The Anonymous Widower

David and Samantha Cameron Set a Dangerous Precedent

If I go back three years or so, C and I would often take a weekend away by flying from Stansted and staying in a good, well-reviewed, but not necessarily over expensive  hotel.  In fact in the year she died, we did it three times to Nice, Majorca and Valencia.

So it was good to see David and Samantha Cameron doing exactly the same thing last week to celebrate her fortieth birthday.

But have they set a dangerous precedent?

Wow betide a politician, who takes an expensive break, except in the summer! The tabloids will have a field day. 

I particularly like their flying on budget airlines.  So they did fly Ryanair one way and easyJet the other, but I suspect this was probably mre to do with fooling the press and security than anything else.

We perhaps will never see the Queen on a budget airline, but there have been many reports of her travelling to Kings Lynn for Sandringham on the train from King’s Cross. As I’ve regularly used First Class on that line, I may have actually sat in a seat she has used.

April 8, 2011 Posted by | News, Transport/Travel | , , , , | 4 Comments

Welcome to the United Kingdom

If I thought Gatwick was a disgrace going out, it was only because I hadn’t tried it going in.

It was like entering a building site and it was a long walk to passport control, which seemed to have been set up by vaguely clearing an area of the site. I’ve seen better facilities in countries that are very much less wealthy than the UK.

There was no signage to the trains and yet again trains south of the Thames were very badly organised.  It appeared that I needed to go to Platform 1, but after getting to the platform and finding one of the invisible staff, he said I needed Platform 4 for London Bridge.

To be fair the train arrived on time and there was a 141 bus waiting to take me home.

If you compare Gatwick to St. Pancras, it’s like comparing a twenty-year-old Skoda with a modern Jaguar.

It’s the last time, I’ll use that dump.

March 31, 2011 Posted by | Transport/Travel | , , | 2 Comments

A Fast Ferry Home

It may have been run by a company called Fast Ferries, but it still took four hours to get me from Tinos to Rafina on the Greek mainland.

A Fast Ferry

I hadn’t eaten any food since a very good moussaka on the Sunday at lunch time and as I left early for the ferry, I didn’t get any breakfast.  At least a supermarket was open on Tinos, at which I was able to purchase a couple of bananas. Where would coeliacs be without them?

On the ferry it was just coffee and chocolate and there weren’t even any Greek salads.

It didn’t get any better at the airport either, as there wasn’t anything in the cafes which didn’t have a large slug of gluten.  No Greek salads and not even any of those sesame snacks you usually find in Greece.

So I had a choice of either getting the midday easyJet flight or retreating to Athens and getting a flight on the next day.

I chose the flight, as it appeared there were quite a few seats and as it turned out, two of us had three seats for the journey to Gatwick.

So the flight was good value because of the extra room.

I was also back home in good time.

March 31, 2011 Posted by | Food, Transport/Travel | , , , | 1 Comment

Gluten Free in Greece

In some ways being gluten-free in Greece is easy.  On my recent trip, I found several restaurants that could do me an excellent gluten-free meal.

I had no trouble in Athens, Syros or Mykonos and Tinos for lunch, but it turned a bit dodgy on Sunday evening on the last island.

I think it was partly due to the early time in the season, but there wasn’t really any restaurants open on my last night in Greece.  As I was catching an early boat in the morning, back to Athens, I skipped supper.  It didn’t really matter, as I’d had a large moussaka, for lunch.  As I didn’t have any reaction to it,  I can assume it was safely gluten-free, as the owner had assured me. And as moussaka should be!

It was on the boat this morning that I was reduced to drinking coffee and eating jce cream again, as that was all that was safe. There was no fruit, but I did have two bananas with me, that were the only gluten-free snack in the supermarket at Tinos.

At Rafina I got a bus to the airport and bought a ticket to London on easyJet, as it was a quarter of the cost of a BA one. But there was nothing that wasn’t gluten-free at the airport.  Not even any chocolate or fruit.

Since I last few easyJet a few years ago, their menu has broadened, but not in the gluten-free area, although on some flights there are halal and kosher dishes.  I have a feeling one of the latter might be gluten-free, but it didn’t say so.

In the end it didn’t really matter, as I was home around six and had plenty of time to pop to Carluccio’s in Upper Street.

I think next time, I need some sun, I’ll go to Italy.

On previous trips, I’ve often bought sesame biscuits and I can buy them in my local deli.  But I didn’t see any anywhere! Why?

March 28, 2011 Posted by | Food, Transport/Travel | , , , | Leave a comment

Why Does Anybody Use Gatwick?

To get to Athens, I used the 9:00 easyJet flight out of Gatwick. It was a mistake in that to get this flight I needed to leave home about seven to get the train to the airport. For a similar flight to Heathrow or Stansted, it would have been a little bit later.

To make matters worse no-one seemed to be able to tell me what ticket I needed, as of course I can get to the Zone 6 Boundary on my Freedom Pass. As also finding the right platform at London Bridge or Victoria is a nightmare, I decided to take Thameslink from St. Pancras. In theory it should have worked well, but because of the miles you have to walk in the tunnels at King’s Cross, I missed one train and had to wait twenty minutes. I suspect the designer of the new King’s Cross was some sort of sadist, as although it may have more capacity, it defintely puts you off changing trains at the station. I had hoped to catch a 56 to City Thameslink from home, but they had gone missing.

And then of course the train was delayed coming into London Bridge, so I got to Gatwick a few minutes late.

I checked in reasonably quickly and security wasn’t too bad.  But if I’d had to take my shoes or belt off, I’d have thought seriously about abandoning flying again.  I was only carrying one back-pack and I wouldn’t with anything more.

I was fairly late for the gate and it was queues and no seating, when I got through the last check. 

But we did get away from Gatwick just a few minutes late.

Let’s face it, if I fly again, I’m not going out of Gatwick.

March 23, 2011 Posted by | Transport/Travel | , , , | 6 Comments

Off to Athens

I’m just leaving for Athens for a few days.

We’ll see how it goes!

March 22, 2011 Posted by | Transport/Travel, World | , | 1 Comment

The Times Saturday Magazine.

I usually read this from cover-to-cover as I take the train to the football, like I did on last Saturday.

It had two particularly good articles, that I will highlight here.

Melanie Reid was on her usual top form and was particularly annoyed that her story had been hijacked by the Christian Right. I prefer to call them the Christian Wrong, as when it comes to moral philosophy, any that calls itself right, is probably not open to criticism from a scientific-correctness point-of-view.  If Jesus did exist, and in my view if he did, he was just one of a number of good moral philosophers that are always around, then he wouldn’t be on the right like Sarah Palin and the Mad Hatters.

Carol Midgley was ranting about airport duty-free shopping.  She was absolutely right and it should be banned. Many duty-free purchases are carried half-way round the world and how much carbon dioxide does this add to the atmosphere? You also have the madness that say Scotch Whisky is air-freighted to places like Hong Kong for sale in duty-free shops there and then bought by Scots and other UK residents for the flight back.

February 28, 2011 Posted by | News, Transport/Travel | , , , | 1 Comment

Hail the Hercules

The title of this post is pinched from The Meccano Magazine of the 1950s.  I used to get it every month and it was very much part of my education.  As an aside here, does anything similar still exist?  I doubt it and could this be why our engineering and scientific education perhaps isn’t what it should be.

One particular edition  described the then new Lockheed Hercules or C-130 to give it, its US military designation. This was probably in about 1954, as the Hercules made its first flight in that year.

Today it is reported that the UK government has some RAF Hercules in Malta to extricate British nationals from Libya. So yet again, a nation is turning to an ageing design for its emergency transport needs. The RAF used them in Dhaka to get British nationals out during the war that saw the birth of Bangladesh, get people and supplies to the Falklands and into Sarajevo and the Israelis famously used them at Entebbe.

There are some designs that are timeless and will probably always be with us.  The Hercules is definitely one.

February 24, 2011 Posted by | News, Transport/Travel | , , | Leave a comment

The Jumbo Jet on Top Gear

I have been curious about the 747 Jumbo, that appears in the background of many of the scenes on Top Gear. I just wondered how it got there and I found the story of G-BDXJ on Wikipedia. It was originally called City of Birmingham.

Now, I had thought that a 747 of this name had been involved in the Jakarta Incident, where the aircraft lost all power because of volcanic dust from Mount Gulunggung.  But it was actually called City of Edinburgh and the story of the flight is one of my favourite books, called All Four Engines Have Failed by Betty Toothill, who had been a passenger on the flight. It is a marvellous study of adversity and how to come through it unscathed.

The captain of the aircraft, Eric Moody, will go down in history as giving the most understated  instructions as a disaster was unfolding.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get them under control. I trust you are not in too much distress.

We would all hope we could be so cool under pressure.

There is also a happy ending to the story, in that nobody was killed or even hurt. But also the author of the book, Betty Toothill got married to a fellow passenger.

This surely, is a story that deserves to be made into a film.

Sadly, I have lost my copy of the book.

February 13, 2011 Posted by | Transport/Travel | | Leave a comment

Charges for Credit Cards

A super complaint is going to the Office of Fair Trading about excessive credit card charges by companies, such as budget airlines and on-line retailers.

The only time I’ve paid one lately was with theTrainLine. I don’t use them, as they overcharged me by £9.20 to get to York.

These charges should be banned, as if I use my card in Waitrose, Marks and Spencer, Carluccios or Pizza Express,  they don’t charge, so why should an airline or an on-line retailer?

February 11, 2011 Posted by | Business, Finance, Transport/Travel | , , | 2 Comments

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