Well, there’s the views and then there’s the chance to get wine 24 hours a day (and sometimes for free). Oh yeah, and the occasional decent movie. (Watched The Ides of March today. Recommended.)
This photo was taken 5 minutes after take-off from Domodedovo airport, Moscow.
The new St Pancras station in London, terminus for the Eurostar trains, is definitely the most impressive railway station in Britain and probably ranks among the top 10 in Europe. But for those of us plebs who don’t want to catch the Eurostar, or even the cross-country services north to Sheffield, but the cross-London trains down to the South coast; we are herded down into the basement.
Still, this couple looked kinda cute. And I was only there for five minutes.
It is sometimes said that Oxford Road, Manchester, is the busiest bus route in Europe. Looking at this sight – there are at least 17 buses visible on this shot and I see no reason why the unseen space behind the one in the centre of the picture is occupied by anything different – it is not only easy to believe this, but impossible not to marvel at the mentality of those who think that unregulated public transport is a good idea. Reallocating even one of these buses to the Lake District, say, or a bus-free village in the shires… don’t you think that would be a more productive use of it?
Back from the Lakes yesterday afternoon – and off again today, to Bergen once more.
Yesterday I walked through Skiddaw Forest and talked to no one and had a really good time, felt at peace, part of a natural environment. Today I flew first to Copenhagen then to Bergen and talked to no one and felt isolated, cut off from the world, shuttled through the antiseptic and artificial world of the business traveller. I’m sat now in an anonymous hotel with anonymous food in my belly and while I’m looking forward to, tomorrow, getting on with the next instalment of my work here, today has just been dead time.
A full day travelling. Today’s photographic challenge then: make airports/air travel look interesting or attractive. Here’s my best attempt.
After having got up at 4.30 (Norwegian time – 3.30am UK) to undertake this journey, I wish I could adopt this position on a plane. But I think those days are past.
What irritates me most about the public transport in this country is not the unpunctuality (which tends to be concentrated on certain lines at certain times of the day, and after a while you just learn to avoid them – if you can, of course). No, the thing that gets me the most is the stupid ‘no growth in numbers’ contracts which the train operating companies have signed.As a result, public transport is an utterly backwards industry in which there is actually no business incentive to increase custom. (Undergraduate education is becoming another one.)
There is one, and only one, reason why such a state of affairs is tolerated: it’s because every journey by public transport represents a little redistribution of tax income. The government like collecting tax, so encourage us to use cars, which are enormous sources of tax revenue. They don’t like paying tax back out. so don’t want us to use public transport, which is ‘subsidised’ (I call it ‘invested in’). As a result Britain has the highest public transport costs of almost any country in the world.
But despite everything, it’s still a damn sight better than using a car.
6.52am train in this morning, arrives Manchester 7.40ish. 5.17pm train home, arrives Hebden Bridge – supposedly – about 6pm, except today it was 7 minutes late for no particular reason. Thank God I don’t have to do this every day. Some people do, but it would kill me. (Note the photographer reflected in the window above the head of the napping guy.)
Good morning meeting in Helsinki then off to Tampere on the train for tomorrow’s conference. Wish I could submit more than one photo of Helsinki’s superb 1930s-semi-Stalinist style railway station, but this one will have to do.
To mark the start of its second month, this blog is going international for 3 days – to Finland, as it happens. I wanted to get a shot inside the airport to try to encapsulate the day but they are such intrinsically boring and bland places, and you keep thinking that if you snap away, some security guard is going to come and confiscate your phone. Fortunately while we were on the taxiway waiting for take-off, the evening light shone just so, and something came of the wait.
Being 42 