Transport of Delight?

TfL does not, as you might guess, stand for ‘transport fucking lunacy’.  That’s putting it too strongly; but only just.  I will tell the story.

To travel from Romford to Charing Cross, you need to get a train to Stratford and then change to the tube.  So we bought train tickets for that first leg, assuming we’d then clock in to the tube for the rest of the journey. 

Not so.  Without walking for half a mile, exiting the station and then re-entering it and walking the half mile back, there seemed to be no means of paying for the second leg of our journey.  We asked a nice staff man who didn’t see the problem, and indeed there turned out not to be, as we were just waved through by the weary attendant at Charing X on the flash of a bit of roughly right-coloured cardboard.  Lucky.

Z rightly insisted on a more informed approach to the return trip, so we clocked in at Charing X, exited and re-entered at Stratford, and caught a slow train back to Romford.  (Finding that one was a whole different, which I’m too tired to relate in detail.)

The moral, if any, of this story (apart from don’t go to London from Romford without serious forethought) is as follows:

If you are going to bring a lot of different things together under one name, make damned sure the bits add up to the whole, rather than the whole consisting of the bits.

Unmakeupable

Willie Walsh, the CEO of IAG, which owns, amongst others, British Airways, has opined that the best way to fund the third Heathrow runway is to introduce toll roads around  the airport, because otherwise it'd be unaffordable.  'There is no point in having infrastructure if people won't use it because it's too expensive,' he is quoted as saying.  Walsh doesn't specify which roads, but it must be the M4 and the M25, because there aren't any others.  Clearly, this will encourage rush-hour commuters to get value for money by catching aeroplanes instead, won't it?
I imagine, however, that Mr Walsh simultaneously subscribes to the published Airports Commission declaration that this runway will bring some £211 billion of benefits to the British economy by 2050, although it isn't stated with any precision where this bounty will come from.*
Like I said...


* Not, presumably, Sharm el-Sheikh, at least for now.

The Internet of Thinks

Driving back from Wales through the drizzle, lorry spray, lane-hoppers and self-fulfilling prophesies on the traffic displays, I rather fancied one of these driverless cars we hear about.  I know the technology’s not quite perfected yet, but Moore’s Law assures me that it will be by next Friday.

So, I’m wishing I was sitting in the back seat, nodding off while my car navigates the roadworks  between junctions 14 and 13, imagining the near future…

I’ve been down the pub in the next-but-several village, and I know I’m three pints over the limit.  Or four.  Or several.  I can still work a phone, though, so I tap up the SmartCar app and tell Siri: “Car!  Come here!”  Car, of course, knows where ‘here’ is – it’s where the phone is – so she checks her charge, backs out of the car park of some pub in the, or a, previous village and sets off down the lane.

This is when Car’s GPS gets hacked or confused and decides that the best route is via Zeebrugge.  Car makes her way to Felixstowe, crosses the North Sea on a ferry she’s booked through O&P, does a three-point and pulls onto the car deck for the return trip.  Being the precision-engineered artefact she is, she stops exactly 5 millimeters behind the vehicle in front, which then reverses.  Car instantaneously does the same.  Unfortunately, the human driver of the 18-wheeler behind is less precision-engineered, and rams into her backside.

The insurance claim is ongoing.  The latest I heard, the software developer at Goggle was being held to account.  Meanwhile, I’d summoned a driverless Ubre taxi, which delivered me safely to Tavistock, where I was informed by my fridge back in Norfolk that I was getting low on cottage cheese.

Human error?  Yes, it always is.  The question being, which human?

Puglian Pecularities part 2

All right, the food:

Sea urchins.  These were featured in a BBC programme about Puglia a couple of months ago.  Apparently they’re best eaten live, straight from the sea, like oysters.  Sliced and cooked in a pasta sauce, they don’t taste of anything much, except the sea, like oysters.

Supermarket vegetable pricing.  You know how you have to delve through nested layers of blurry pictures on a touchscreen to find an aubergine?  Not in the Famila supermarket in San Vito.  Each item that has to be weighed has its own unique number: Melanzane (aubergines)?  035.  Just put it on the scale, key in the number, out pops the sticky ticket.  Brilliant!

Chickens.  The local chickens are tiny by Brit standards, but one is just right for two people.  And they taste like chickens used to taste in my childhood.  I asked what they were fed on and was told: ‘Quello che c’é’– whatever’s around.  And they’re about €4 each.

Italian meal structure.  It’s now permissible to have less than four courses for lunch. 

But it’s possible to have four courses for dinner.  Ristorante dell’Annunziata (I think) in Ceglie does antipasti (twelve of them!), primo (big bowl of linguine or bean puree), secondo (I chose rabbit stew) and dolce, for €20.  All local fare and recipes.  Carafe of local Primitivo plonk included. 

Puglian Peculiarities

1. The weather was poor by Puglian standards.  On the first Monday night there was a scary thunderstorm, which took out the electricity supply for about fourteen hours.  (We were informed on Tuesday morning that it wouldn’t be back on before 4 p.m.; it was actually restored at 2.30.  This way of exceeding a target is a very Italian phenomenon.)  Then, in week two, the wind kicked in.  If we’d been purely after a lounger-and-pool holiday it would have been a downer, but as it was it got us out and about, dilettante culture vultures.
2. Road signs are idiosyncratic.  You’d think that finding your way through a small town like Carovigno, which is basically a high street surrounded by off-white low-rise suburbs, would be a doddle.  Not so – the signposts clearly say ‘Brindisi’, so you follow them and find yourself in a dead industrial estate, or a litter-strewn cul de sac…  Part of the problem is that they haven’t fully adopted the convention that an arrow pointing vertically means ‘straight on’.  So you get two arrows, one on each side of the junction, one pointing left and one right; if you miss one of these, you erroneously turn left or right.  And finding your way back from this error is an existential challenge.  I swear that they reconfigure the roads whilst I’m executing the seven-point turn.  It took an hour to get out of Otranto onto the coast road and find that gorgeous beach I’d remembered from all those years ago. When I finally got there, it reminded me of Studland.
3. Baroque is everywhere, especially in Lecce.  Those totally bonkers facades, gargoyles, pediments or whatever they are (see photo #1 in the previous post for a snippet) make you wonder what those guys were on.  It surely wasn’t religion.
4. I managed to swim in the villa pool most days – not very far, admittedly, because of my dodgy right arm – but still a breakthrough.  I’d have loved to have surfed in the Adriatic, but that’s not easy when a) the tallest wave is about nine inches and b) I’d forgotten to take my togs.
5. Two-stage plane trips were a first for me.  We changed at Rome going out, Milan on the return, with several hours hanging around in airports – not fun!  But the luggage made it through both ways, which I consider to be a miracle of logistical efficiency. 
6. And I haven’t even mentioned the food…!

 

Highway 55* Revisited

I first visited Puglia in the summer of 1969, during a final tour, backing a singer called Maurizio, in the death throes of what was left of Dave Anthony’s Moods.  We’d come there from the nightmare of the Calabria toe, where in small hilltowns the police patrolled at night in fours, with dogs, and black-clad young women hid their children behind their legs and their faces behind veils at the approach of this bunch of harmless would-be capelloni hippies, and you had to get Davide, the roadie, to persuade a suspicious café to sell you a horsemeat steak.

Puglia wasn’t a bit like that.  Enlightenment was the word I used to myself, back then, and it was a good one: the area was full of light, both literally and figuratively.  I remember a late night conversation with a university student in Lecce, in which he summed up the difference: “They are Arabs, we are Greeks”.  Politically incorrect nowadays, perhaps, and historically broad-brush – Puglia has been invaded more times, by more alien forces, than perhaps anywhere else in Europe, including Britain – but it nailed it at least at one level.

 

So my recent visit was more than just a holiday.  I wanted to discover whether my hazily-recalled impressions from forty-five years ago were still real – was it still the same?  Or rather, did it still feel the same?

Well, the short answer is “Yes”.  I’ll share a few details of the trip next time, but meanwhile here are a few pictures.

*The E55 is the coastal near-motorway (I haven’t been able to discover what the E stands for, as Italian roads are officially A, S, R or P) which runs from Bari in the north to Lecce in the south, and hence will be much travelled by any motorised visitor to Puglia.

Getting Ready

I have a wimpish streak when it comes to getting on an aeroplane.*  I don’t do this very often nowadays, which makes it loom even more threateningly.  In a way, although the procedures are supposed to be much slicker nowadays, what with t’internet and that, I hanker after the good old days when you went up to Meadway Travel, sat down for a couple of hours with an expert called Jenny who did all the legwork and answered all your questions (including the ones you hadn’t thought of); and three days later a fat envelope dropped through the letterbox, you gave the contents a skim, read the bit which told you where and when to turn up and then forgot about it until departure day.  They supplied all the bits of paper which now you have to identify, download and (if you’re lucky and your version of Adobe is the same as theirs – possible but unlikely) print off.  And how is it that my question has never been Frequently Asked?

Anyway, all that’s sorted, so I’m distracting myself with details.  I went to Staples (you know, the wonderful shop where you buy your, erm, staples) for some luggage tags.  (They had a choice of colours, I chose white.)  I went to another wonderful shop called Clas Ohlson, which sells everything you can’t buy anywhere else, and got continental plug adapters, a two-way headphone splitter, and an alarm clock.  I added antihistamine cream and paracetamol to my packing list.  And a penknife.  Never travel without a penknife (in the hold, of course, not the carry-on): as I have noted before, it contains a corkscrew.  You have to be equipped for emergencies when travelling.  Grand Tourists used to have several trunks-full of just-in-case stuff sent luggage-in-advance.

I’m going to Puglia, just in case you wondered.   

 

*Multiply everything by ten when two aeroplanes (consecutive, not concurrent!) are involved.

Best laid plans

It’s been an unusual couple of days, which has to be good.  Unusual is good.  About eleven o’clock Wednesday, as I was finishing my cold coffee and mapping out the plan, which entailed all sorts of domesticity, the phone rang.  Well, there’s an event!

Sam, who’s between jobs and delivering cars around the country to scrape a living, was stuck at Reading station, having missed the train to Newbury by four minutes.  (I was subsequently told that the timetables have been shifted forward by four minutes due to the absence of the scheduled leaves on the lines; I’m not sure I believe this.)  Could I help?  Course I could.  Pick you up at Reading station in about fifteen.

If you’ve been to Reading station recently, you probably need counselling.  There’s been a huge cosmetic makeover, which as far as I can work out has halved the number of platforms whilst doubling the time needed to get between any two locations.  (I’m probably being unfair; after all, they’ve only been at it for three years, hardly enough time to break something which was working fine, let alone repair it.)

I go there rarely nowadays, and he even less, so neither of us was particularly aware of the various  ‘pick-up’ or ‘drop-off’ points.  We had a hilarious series of phone conversations – “What can you see?”  “Cars in a car park.”  “I can see a pub called, um –“  “You’re in the wrong place…” “So are you!” – before we finally hooked up and set off for Greenham Common.  We had a really good chat, which wouldn’t otherwise have happened. 

Next day, Bee phoned me to let me know that someone had done a bit of road rage and seemed to want to reverse into her as she was parking, so she’d switched on her hazard lights, seen the aggressor off and caught the train to London.  When she got back six hours later, the hazards were still on, but the car battery  wasn’t.  She called the rescue people and spent some time wandering round Waitrose until they called back to suggest that she’d best be getting a taxi home. 

The taxi driver, on learning of her predicament, suggested that, instead of taking her home, he used his jump leads to start her car.  Naturally, she snapped this offer up.  He then thought he’d better follow her, just to make sure she didn’t break down on the way.  I don’t know yet whether he made any charge, I’ll find out; I suspect not.  Aren’t people decent?

The other good news is that Waitrose now do ossobuco cuts of veal, so that’s Saturday’s dinner sorted.  It does mean that I’ve had to buy a pack of the despised saffron, but hey! One in ten years is pardonable, innit?  Not even I would put turmeric in a risotto alla Milanese.

Do the math…

Do the math… please, government, before you embark on this HS2 project.  Otherwise, in twenty or thirty years’ time it will come back to haunt you, or your descendants.   I won’t be around, nor will my own descendants (I don’t have any), but I promise this will happen.  There are two things you need to do, or have done, before you irrevocably turn on the green light.

The first is called a cost-benefit analysis.  There are two parts to this, which I’ll call tangible and intangible.   The tangible ones are those directly related to the project, to which you are sure you can subsequently ascribe monetary values.  What you do is divide a piece of paper down the middle, with a line.  On the left, you list the costs of the project, on the right, the benefits.  Obviously, at this stage these aren’t quantified, nor should they be.  The point is to make sure you’ve covered everything, every quantifiable cost and benefit, and that you will later be able to put a monetary value on it which you’ll be able to substantiate’: otherwise, it’s intangible.

Intangible costs and benefits are those you recognise you won’t be able to monetise, but which nevertheless have to be factored into the broad picture.  They’re the ‘what if’, ‘blue sky’, ‘OSINTOT’ factors.   Hint – if you’re using bullet or numbered lists, always leave an empty one at the bottom, there’s bound to be something else no-one had thought of.

Once you’ve done all that, then you can plug in some numbers.  This means putting monetary values on all the tangibles and, if you choose (and in this case you should), the intangibles too.  All these numbers, of course, have to be properly assessed, peer reviewed, and consensually accepted.  And then you can run what’s called a discounted cash flow calculation.  Here's how it works, but don’t worry – there won’t be a test at the end of this post.  Basically, what a DCF does is demonstrate, given the best estimates of all the variables, when this project is likely to go into profit.  It takes into account, crucially, the opportunity cost of the bottom-line option, which is always ‘don’t do it.’

Being an optimist, I assume the government (or whoever’s really in charge) has done all the above.  Well, you’d have to be really stupid not to, wouldn’t you?  So why don’t they just publish the results?

Oh.  I see.

Seagulls at Sunset

This chalet in West Bay is called ‘Sunset’. 

 

Here’s why.

 

 

‘Sunset’ is on the northern edge of the lagoon formed when the river Brit meets a kind of barrier with sluice gates which prevents it, I suppose, from washing away the rest of the town or something.  On the other side of the lagoon, you can people-watch for hours – they cross and re-cross the bridge, and as you gradually relax into a more natural pace of life you can spin imaginings about who they are, where they’re off to or returning from, whether they will get or have got whatever it was they are or were hoping for…   But mostly you can watch seagulls.

I’ve always thought of them as sea-thugs, and I haven’t entirely modified this opinion.  In their natural element, the air, they’re certainly graceful, even beautiful, like penguins in the water; but standing still they are menacing, their cold staring eyes looking as if they’ve been reincarnated from somewhere down the Jurassic Coast and want to take revenge.  (They are dinosaurs, you know.)  And floating, they just look petulant.

The pit bulls of the shore.  You can see about ten of them in this picture,

but there would often be thirty or forty.  You will know from the media of their aggressiveness and uncalled-for territoriality, but it’s a bit scary to see them operating at full tilt, against each other.  A few hours’ observation, though, revealed some subtleties.  There seemed to be two separate flocks, and a queuing system was in operation.  One bunch would graze, squabbling, on the plankton or whatever it is, whilst the others would perch on a couple of nearby rooftops, garnishing them with guava as they waited their turn at the feeding grounds.

And the noise!  I worked out after a while that they have a vocabulary of five words, four of which mean “I’m angry!” [on a scale from “I’m rather cross” to “I’m spitting feathers (yours!”)], and the fifth of which means “please, I didn’t mean to [insert infringement as appropriate, e.g. ‘steal your chip’, ‘crap on your car’, ‘crash-land on your breakfast table’]”.  (I discovered their attempt at a dawn chorus later.)

Finally, they’re devious.  Oh yes.  This particular character had devised a trick of perching on the wall, looking as plaintive as a Jurassic throwback is capable of looking.  It had only one leg.  We were starting to feel some sympathy for this evident runt-of-the-litter, being tempted to toss it a crust, when I caught it in the act:

 

The little bleeder was faking it!  Talk about refugees on the Underground!  I half expected it to hold up a sign saying “CRIPPLED.  HOMELESS.  FOUR CHICKS.  PLEASE HELP ME”, before flying off to one of those penthouses across the bay.

So all in all, I wasn’t warming to them.  That is, until the real pit bulls turned up.  Human sort.  There were about eight of them – four male, two female, assorted sprogs.  Alpha Dweeb launched an inflatable dinghy and proceeded to row straight into the floating gulls, uttering his distinctive loud, hoarse, threatening cry, echoed by his onshore companions.  He circled the lagoon over and over for about an hour, plainly bent on disturbing as much peace as he could find, egged on by the rest of the pack.  The gulls at first shrugged and flew away, but some invisible line – who knows the mind of a seagull? – was crossed, and they decided enough was enough.

One by one, they started to swoop – at first at some height, then progressively lower, until they were no more than six feet up.  Alpha Dweeb thought this was hilarious, and began to swipe at them with his paddle, cackling.  I thought of calling out a warning – they can take out an eye or rip off an ear without breaking wing-flap – but decided it would be unfair to oblige the poor lads to have to hurl yet more abuse around, so I left well alone.  Eventually someone shouted “PUB!” (one of the few intelligible sounds I heard) and they packed up and left.

So, I still wouldn’t feed the gulls, but I did end up slightly more benevolent towards them.

Feeding the ducks is okay, though.

 

 

Christening – the context

In an astute comment on my last post, in which I’d briefly agonised about the theological and ethical aspects of modern-day christenings, Z neatly caught the zeitgeist, with “any excuse for a party, I reckon.”  I reckon Jesus would have approved. 

Also worth noting is that it’s probably one of the few celebrations at which the guest of honour is the only person present who starts the party with absolutely no idea what’s going on, and waits for everyone else to catch up.

I can’t draw the context too broadly – that would have to start with the conception – so let’s go from 9.30 on Saturday morning, when I found that the burglar alarm had thrown a sulky, costing me fifteen minutes of K’s anxiety that we were going to be late (plus the ten that it took me to go back and pick up the phone I’d forgotten), before we were able to get to Southampton airport with an hour and a half to spare.*

We were collected on arrival in Jersey (not immediately, but not too many K-Anx points later) and spent the afternoon not helping people to do things they’d either already done or couldn’t be bothered with.  A heavyweight marquee and a couple of lighter gazebos had been installed just in case of a bit of rain or wind, and these had to be tested, by sitting under them during the occasional shower, testing the beer.

I didn’t enjoy the big (in two senses) restaurant meal in the evening.   The locale was fine, and the food was okay for quality, but served in off-putting quantities.  I don’t want eighteen spare ribs on my plate, with chips, especially after a bucket of mussels big enough to bale out the Titanic.  And I can never hear what anyone’s saying, and I know they can’t hear my replies.  And I was knackered.  And the bottles of Bombay Sapphire on the tables proved to be full of tap water.

After the christening at midday on Sunday, the party in the marquee, gazebos and adjoining house was fine.  Well lubricated and not over-watered or ventilated.  And it proves acceptable to conduct a hog-roast inside a marquee.  I must admit these nine-hour stand-up bashes seem to be getting harder, though, especially when there’s no dancing.  I recognised quite a few people without really knowing who they were, which made for some interesting conversational tactics.  I enjoy that kind of thing – tricks like “When did I last see you?  Must have been at the wedding, I remember us chatting but I honestly can’t remember what about…?” usually yield up enough clues to move forward.

K and I somehow got back to the hotel at about eleven.  There’s an unwritten law of parties which states that the complexity of organising a taxi increases in direct proportion to the number of empty bottles.  To this must be added the number of helpful advisers explaining that you don’t need one because it’s an easy fifteen minute walk via the unlit short cut across the golf course. 

We got back to Southampton too, next day, despite the horrific weather forecasts helpfully showing every ten minutes in the departure lounge, coupled with my knowledge that we’d be in a very small turbo-prop plane at 18,000 feet: even I will confess to a twinge of T-Anx.  But luckily K didn’t seem to notice.  As it was, all went smoothly, and I was able to walk through my front door in Reading at precisely gin o’clock.

  

*K is Bertie’s great-grandmother, and does get anxious about things.  All of them.  I am a very practised K-Anx manager.

A303 Revisited

Just a turning off the M3 these days.  Should be a song, like Route 66.

Basingstoke.

Andover.

Thruxton.  Vroom vroom.

Quarley.

Amesbury.

Stonehenge.  Come over the hill and you almost miss it, until suddenly there it is on the skyline.  As you descend, so does it, and you see that it’s swarming with human ants, who are eating its heart.

Winterbourne Stoke.

Deptford.  Marlowe never came here, you think irrelevantly as you soar past the signpost.

Fonthill Bishop.

Zeals.

Gasper.

Wylye.

Chicklade.  An old joke about hens.

Mere.  Don’t stop there for lunch.  The only way out is via the carpark.

Wincanton.  Tankers full of milk.

Compton Fauncefoot.

Queen Camel.

Wales.

Kingsbury Episcopi.

Ilminster.  The strangest bypass in Britain.

And then it peters out, no ceremony, not even a place (the nearest is Upottery), just before Honiton, and turns into the A30.  Which is a whole other story.

Solar flares maybe?

We had an inkling that something might be slightly out of kilter when the satnav, Florence, issued  her first instruction before the car had begun to move.

“Make a U-turn,” she said.

We were going to Drury Lane to see War Horse.  (The stage version of course, not the allegedly saccharine film: I was collecting a Christmas present.  It was, by the way, ‘effing marvellous’, as the Sergeant might have put it.)  The theatre was 21 miles away, and we’d allowed ninety minutes to get there, park up and find our seats – ample time, no?  But we hadn’t allowed for Florence.

Florence is of the same genus and nationality as the satnav in my own car, but with a rather different personality.  Whereas Brünnhilde is terse, assumes a level of intelligence on the part of her pupils and doesn’t suffer fools gladly, Florence is a bit of an anxious, over-protective schoolmarm.   She would say things like “Keep right and continue on the M4” whenever we approached a junction, just in case we felt impelled to veer off left onto the slip road just for the hell of it.

All went well, though, as far as the Hammersmith flyover.  Then both Florence and Transport for London or whoever is in charge got completely confused, with the result that we ended up negotiating the multi-lane spider’s web of the Broadway.  Florence lost it.  “Turn right in 100 yards, then immediately right again.”  We ignored that.  “Follow the road for 900 yards.”  No other option short of shop windows, so we obeyed.  “Your route is being recalculated.”  I offered to get the map book out.  “Better not,” said A (who was driving).  “It’ll only upset her.”

Somehow we made it through.  I knew we were back on track when L spotted Harrods on the right.  “Familiar territory,” she announced.  At this point, Florence got a bit sniffy.  “There is traffic congestion ahead.  An alternative route cannot be recommended.”  You always know they’re rattled when they drop into the passive voice. 

We got there with five minutes to spare, not even time for a stiffener for me and L.  We were in row AA, right at the front.  You could see inside the horses, see the humans manipulating them – which somehow made it even more magical.  I found myself avoiding eye contact with Joey.

Neutrinos

It would be a good idea to stockpile these now, if you can source some.  It seems that experiments at CERN have sent these cheeky little fellows some 400 kilometres to somewhere in Italy, at a speed slightly greater than that of light.  This is causing some consternation, and the scientists responsible are being rightly cautious (they’ve only repeated the results some 15,000 times, so it’s early days); but it appears that, if suitably peer-reviewed and confirmed, this opens up the possibility of time-travel. 

I haven’t yet developed the theoretical framework which would support any practical implementation of this, but I’m sure the guys at Apple are working on the iTime as I write.  It shouldn’t be too hard – after all, photons, when organised properly, can carry vast amounts of information (including these words), so why shouldn’t neutrinos be trained to do the same?  It’s already commonplace to ‘print’ three-dimensional inorganic objects following a blueprint, so organic ones, like people, can’t be far behind.  All we need to do is send an organic printer back to a pre-determined temporal location, scan oneself at this end, and hit ‘send and print’.  The neutrino waves will do the rest, and there we’ll be, watching ourselves conduct that first fumble in the bus shelter.  Or looking over Einstein’s shoulder as he gets special relativity wrong.  Or observing that butterfly flapping its wings in the Brazilian jungle.

Of course, we mustn’t ever intervene.  It’d be tempting though, wouldn’t it?  There are quite a few things I’d be tempted to change given the chance.

PS To my regular silent watchers, greetings, you are very welcome.  Feel free to say hello.

Read the small print

The hotel seemed very nice.  The staff were friendly and the room, once I found it after negotiating several up-and-down flights of wooden hills, was clean and adequately equipped.  And the view across the harbour was delightful.  'This will do me for three nights,' I thought.

As I looked more closely at the facilities, I noticed this, printed on the outside of an envelope on the bedside table:

'I wonder what that means?', I thought, and forgot about it.

When I made my way to bed, much later, I found out.  The hotel was adjoined to a popular pub, which had an outside terrace for admirers of the view, and for smokers.  Smokers seem to talk much louder than non-smokers, to make more bad jokes and to laugh a lot.  I say smokers, because there were no view-admirers - it was dark - and the rain was falling steadily.  Smokers are also desperately resilient.

But the noise ended at about 11.15, I got a good night's sleep and forgot about it again.

Next night, the same thing happened, but I was wise to it by then.  Come 11.30, they'll be away.  And they were.  But then, the pub staff decided to have a chat, out on the terrace.  This was worse, because the conversation was inaudible most of the time, but then, just as I was slipping away, someone would make a good joke.  I don't know if you've ever been in a similar situation, but the worst of it is that you lie there wondering if that was the last one, or if not when the next one will be along.

It was time for the earplugs.  Here are the instructions for installing them:

Try that at midnight.  They sort of work, but they're uncomfortable enough to keep you awake.

By 1.30, I'd had enough.  I opened the window and had a word.  I was very polite.  "I say, would you be so kind as to put a focken sock in it?  Some people up here are trying to get some bleeping sleep!  Thank you SOO much."

That did the trick. 

By the final evening, the word had obviously gone out that there was a Scillonian demon residing up there.  The revellers meekly let themselves be shepherded off the terrace, at eleven sharp, by the ferocious landlady, and I slept soundly until five-thirty, when the seagulls started their dawn chorus.

Box-ticking exercise

Off on me hols tomorrow.  I'll tick the boxes when I get back.  Click and enlarge to enjoy.

Baggage

Next Wednesday, I will be flying on a helicopter from Penzance to the Isles of Scilly.  The only previous time I've been on a helicopter was when I was thirteen.  I was in the Navy Section of the Combined Cadet Force, and our field day that year consisted of a bus ride to Portland Bill, where we did marching drill, were shown the outside of the prison and the quartermaster's store, and then taken up for ten minutes in a helicopter.  I don't remember anything about the experience, except that it was memorable.

Here are the instructions regarding baggage on the Scilly flight:

"Each adult and child is allowed a baggage allowance of 15kg. No single piece of baggage will be carried if it exceeds 20kg. An excess charge will be made for any baggage above your allowance of 33lbs (15 kg). (The excess charge will be at the operator's rate at the time of travel). Small items may be carried in our aircraft cabin, such as handbags, cameras and binoculars provided they can be secured to your person. All passengers maybe subject to a random baggage search."

 

 I doubt I'll be able to achieve the 15kg target, but I'll try.  I'll take a stapler to ensure I can secure my camera to my person.  And I won't be carrying any random baggage, so that's okay.

And why do they say 'maybe' when they mean 'may be'?