Paris looks its best at night. The city is beautiful anyway, but when the sky is dark and the best of its buildings are lit up they really come into their own.

We left Lyon on a late morning train that got us back to the capital in time for lunch overlooking the Seine, a walk down to the Statue of Liberty and then the metro out to the Bois de Boulogne. Not been there in ages, but I do remember the shady ladies hanging around in the trees as they tout for business. I’m quite glad we were on Velibs which means we could ride away faster than they could totter in their impossibly high heels.

I say ‘quite glad’ because it wasn’t an entirely good experience hiring bikes. In principle it’s a great idea. There are bike stations all over the city so you can check one out at the start of your trip and then check it back in somewhere else when you’re done. The bikes are easy to ride and well maintained, but the actual check in/out system is a seriously convoluted process.

Or perhaps the translations were just a bit off.

Either way it took us ages to get Rich’s bike logged back into the system and even with mine we had to log out and then back in again to be sure, so I don’t think we’d do that again.

We were glad to be rid of them by the time we were done, and jumped on a metro back into the centre for dinner.

Pyramid at the Louvre

Neither of us was particularly hungry after a week of good food, but we headed back into the Latin Quarter for a cheap menu and found a little restaurant where they had cats roaming around under the tables then shot off with our cameras as soon as we had paid for one last walk around the city.

Up past Notre Dame, pass by the Pompidou Centre, down to the Louvre to squat down by the pools as everyone else lay on their edges and looked up at the stars, and then home by way of Montmarte, which seemed to have turned off its lights, so no photo opportunities up there.

Notre Dame

All very touristy.

Saturday – today – a walk through the flea markets and lunch and a train home. A bit of a shocking return to reality. After quiet, comfy TGVs we were back on the Eurostar with badly behaved British children running up and down the aisles, British parents leaving over the backs of their seats to talk to each other and a woman with a very flimsy grasp of French translating her paper’s obituaries into English.

Would rather be back in Lyon.

Pompidou Centre

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Last time I was in Lyon was 2003. We were chasing some lost train tickets and only discovered the best bits – the proper old town – a day before leaving. This time, forewarned and forearmed, that’s where we spent a lot of our time.

We walked and walked and walked, which is probably harder to do in Lyon than it is in Paris because it’s so much more hilly. You have the silk district – Croix Rousse – and the hill up to Fourviere and the huge church (accurately described as a dead elephant with its legs up in the air), each of which require some hefty calf work.

So anyway, we arrived on Tuesday after the kind of train journey you’d never get at home. Comfortable seats, quiet carriages, perfectly behaved kids, a service that runs according to some kind of timetable… it was almost a shame to arrive. Particularly as the areas around Lyon’s stations are so dumpy.

Anyhow, we checked into our room and went exploring. Who would have known that Lyon would be such a catch for Art Deco buildings. I remembered the old Pathe cinema, of course, but look at this friendly building.

Oh, hai!

That sits out at the end of the little skyscraper district on the Part Dieu side of the river where you can live in great looking buildings like this:

Art Deco architecture, Lyon

And in the evenings you can take the metro into town and watch a film at this great-looking cinema, complete with a golden crowing cockerel on the top of its tower:

Pathe cinema, Lyon

We didn’t do that, of course. We were too busy walking and eating. Lyon is rightly famous for its gastronomy and we had some excellent meals, but it’s pretty lame if you’re a proper vegetarian. I ate fish twice a day every day. Not that that was a problem as it was universally excellent. We ate lunches outside in the sun on the huge Place Bellecour, and dinners outside in the old town on wobbly little tables perched precariously on the street cobbles.

We did give in to our aching feet once – when we took the funicular up the hill to the basilica. You can’t help but notice this enormous white building as it dominates the skyline, looking down on the city and the river. It’s a cool refuge from the sun at the height of the day, and right by the Roman ruins, which have stood over the city for a couple of thousand years and are in surprisingly good condition. Particularly when you consider they’re free to enter and you can clamber all over them (although you do get shouted at if you climb up anything properly perpendicular).

Traboule courtyard, Lyon

Highlights of Lyon? Rather shamefully it was probably the food, which I didn’t think I’d say as we trained out to Les Halles, which is supposed to show off the city’s culinary delights but fell short of the same in Nimes.

Still, pike souffle can do a lot to win you over. Particularly when it’s followed by Terrine de Pain Perdu Brioche – effectively a very naughty, rich, sticky bread pudding made with brioche. I need to find out how you make it.

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Last year was the first in about 15 that I didn’t make it to Paris, so it was good to get back – even if it was just for a few days either side of heading down to Lyon.

We had initially been planning on a trip to the ballet. Dad’s suggestion on account of the fact that there was something he wanted to see and we had never been, so he came up by train from the south and we did the same from the north via the tunnel and we met in the middle.

Without any ballet tickets.

Turns out it’s incredibly difficult to get your hands on any as there are all sorts of restrictions on who can buy what and when. There is even one day in the booking cycle when it is only open to foreigners and non Paris residents which strikes me as a bit unfair.

Opera Garnier where we would have, but didn’t, see the ballet

Rather unfortunately it coincided with Eurovision. I hadn’t realised this when I booked the train – stupidly – so our first job on arriving on Saturday evening was to find our hotel, dump our bags and then race to the Marais, which seemed the most likely place to find anywhere showing it.

But you know what? It turns out French bars aren’t all that hot on Eurovision. We found two showing it, but only one had the sound turned on. The other was showing the pictures on a telly in the corner with boppy music over the top.

Anyhow, we holed up in the one bar that was showing both halves of the programme and gently sweated through two and a bit hours of songs before hot-footing it back to the hotel for the voting.

Watching is back we didn’t miss much on the interval act although we would like to have heard the UK commentary as it became more and more abundantly clear that we were heading for last place again. Can’t say I’m entirely surprised: the performance was fine but the song didn’t really grab me the way it did Rich.

I wish I understood more of what the commentators were saying as they got very giggly at the national judges giving their scores.

Rooftops of Paris

Anyhow, we met dad the next morning and spent the next couple of days with him, eating cheap meals on the Rue Mouffetard (Bistrot Gourmand, since you ask – €9 for three courses) and training it out to La Defense, which Rich hadn’t seen before. Last time I was there I was late for a meeting at the top of the Grande Arche after my hotel TV, which I’d set as the alarm, helpfully came on muted. Next thing I know, frantic calls to see where I was and several arguments with taxi drivers who were averse to the very idea of heading towards Defense in the rush hour because of la circulation.

No such trouble this time around, leaving us time for a slow walk east through the tall buildings back to the metro by which we hot-footed it to Le Printemps for tea under the dome.

Well, that’s changed somewhat. Gone are the nice old mirrors and the brassware. It’s been considerably moderened up since I was last there ten or so years back and I’m not sure it’s for the better. The one thing they haven’t changed, of course, is that glorious glass roof, and the addition of mirrors on the tables, which I don’t remember from before, is a good one as it means you can easily look up by looking down, so no need to crane.

The dome inside Printemps

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Low Row

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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.

Technorati Tags:
trains, national+express, national+express+east+anglia

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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.

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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…?

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