A Mrs Thatcher moment...

I suppose that I have this in common with a lot of people... I try not to fill my thoughts with Margaret Thatcher. But, earlier today, I thought about something she said 23 years ago.

I'm currently in mainland Europe, where it has snowed a lot...



(This is Mozart, in Salzburg, coping well with the "big freeze". Coping less well with the fact that he appears to be composing with a pencil, something which wasn't invented until 20 years after he died....)

...and here, they deal with the snow really well. It's 6-8 inches deep and the roads and the railways are all fine. Ahem, even the schools were open...

The fast, fairly luxurious, double-decker train from Munich got to Salzburg bang on time...



(...and that's in a different country. Through some Alps. Albeit small ones...)

And, of course, they get it all the time, so they are used to it. But there must be other underlying reasons why we're so rubbish at snow in the UK...

I wondered how, here, the trains were clean and reliable, how there were still conductors and ticket inspectors (plural) on the stations and on the trains, how the snow didn't bring it all to a grinding halt...



(Here at Ostbahnhof in Munich, this man spent the best part of 30 minutes clearing the snow from a platform and looked like he was enjoying it... He had a very substantial looking machine to help, but the two people doing it on our platform just had shovels, so no major investment needed...)

I'd decided that it was probably something to do with it not needing to make a profit; being a nationalised concern for the good of the people! Damn you, Mrs Thatcher, and your privatisation of all the train companies and the break up of the system!!

But it turns out that Deutsche Bahn is a private comany after all, so does need to make a profit. So that can't be it...

Anyway, I aksed Jon, who now lives here in Munich, why he thinks the public transport system is so good, how it manages to employ so many people, make a profit and not let a bit of (the wrong type - any type - of) snow bring it skidding to a halt. He gave a most complete and accurate answer in just three words...

"People use it..." he said.

And of course that makes sense.

When, in 1986, Mrs Thatcher said "A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure," she helped to make sure that, if you have to use public transport in the UK, that's in some way shameful - you're just cattle; too crap to have your own car. She also engineered the system which means that it costs £8 to get to Southampton and back from my house, whereas here, you can travel between Munich and Salzburg (and back) - 180 miles, between countries! - for £5.

Bless her.

(On the down side, the snow here is just something you have to get rid of to make the trains run. It's commonplace, so no-one plays with it - no snowmen, no snowball fights. I don't think that's Thatcher's fault. Probably just miserable Europeans...)

Currency...

After a summer spent computing exchange rates in my head and getting to grips with foreign notes and coins......



(Hong Kong notes: some these appear to have been printed by my bank, which I wouldn't trust to produce anything secure or technical...)



(Australian notes: all of which have a see-thru bit and have gone "polymer" meaning they can be recycled into bins and other stuff at the end of their life...)(not my fingers, by the way...)



(Australian coins: which have kangaroos and koalas and echidnas on the one side, but are reassuringly royal on the other...)



(She looks really grumpy, doesn't she...?)

It seems bizarre to come home and find the money is just as foreign...



2ps and pennies seem to be very prevalent already, but haven't seen the rest yet...



...only in the picture.

If you get asked what's on the front on a ten pence piece, you might hesitate then say "Britannia" or "portcullis" or "lion" or something else really random because we're a bit ignorant about something so common which we handle everyday, yet hardly look at.

Of course, what's really on the front of the ten pence piece is the Queen's head, because that's what's on the front of all the coins (something else most of us forget - the front is really the back and the back is really the front...)

That hasn't changed with the new designs, but the answer to what's on the back of the coins will now always be "a bit of shield...", which might make pub quizzes easier, but surely lacks a bit of variety...

Currently...

Currently have this view...



...as I type, from 25 floors up.

(Ab)Normal service will be resumed here in September. For goings-on in August, see the other side of the world.

OZ -6 (HK -3): Wired up...

I am in the process of not-quite-packing.

This is a procedure which involves gathering together things which might be necessary for my holiday without actually packing them into anything. The suitcase is still in the loft.

It's a very useful phase of the proceedings as I am also getting a number of other jobs done as a by-product. For instance, sorting out my "home file" (a product I swore I would never possess) while trying to find my passport in it. This involved a trip into town to purchase A4 filing wallets (or "slippy dippies" © Chris Kilby 1990s). These were cheap, which is good, because I could have just lifted some "used" ones from work... This led to several hours sorting out contents of aforementioned boxfile and categorising and shredding and wondering why, in the light of the advice I give my Dad, I still have the receipt for a printer I bought in 2001 and threw away in 2002.

Anyway, here is the collection of electronicage I have to take abroad...



USB cable, another USB cable with slightly different end (in white), camera batteries (why it can't take ordinary batteries, that you buy in a shop, I don't know...), charger for camera batteries, earphones for iPod, memory card for camera, USB stick to back up photos to avoid what happened to Tina's Australia photos, socket adapters to turn safe, earthed three-pin plugs into wonkily angled, two-pin, flimsy death-trap plugs, phone charger...

That's the luggage allowance gone then.

OZ -15 (HK -12): Too hot...

I am very excited that it's going to be winter in Australia. I like it being cold. (Actually it won't be cold, but it won't be boiling. It'll be comfortable.)

I've been so busy looking forward to the winter evenings, dark early etc that I totally failed to appreciate how hot it's going to be Hong Kong...

I realise there are ways of coping, but I really don't want to have to wear linen and sandals...

Branded...

I finally went to the Minnellium Dome last night...

Yes, I know, only eight years late, but nearly everything they planned for the minnellium was late. And still doesn't work. It's a British thing.

In those eight years, I've flown over it, driven under it, sailed past it, tubed through it, but never actually been in it.

It's bloody clever actually. On a very narrow peninsula they've managed to thread the Jubilee Line under the Blackwall Tunnels - that's four tunnels under the Thames in total - and construct this very iconic building on top. (Although I suppose it's not really a building - just a big tent - and the buildings underneath it are fairly ordinary.)



And, of course, for about the last seven years of the eight, no-one in their right mind wanted to go there because it was an ill-conceived, publicly-funded white elephant full of crap. It was all cultural - Mind Zone, Body Zone, Spiritual Zone - and no-one wanted to spend their "lee-zhure" time doing all that nonsense, even if it was inside a triumph of civil engineering...

So what happened?

Well, firstly, someone decided it would be better if it were full of things people actually wanted to do - shop, eat, go to cinema, see Bryan Adams in November (OK, not the last one...)

Secondly, someone else decided it would be good if people could actually get there, so they built the aforementioned tube line...

But most important, branding happened.

Someone, probably in what Eddie Izzard calls one of those "4 o'clock in the morning, stroky-beard meetings", came up with the ludicrous suggestion of calling it after a phone company.

O₂ is one of the most successful marketing exercises of all time. The phone company used to be BT Cellnet - deeply untrendy and lagging massively behind the likes of Orange and Vodafone. No clear identity and losing money and subscribers.

But now, the strength of the brand is overwhelming. It can be identified by the subtle blue fade of the corporate colour, the little subscript ₂, the bubbles, Sean Bean being all northern and reassuring on the ads, etc.



And now, not only has it made the Dome very cool and trendy, every person who goes there (23 000 watching Kylie last night, not to mention all the people eating and drinking and watching films) gets the brand lasered right through their eyeballs into their brains at every available opportunity.

The branding is so successful that The O₂ is the only fully commercial organisation to have what is effectively a free advert on that other icon, the tube map...



Now that is bloody clever...

OZ -21: Apparently...

...people do person does read this blog, which is all very encouraging and spurs one on into making a bit of an effort.

With this in mind, I have invested time and coffee in producing the very nascent map below.

It shows the basic route and main destinations and its creation, in that it was bloody hard to do, gives the lie to Google's corporate "do no evil" philosophy (see number 6) and drives a cart and horses through most of its design principles (especially number 3).



(You can zoom in pan about and look at an aerial photo of Heathrow, if you wish...)

I intend to add those groovy little place markers in various colours and styles to bring some actual tourism to what is currently only flights, and they may (or may not) appear on this map (see number 5).

OZ -22: Countdown has begun...

With only three days officially left at work now (but probably about seven or eight left unofficially) and with some other people (who had sensible Easters actually at Easter) having finished work for the summer completely, I thought it was about time to start looking forward to the holidays.



The last time I did this properly was in 2005 when I went off to New Zealand and it's been really good to look back at the blog and the photos from them to remember what we did and saw, what with memory failing through age, early onset Alzheimers etc.



Being as I'm going nearly as far again this time, I have decided to "temperately"* interrupt this blog (no imposition as I haven't written on it since April and no-one reads it anyway...!) and produce a self-contained "interactive postcard" of...







(I really spend too much time on the computer...)



There are several good reasons for this:

1. It's cheaper than phoning people;


2. You don't have to master any foreign language to buy stamps for real postcards (in this case, Australian...);


3. It's a good back-up for all the photos in case the memory card goes tits-up;


4. It saves making a real scrapbook like I used to do when I was little (my OCD meaning that I would only ever buy John Hinde postcards...);


5. It will give Ann Crocker something to read (I still have a dog in my boot that's hers... fluffy, not real, so don't phone the RSPCA...);


6. It will divert attention away from the fact that I have failed Project366 (but kept going longer than some...).

* © Nicola, Pinkney Hydro (someone will get that....)

Welcome to Felpersham...

Hereford is a dump.

It's a grotty, featureless hole, masquerading as a city on account of a (rather small, squat, dirty) cathedral.

You know you are in trouble when the Hereford City Council website offers you this:



...a wonky black and white scan of a map from many years back. You can spend many a happy hour trying to locate the Tourist Information Centre. Go on, try it. I imagine that when you get there, the Tourist Information they offer would be "Go anywhere other than Hereford".

(It is helpful, though, to have the toilets categorised into Male & Female; Male, Female & Disabled; Female & Female Disabled; Male.)

Having just come from Cardiff, which is lively and cosmopolitan, Hereford is like being stuck in the 70s. Nothing opens after 5.30pm. The only things that were open after that? McDonalds, a Pizza Express (which I imagine is the height of sophistication for people in Hereford - "if you're celebrating, sit in the window") and a Beefeater.

If you're Welsh and crossing the border into England for a bit of a day out, say from Abergavenny or Monmouth or Brecon or Llandridnod Wells (Google maps...!) then you are going to be very disappointed. Cerys was right - "Every day, when I wake up, I thank the Lord I'm Welsh..."; the little known next line perhaps being, "Because I don't live in Hereford..."

If I ever go there again it will really be too soon.

Urbi et Orbi...

Not your standard Papal Balcony affair, I'm afraid - just a few Easter things I need to get off my chest.

Stop moving it around...

It's confusing and inconvenient. Last Easter Sunday I was here...

(...where, coincidentally, it was also snowing)

...but that's not twelve months ago to the day - it was actually on April 8. Easter Sunday is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox. This year it's about the earliest it can ever be because the spring equinox was on Thursday and the full moon was on Friday, so here we are. No wonder Tesco had to have their Easter Eggs on display by Boxing Day...

It was stolen by Christianity...

As we all know, the days used in the calculation - spring equinox, all druids and Stonehenge; full moon, all witches and werewolves and magic - are totally pagan things and nothing to do with the crucifixion or the resurrection. This is because Easter was happily going on for donkey's years before Christianity hit Britain - as a celebration of spring, new life, fertility etc... hence bunnies, eggs, chicks. It was a celebration of the goddess of spring and fertility Estre (or Oestre or Ishtar) and the word comes from her. As does the word "Oestrogen"...

"Do you wish to remove unused files?"

I went to Church of England primary school, so stored away in my brain, taking up valuable space, is...

There is a green hill far away
Without a city wall
Where the dear Lord was crucified
Who died to save us all.

We may not know, we cannot tell
What pains he had to bear
But we believe it was for us
He hung and suffer'd there.

He died that we might be forgiv'n
He died to make us good,
That we might go at last to heav'n,
Saved by his precious blood.

I will never need this for any useful purpose again in my life (ie. beyond blogging and quizzes)and yet I can remember it verbatim. I didn't look it up. Some kind of brain clean-up facility is needed, along the lines of the excellent example here...

Even at the age of 8, I remember being bothered about "without a city wall" because I thought that it meant it hadn't got one. It was only a green hill far away, why would it have needed one? Only as my grammatical understanding progressed did I realise it meant "outside the city wall..." (Makes mental note to use this construction more often in everyday speech to confuse people... "Where's Starbucks? Just down the way, without the front doors...")

I'm still bother'd by the whole rhyming of "forgiv'n" and "heav'n" and the sing-them-as-if-they've-only-got-one-syllable thing, both of which happen loads in hymns. I suppose it was because the tunes and the words were probably written by different people, maybe centuries apart, and someone had to crowbar it all together. Maybe if Rice and Lloyd-Webber had done it instead...*

Open the bloody shops...

Why are they closed?

It can't be to force people into church, because it doesn't work...
It can't be an objection to making profit, because all the little shops can open...
It can't be an objection to trading per se, because of car boot sales...

It must just be to remind us about suffering...

Sod health and education and social justice, in the next election I'm voting for whoever sorts the Sunday Trading laws out. Or moving to Scotland.


*Oh...

"Tell me Christ how you feel tonight
Do you plan to put up a fight?
Do you feel that you've had the breaks?
What would you say were your big mistakes?"

They did...

It must be the holidays...

...because emails with this kind of thing in usually go straight in the junk mail. And are usually from Tina. But on this occasion, thanks, Sarah, for wasting a considerable chunk of my Saturday morning! Baaaaa!



I haven't got above Bobbing Bobcat yet; I have only had one coffee though....

Whiteout...

The sun has come out now, but for the last couple of days it's been really cold. -6°C at its lowest and not much above freezing during the day. And foggy!

And this morning, although it hadn't snowed where my Dad lives, it had snowed a couple of miles to the east (closer to Russia).



Now, why couldn't it have done that at Christmas?

Did I miss the pancakes...?

Only just been born, but in Tesco (which seems to have taken over my blog...) He is already dead.

Christmas Repeats....

Penguin...
Reindeer...
Owl...
Polar Bear...
Penguin...
Owl...
Reindeer
Polar Bear...
Polar Bear...

One would have assumed that, with a John Lewis advent calendar, one was investing in quality and, perchance, a little bit of variety.



Seemingly not.

This could be Rotterdam, or anywhere....

It's actually Amsterdam.

Not from my recent visit there, but passing over on the way to Berlin.

Compared with Google Earth's version...



...I don't think it's bad.

But I bet they're not panicking.

PS This is Rotterdam...

Gone Dutch...

I got back from Amsterdam yesterday.

Didn't have time to blog anything while I was there. Actually that's a lie - the one time an internet cafe was immediately apparent, it was also shut due to technical difficulties. Maybe it was waterlogged. Amsterdam is 6.7m below sea-level, so they spend most of Holland's environmental research budget on working out how not to spend their entire lives underwater. (Something which the UK will probably have to start doing after this summer.)

Anyway, here are your Top 10 Dutch Icons as seen over five days...



Bikes and Flowers...
(Millions of bikes everywhere. Where's Katie Meluiliulia when you need her to write a bloody song...)
(Not appreciably more tulips than anything else...)



Canals and Windmills...
(Some canals are crossed by these swingy-style bridges. Water doesn't go foetid or smell as clever Dutch hydrologists have worked out how to refresh it every three days...)
(Windmills are just tourist attractions nowadays. These three have been moved on the back of lorries from various parts of Holland to a kind of Home for Retired Windmills ...)



Heineken and Clogs...
(They don't brew it in Amsterdam any more, they just charge you €12 to go in and look at some old adverts sitting in a Star Trek chair...)
(Man does not spend days hand crafting clogs now, he just puts a big block of wood into big version of machine that copies keys and that makes them for him...)



Red Light District and Narrow Canalside Houses...
(Admittedly a very general, daytime shot of the Red Light District. If you try to take anything more specific or at night time, you might get killed...)
(On bus tour, canal barge tour and cycle tour, three different guides pointed to three different houses and said they were the narrowest in Amsterdam...)



Anne Frank's House and Cheese...
(Never having read her diary, and been berated for not having done, I thought she hid on her own in a tiny attic room. Turns out she hid with quite a large number of family and friends in quite a sizeable granny-annex. I'm not saying that made being Jewish during the occupation any easier, or made her story any less tragic, just exposing my ignorance...)
(Two for the price of one here - the cheesemaker is wearing clogs...)

(I suppose Van Gogh should be in the Top 10 as well. And Rembrandt. But Van Gogh was a miserable bugger by all accounts and Rembrandt was a bankrupt, so they can be 11 and 12 and not worthy of further comment.)

00:01

Because it was the last day of work, and because it was the last time we'd be able to, and because there's a Starbucks, and because we actually wanted to read the book, Cesia and I went to the Harry Potter Launch Party at Borders in Southampton.



Surprisingly, the books were not in this large packing box, which had been in the shop for a number of days, but it does show that the staff at Borders had really made an effort. Bits of the shop were labelled up in "Harry Potter" font, they were playing the soundtrack and they said "Good Evening, Hogwarts" every time they had to use the tannoy. (Which got a bit irritating after a while, especially as the things they said afterwards - "Good evening Hogwarts! Could Rob please call extension 204?" - were, like, totally off-role.)

And they dressed up.



Mad-Eye Moody, very effective; Hagrid, on stilts and not in any way fat enough, less so.

Anyway, we made the dreadful mistake of going to Starbucks to have coffee (which they weren't serving hot, because you need a licence to do that after 11pm, which they didn't have, but were serving iced... ) and then browsed round books which weren't Harry Potter for the best part of an hour, so that when we finally joined the queue to get served, it snaked round the shop, like a snake, right back into Bargains and Romance.



No matter. The countdown to midnight came and went and Minerva McGonagall and a fat bloke with greasy hair (who would have been better as Hagrid) wheeled the real palette of books through to general burblings of excitement...



...and then it must have taken them bloody ages to get the plastic off because the queue steadfastly refused to move for about another half an hour, leaving us stranded with nothing to read but yards of Georgette Heyer.

Past crime and travel and Diana, reverential pause, Princess of Wales, 10-year anniversary remembrance gift books and we finally got there...



...which only left the decision about whether to buy the children's cover or the adult cover. Being as anyone seeing you reading it with an adult cover still knows that you're reading a children's book (even if you don't), this decision was easy.

Back home by 1.30 and read four chapters before dozing off...

So here it is...

...Merry Christmas! Everybody's having fun!



Yup, it's officially Yuletide and it gets earlier every year. The Holiday Inn in Southampton is going for the festive crowd, even though it's only June. It must be time to book!

This pleases me, as I think I probably have Reverse Seasonal Affective Disorder. I like the winter and find summer a bit depressing. But now the longest day is over and the nights are drawing in, it must be time to get your big jumpers out, light the fire, eat hearty soup and cheer up!

So, what do you want for Christmas...?

Haven't I seen that on "Friends"...?

Yes, you probably have...

Most of what you see in New York is familiar to you because you've seen it all before on the television or in films. You can walk round almost any corner and see one of those iconic shots that they slip in for a few seconds to remind you that you're there, even though it's all filmed in a studio in Hollywood.

Friends is a perfect example because it's littered with them... (You can do those accompanying bits of "Ross and Rachel on a break...", "Phoebe slightly weird..." incidental music in your head as you look at them...)



North up 5th Avenue, 16 blocks to Broadway and the Flatiron Building, another 10 blocks to the Empire State Building and another 11 blocks north (and a couple west) to Times Square....



Washington Square Garden (it's rectangular, but is a garden) with its miniature Arc de Triomphe, a staple of the Friends library shots. But you can watch 10 series (on E4 over the course of about a week, probably) and not see any of them actually walking past any of these places.

And, of course, the corner of Bedford and Grove Streets in Greenwich Village.

("Where?" I hear both readers asking...)

You see you'll recognise it now...



It's their apartment building. No honestly, it is...

When you are there, it doesn't look much like it, but that's 'cos you've only ever seen it in 2-D. It was only when I looked at the photo on the digital camera screen that I was sure we were in the right place.

If you just want a sit down and a coffee when you get there, what you might expect some telly-savvy entrepreneur to have rebranded as Central Perk is actually still the very bijou and refined Little Owl restaurant.

So take a flask.

Served by Pat at 8.29am...

It wasn't a pilgrimage, but it wasn't really tourism either. Part of it was curiosity, but not morbid curiosity; part of it was compulsion.

We went to Ground Zero.

And actually, the renewal which is going on there is quite uplifting.

The big hole in the ground is no bigger than the big holes at any number of major construction projects...



...and the things which remind you of why it's there are round the corner or along side streets...





So it really wasn't morbid, at any point. And it wasn't really particularly easy to relate what happened here to what we all watched on television six years ago. Not because I'm heartless or unfeeling, lacking in sympathy or empathy; just because, initially at least, it was like visiting a film set. But, as I realised later, only because up until this point in my life, everything in New York was just a film set.

And then we went into the temporary visitor centre and listened to some of the personal testimonies and looked at some of the belongings of the victims discovered in the wreckage. But it still seemed like a story, something unreal.

But it was the receipt which did it...



Until I found it again on the exhibition website, I'd remembered it from the exhibition as a train ticket, one tiny bit of paper, recovered from the rubble with a few other belongings.

And for me, it was seeing 9/11/2001 on the receipt which actually made it all real. Something which happened to real people on a real day. Served by Pat at 8.29am...