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We all decamped to the John Snow after work. Laura left on the last day before Christmas but by that time most of us had left for our holidays, so there was nobody to sign her card, give her the Liverpool shirt we’d bought and had her name printed onto, or drink to her health and future.

Tonight we did all that.

She was talking about her new job and it sounds like the dream assignment. She’s the deputy editor of a James Bond magazine and all of her fact-checking jobs involve watching the films at high speed. Much more entertaining than checking motherboard layouts on obscure Taiwanese web sites.

The south pole interview for the 24th January show is starting to look difficult. The British Antarctic Survey only gets three email deliveries a day, apparently, so they wouldn’t be able to take part (that’s all part of the mysterious plan, you see). They very helpfully put me on the their Australian and American counterparts, though.

The Australians are based in Tasmania, which is a definate possibility as I don’t have anyone lined up for Australia yet, and the way the show is being planned it will fit in very well at around the same time as the interviews with Korea and Japan.

The American Survey sounded far more interesting, though, since it is actually right on the very point of the South Pole. I guess they got there first and managed to bag the best spot - a bit like putting your towel on a sun lounger by the pool before breakfast.

They sound like they’re up for it, but the permanently-on email connection of which my British contact spoke is apparently not quite as uninterrupted as I would have hoped…

Well unfortunately, the kink in the logic is that the Pole does not have e-mail 24/7 but only during a period of the day when there is a satellite window to facilitate. So I don’t know likely this is to work. Let me look into it.

So, a possible hitch there, but I’m taking the ‘Let me look into it’ as a reason for optimism.

On another international note, I had a play around on the German railway site I’d used to plan the holiday around France last year. I want to go to St Petersburg (Russia, not Florida) in February and thought it would be more fun to do it by rail than by air.

It’s possible, but it takes a long time. I did enjoy the trains around France, though, so as far as I am concerned the travelling would be part of the holiday. Paul and I were planning on training it across Canada a couple of years ago, so this will be nothing compared to that.

By my reckoning, I could make it from Chelmsford to St Petersburg in just over two days (50 hours, 31 minutes to be precise). It would be a mamouth journey, but I’d see some great sights, passing through Brussels, Cologne, Berlin, Frankfurt, Warsaw and the rather amusing sounding Brest Central, where I’d have to wait an hour and a half to change trains.

Even just thinking about it I’m getting excited. It’ll probably cost more than flying, though, so I’ll need to look at the finances carefully and work out how much I’ll save by getting sleeper cabins on a couple of the trains instead of booking into hotels along the way.

Perhaps I’ll stop off in Warsaw on the way home…

This entry was posted on Friday, January 11th, 2002 at 11:55 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.