories
Journal, Travel, Work

Notes from Morocco: Day Four

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We are woken up by the musicians. They come stamping around the camp shortly after seven, standing by the flap of each tent and banging their drums. It certainly beats the hey-hey-hey Mickey Mouse message they played down the phones on a press trip to Disneyland Paris a couple of years back.

Today we were leaving. Not just the camp, but Morocco, too. The 4×4s had disappeared late yesterday afternoon, and now we were loaded onto a couple of dusty mini-buses and driven back down from the plateau and onto a fairly good road that took us back to the city in less than an hour.

When you use the good roads – like this one – you really see how different Morocco is to home. We passed by a boy at the side of the road sitting on an oil drum. All around him were ranged a series of smaller cans full of petrol he was selling, perhaps for the bikes that would never make it from one well-spaced station to the next. And there were no hoardings, either, save for the occasional notice of a coming development. There were no Gap billboards or McDonalds arches, no designer labels, and certainly nothing offering two of anything for the price of just one. It was quite refreshing.

The airport was less-so. Its bland, dingy terminal one is being renovated, with a beautiful entrance hall and a solar power plant, but the actual area where you queue and wait for your plane is nothing special. The x-ray people gave our bags a cursory glance and they told us to walk through the metal detectors without emptying our pockets. They beeped, of course, but the guard that stood beside them just rubbed his hands briefly across us, and never asked for an explanation of any wallet, key or belt bumps.

The whole airport felt unnaturally relaxed and laid back when you knew how frenetic the city it served was, just a couple of miles across an olive grove.

We put down in Casablanca, to drop people off and fill their seats with new passengers, and our 25 minute stopover turned into a 90 minute delay as an argument broke out at the back of the cabin between the ground and air crews. It was something to do with the forms the man from the ground crew kept waving close to their faces, but nobody seemed to want to sign them.

A compromise was arrived at, eventually, and the doors were close and we moved just slightly.

‘I’m sorry,’ said the captain, speaking over the intercom. ‘It seems that our slot is no longer available at Heathrow, and we’re going to be delayed.’

A collective groan rang out through the plane, which I suspect was less to do with the delay and more with his fibbing. Our slot was probably lost over an hour before, though no fault of Heathrow.

I think I preferred out over-honest pilot coming over.

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