Category: Travel Knowledge

Tips for Travellers: The Greenhouse, Llantarnam, Wales.

Missing: the Menu.

We came out for a family meal a couple of days after Christmas and whilst we were met with a friendly staff welcome, the menu was noticeable by a series of absences: most of the local beers were missing, the mash had gone AWOL and the taste of the chicken dishes had been obliterated by some over-zealous over-heating.

The fun game for the evening was second guessing what HAD stayed on the menu and I was reminded of the old Monty Python Cheese Shop sketch where the hapless customer found himself in a futile search for a variety of cheeses only to be met by an ever increasing array of excuses about why the aforesaid cheese was not available. So a fun filled evening was had by all, although not in the way the owners may have intended.

Tips for Travellers: The Furness Railway, Barrow in Furness, Cumbria.

Revisting Old Haunted Haunts.

The Furness Railway is perhaps one of the most evocative, curious and welcoming pubs in Barrow. Seemingly open at all times to all customers, I’ve never heard them say no to any customer, whatever the time of day or nature of the request.

The food is cheap and cheerful; the beers cheap and surprisingly good and the staff welcome unfazed by some of the more feral members of the community who might inadvertently tip their beer over your head.

It might be a part of some large anonymous chain, but the Furness Railway is a unique experience at all times of day to all types of customer. It’s a ‘must-go-to’ haunt in one of England’s most haunted towns.

Don’t leave Space to the Professionals!

At last, Space, the final frontier between the knowing (the nudge nudge wink wink of the ironic inverted commas) and the unknowing has finally been breached.

In his work on MoonGolfing, Tim Wright sums up the next era of the space race: or rather the space trudge given many of us aren’t fit enough to race anywhere, never mind into space: Don’t leave Space to the Professionals!

The next era of the space trudge will be its democratisation; the time when any old Joe will be to take one small step for man, and an even smaller step for mankind.

By writing the professionals out of the picture, Tim Wright has joined a long line of illustrious contemporary thinkers whose premise is that any profession is too important to be left to the professionals: this includes teaching, artists, historians, and now thankfully, space invaders. Want your kids to have a decent education? Write the teachers out of it. Want to make art? Don’t employ an artist. Want to write history? Just make it up as you go along.

The end of professionalism in the space industry can only be a good thing in the end as it will mean governments will have to engage communities in deciding what kind of rocket they want on their doorstep. An Atlas 125 madam? Complete with twin powered nuclear explosive devices discreetly hidden under the bonnet? That’ll do nicely.

The private sector will no doubt be able to put a man into space for a fraction of the cost that those fat cats in the public sector earn. Whether they can bring that man back to Earth in one piece is another matter altogether and is but a trivial issue in the bigger vision of the democratisation of space.

No, there’s no doubt about it: leaving space to the professionals has resulted in the human race diverting millions upon millions of unnecessary dollars, rubles and rupees in activities which are as scientifically illuminating as landing a washing machine on a comet some trumpty doodle zillion mega aeon year lights away and then watching it bounce big into space, stuck on its spin rinse cycle.

The sooner the likes of you and me can make our mark on the overwhelming nothingness that is the universe, the better.

Coming Closer to Home: what it’s like to live upside down.

When we were kids we’d occasionally get perplexed about how people could live upside down in Australia and not fall off the planet.

Having two European guests, Anton and Srdjan,  take root in your home town, courtesy of a Youth in Action Grant, makes you realise that up-side-down-ness isn’t about gravity at all but much more about how you drink, eat, navigate local traffic and your own national identity within the wider European maelstrom of identities.

Hosting European guests has many pleasures to it – showing them your favourite pub topping the list of course – but the most entertaining one is looking at them looking at us and finding out that it’s a perpetual source of amusement for them.

The most obvious example is of course the fact that we Brits drive on the wrong side of the road, compared with most of the rest of the world. There are a lot of early visit gags about the lads sitting in the wrong car seat and pretending to drive with imaginary steering wheels and hammering imaginary brake pedals in pseudo emergency stops. No-one’s hurt though and there’s no damage down.

English beer is also a source of wonder and bemusement. Not only does it have no head to it but it also tastes of bread according to Anton.  Or is something that would be fed to the pigs in the summer, if you lived in Srdjan’s home town. The idea that we drink this stuff at all leaves the boys incredulous.

Things get more complicated when we talk about what constitutes typical English food. The road the boys live on is awash with Chinese, Greek, Turkish, Italian and Indian takeaways and when we point out that the most popular meal in the country is Tandoori Chicken, this too provokes a lot of head scratching, puzzled looks and eventual boredom when we discuss some of the consequences of being an ex-colonial power.

Perhaps our up-side-down-ness is something that we should recognise and enjoy more frequently. It would allow us to challenge all sorts of international orthodoxies like McDonalds, Starbucks and NATO for instance. We could cheerfully opt out of some of the tackier sides of modern day living with the reason that we’re an upside down kind of nation and still haven’t fallen off the planet despite the gravitational pull of the large multinational conglomerates.

There are lots of benefits to being funded by the EU: and realising that you live most of your life upside down is probably one of the best.

An amazing taxi offer! Yes, you heard it right…

I know have a habit of banging on a lot about the wonders of contemporary taxi drivers and minicab firms and how little they know about anything at all: but at last, I have found a firm who know a whole lot more about the world: ie where they are in it, where you are in it, how to get you from A to B in the shortest possible time at the lowest possible cost in a manner which is civilising and civilised.

I know it sounds too good to be true: a taxi firm which knows what it’s doing!  But its Christmas after all, and now is the season to expect miracles. So, thank you, UGO Cabfinder!

You can find out about it here.

UGO’s message of pre booking cabs is in line with TFL’s ‘cabwise’ advice which you can find here.

Here’s a lovely graphic to accompany all of the above too!

HS2: does it matter that it’s an unknowable phenomenon?

“Who’s right and who’s wrong?” asked the orange tanned young woman of her six and a half foot track suited skin head boy friend as they were waiting for the bus.

Were they talking about the vague ties of family kith and kin? Or recent events in the HS2 saga? Or the vagueries of post modern knowledge? Were they wrestling with contemporary epistemological challenges about how we know what we know and who knows what they’re talking about? Who indeed is ‘right’ and who is ‘wrong’?

I tried broaching the subject with them both as we muscled our way past the mums with prams, lads with bikes and senior citizens sporting shiny new roller blades.

Travelling by bus has changed beyond all recognition I mused, they’ve turned into freight transportation for lesser forms of transport, hijacked by the mass transport equivalent of the cuckoo.

No longer is it possible just to get on a bus and meet other people. They now have their own internal highway control processes: bikes go there, prams go there, wheelchairs have to put up with whatever the driver determines and the mere passenger scrabbles around for whatever’s left. The bus driver does at least know he is no longer driving a bus but a Scalectrix track on wheels.

Doris and Gyorgi I later learnt were indeed struggling with the state of knowledge, not least the reliability or otherwise of bus time tables. Like Doris pointed out, “they’re shite those timetables”.

It’s the challenge of the modern day traveller – how do you know what you can rely on when it comes to going from A to B? George Stephenson didn’t have that problem back in 1830 when he invented the first intercity railway: he knew nothing, and he knew it. He had a plan of sorts but even then the first train was three months late leaving the platform -a phenomenon which has clearly taken root in the DNA of the British rail network ever since.

And what about HS2? What can anyone truly know about what that is or will be? The budget falls apart daily; the unintended consequences multiply like rabbits in a field looking at a stationery Virgin Pendolino and the route hops from one village to another depending on which village feudal baron shouts the loudest and is able to cajole their villagers into brandishing enough pitchforks in the general direction of Richard Branson.

The sad fact about HS2 is that for all our speculation, we know nothing whatsoever about it: its budget, its route, it’s timetable or the colour of its livery. It would be better for all concerned if they acknowledged their complete ignorance, threw up their hands and admitted it’s a terrifically ludicrous project and damn the expense and the disruption and the egos and the politics and the legacy.

At least if they employed Doris and Gyorgi to run the project, they would have someone who knew what they don’t know and have the orange sun tan, track suit and torn up bus timetables to prove it.

Who should be the public champion for HS2?

The difficulty with the Not-So-H-HS2 campaign is that has still to find its champion – someone who can wave the flag, force the big boys to cough up bucket loads of cash and enchant the good burghers of Great Missenden that property blight is good for them and their grandchildren.

Some have suggested that they need the equivalent of Seb Coe. This is difficult for the Not-So-H-HS2 campaign because Seb lead the Olympic campaign dance over a mercifully brief 7 years from the announcement in Singapore to the closing ceremony in Stratford when Russell Brand cavorted amongst the drug free athletes in a drug fuelled frenzy with his acolytes and assorted celebs.

Not so the Not-So-H-HS2 campaign who have the unenviable task of keeping that party going for a mere 30 years. There’s not a figurehead on earth who has that kind of staying power, not even Richard Branson, despite his recent foray into immortality technologies.

No, what Not-So-H-HS2 Ltd need is a mythical figure who can keep the troops rallied and on permanent message well after this, the next and probably the next 6 governments. Someone who will live on well after all of us have been laid up in the sidings.

So – here’s your chance to contribute to the urban myth that Not-So-H-HS2 is turning into. Answers welcome below!

HS2 has nothing in common with the projects of Balnibarbi.

Swift’s Gullivers Travels tells of the Academy of Projectors established by the Balnibarbians: inhabitants of the land of Balnibarbi.

Balnibarbi’s Academy of Projectors was all about developing projects which were aimed to improve society.

They included a man who spent eight years extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, another whose project plan was to reconstitute human excrement back to its original food components and another who had designed a new method for building houses, by starting at the roof, and working downwards to the foundations.

Clearly ingenious people, the future grandchildren of the Bainibarbians are not related to those who have brought forth the master project to end all projects, the not so H of the HS2 rail project.

HS2 would not be a suitable subject for Swiftian satire, rooted as it is in rigorous thinking, exemplary planning and water tight financial projections.

Banging on about HS2: how can we help them prevent a PR disaster?

The HS2 team held a PR event in Liverpool recently where assembled movers, shakers and hangers on were invited to hear the latest news on the HS2 developments. About 50 of us gathered expectantly to hear what it’s really all about Alfie, and to get it straight from the horses mouth.

To say it was a non event would be kind to non events. There were a couple of short introductory speeches – the first of which apologised for the name of the project – HS2 – and made it clear that there would be nothing particularly HS about HS2 as it was much more about moving freight off the roads, on to the rails and down the current West Coast line. The need for the new line was as much about providing capacity for passengers to travel at speeds greater than 15mph – the average speed they would be travelling if they were stuck behind a mile long freight train carrying glass from St Helens to the city of London.

The second contributor marvelled at the current 15 apprentices who are currently were working on the designs of the line. He pointed out, this project could last their life time and it would be more than likely that they would be grandparents by the time the line was operational.

That fact sobered many of us in the room as it became clear that we were being asked to endorse a project which would outlive us, and perhaps even our children. The project will be alive and kicking when many of us in the room will be consigned to our graves, ashes urns or deep at the bottom of the sea – or even under the rails at Rainford for the enthusiasts amongst us.

The final contribution to the non-event was a glossy promotional video which showed a lighting fast cartoon train whizzing through an empty countryside in all its shiny happy people mode. The absence of people in the video emphasised one of the core problems to the HS2 marketing campaign. It doesn’t have any people in it who will be alive when the line supposedly opens. It’s emphasising its audiences mortality with a ya boo sucks approach – this project is more important than you here and now, and more important too than your children and grandchildren in the there and then.

What’s it all about Alfie is freight, freight and yet more freight trundling through the countryside at the dead of night, rattling by the graveyards of the movers, shakers and hangers on who are currently being asked to cough up in TB type spasmodic fits for its ever spiralling costs.

One way to prevent a PR disaster would be for the team to be honest about the purpose of HS2 and acknowledge that not many of us are going to be around to see the first train leave the new Manchester station which will be built just outside Skelmersdale some time in 2033.