A Curmudgeon's Christmas Eve

Embracing Senior Status

You might be getting bored of the sexagenarian musings presented in my recent blogs. Well, this is about my own experience and how I am settling into this new age.

I wrote about getting the Senior Railcard yesterday, which offers a 33% discount on train fares in the UK. My plan was to find out the real-life experience of showing my ticket to a train conductor and being asked to produce the railcard that gave me the entitlement.

A Lazy Christmas Eve

However, Christmas Eve started as a rather lazy day. By the time I finally got out of bed and boarded a train to Liverpool, it was well into the afternoon. My Senior Railcard secured me a 34.29% discount on the day return ticket.

There was no ticket inspection on either my outward or return journey, though I spent about 90 minutes in Liverpool, walking through the Christmas markets to the Central Library, where I did a bit of study until the building closed early at 4:30 PM.

On the Christmas markets, like the one in Manchester, they are a poor imitation of the German ones: full of tat and gaudy overpriced goods. Whilst they might afford summery activities on a helter-skelter, a roller coaster, and a Ferris wheel, they might attract crowds, giving winter days a sense of liveliness, but they are at best eyesores. Frankly, one is not impressed.

Rail Service Disappointments

I did find that some long train journeys were cancelled, with the reason given that there was a lack of train crew. It makes you wonder who is in charge of personnel rotas and scheduling. The train conductors might already have bonked off, earning themselves a five-day Christmas weekend.

Public transport facilities will be closed for Christmas and Boxing Day in the UK. I might get on a train before the year ends, just for the pleasure of being officially recognised as a senior citizen. It feels strange, but that's the truth.

Strained trained drained

Pricey and ordinary still

After a week in London, I was ready to return home with regrets I had not booked an earlier train back home. Arriving just an hour before my train at the station, I cooled off in the lounge which had taken on a rather exclusive veneer.

The lounge is usually quite busy on Sundays, but it was quite vacant, probably since Avanti West Coast has gone for price exclusivity over market share. Now, we get shown to our seats, and refreshments are served a la carte.

Reserved then unserved

When my train was ready to board, there was already someone in my seat, his ticket did indicate the seat number, but the idea that a seat could be double-booked did not seem that right. So, I asked if it was booked on the 16:12 train. He had a seat reserved alright, but on a different train, he had to vacate my seat and that was just lucky.

A few minutes before the train departed, the train manager unilaterally declared the tarin declassified with all seat reservations invalidated. Those with 1^st Class tickets were to be compensated, but that was not the service paid for. Some ladies who were just asked to move to another carriage I advised to stay as per the notice we just heard.

Reasons most unreasoned

Engaging Avanti West Coast on Twitter, the responder suggested train declassification is usually a last resort for health and safety reasons. I begged to differ as the reason given was because trains were being cancelled and there were engineering works meaning another hour would be added to a typical London Euston to Manchester Piccadilly journey. The reason was commercial and logistical, not remotely anything to do with health or safety.

Then again, we should be used to the so-called compensation default in lieu of the services and goods paid for, it is the reality of rip-off Britain and annoying at that. I can afford the service I paid for in the first instance, I do not need pennies of compensation thrown at me to account for the inability of a setup to act professionally or aim at a modicum of excellence. They seek to get away with anything and you are to make do with the inconvenience and a handout.

Cursing the darkness of a drunken jaunt

I sipped and swilled

Blogs are bringing life to wry observations from which you might end up with a story or even a moral tale. Now, I do not have a ready palate for alcohol, I probably lost my thirst for strong drink by accident.

At the age of 10, whilst away from home taking common entrance examinations in Lagos, I found myself at parties where my choice tipple was Tennant's light lager by the can and with all the adult supervision around me, I was granted the liberty to indulge. I never got tipsy, but there was something about my privileged status that gave me a bye when other boys would have been scolded.

I was the son of the high-flying and most successful accountant from our village, I was the proverbial white boy in black skin, with an accent that when foreign guests were visiting, I was the one put forward to chat to and entertain when the children of the host were locked away and out of sight, I probably took liberties without consequence.

More for the drink, less for the taste

Everywhere I went in the 4 months I was down south, I was feted, indulged, tolerated, excused and well, abused too. Yes, that was sexually, but I did not know I was being taken advantage of. I was already used to being taken advantage of by two of our houseboys up north, this fumbling that went further was like pleasure and play.

By the time I was 15, my uncle who had just returned from the UK was both generous with means and things apart from offering good swills of rum that it got back to me that my parents were concerned that I was being introduced to drink, little did they know, in fact, with hindsight, my parents know so much and yet so little about me, it is almost an enigmatic paradox.

After secondary school at 15, I had a job in the laboratory of West African Breweries where I carried out water tests and introduced conveyor belt quality controls that fed back down the line to improvements in bottle washing and other bottling activities. My exposure to understanding fermentation, counting dead yeast cells, the tank farm and tasting the finished product put an end to my palate for a lager, beer, ale, cider and strong spirits.

I have little tolerance for alcohol abuse

I have the occasional wine with meals and sometimes an aperitif, but bitters and the rest are completely off limits. Essentially, I am dangerously sober in all that I do where people would require Dutch courage to attempt those same things.

That I have little tolerance of the inebriated and drunken is borne of the reasoning that I think the consumption of alcohol is an expression of discipline, you know when you’ve had enough and allow yourself the benefit of keeping your wits about you. We all make mistakes, but we can forgive ourselves and promptly begin to make amends.

A half-brain on a long train

So, as I was about to board the train from Edinburgh to Manchester, a man stepped in front of us with bravado and disregard to get on the train first. He did and as the train departed the station, he enquired where the train was going, the slurring of speech and the unsteadiness of his feet suggested he was all not himself, not by reason of ailment or infirmity, but for the abuse in excess of alcohol.

He was going due west to Bathgate some 18 miles away but had hopped on the train going southwest with the next stop at Lockerbie, some 76 miles away. Any other man might have comforted himself of his folly like Esau of old, but not this man. He fidgeted and buffeted, sighed and hollered, swore and cursed, murmured and blustered to the irritation of all around him that they left their reserved seats for other available seats.

For the lost of Lockerbie

He was by terms a bloody nuisance all because of drink and we endured the menace for a good hour until he disembarked at Lockerbie. Lockerbie itself brings some poignancy to me, it was where the Pan Am Flight 103 crashed on the 21^st of December 1988, which happened to be my 23^rd birthday.

That tragic event and my birthday somewhat creates an affinity with Lockerbie that I should one day disembark and visit the memorial to those who perished at that heinous act of terrorism for which I have not yet been convinced that the real culprits have seen justice.

Cursing the darkness sheds no light

However, the man railed and ranted, I thought of the proverb being played out before my eyes, “It is better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness.” It is said to be an old Chinese proverb and at the same time attributed to a sermon titled “The Invincible Strategy” given by W. L. Watkinson and collected in 1907. The former attribution is suspect and the latter is contentious, but we have a saying to work with. [Wikipedia][QuoteInvestigator]

There was nothing the man could do other was sit still until he got to Lockerbie and hopefully he could get a train back tonight to Edinburgh and then to Bathgate, that is if the conductor on the other train was in the least compassionate, he could have contemplated his folly in the solitude of regret and silence, but he was literally cursing the darkness and it made no difference to the fact that he first had to get off the train and maybe get back home tonight.

In effect, he left an odious impression and the inspiration for this blog. Never drink yourself to not being aware of what you are doing and if you do, responsibly accept that consequences of your folly without becoming a public nuisance. Any of us could have compounded his situation by calling the police to attend to an unruly and drunken passenger at Lockerbie, in which case, he would have had free lodgings at Her Majesty’s pleasure for the night until sobriety gave him gumption and reason along with even more regret.

C’est la vie!

Tax Credits: The Toffs are making it tough

All buses gone

One morning when I was still living in Amsterdam, I walked up to the bus stop one morning to catch a bus to the train station one my way to work.

Until, that morning, we had 5 buses going from that bus stop in different directions going to the train station that no one had to wait more than 10 minutes for a bus to come by. However, no bus came, or the only other bus that did was not going to the station.

One cursory view of the bus timetables showed that all buses from that stop to the station had been cancelled. I was later to learn that the buses were cancelled because there was a new tram service going to the train station, only that the said tram service was another 6 months away from coming into service.

This was some sort of forward-planning made without considering the impact and consequence on our community for the 6 intervening months where we had to find alternative convoluted arrangements to get to the train station, we had to wake up earlier and leave home earlier to make our connections because of this.

The travesty of tax credits

This brings me to the issue of the day in UK politics, the review of Tax Credits as proposed by the Chancellor of Exchequer. That Tax Credits exist in and off themselves is a travesty and a failing of the democratic capitalist model we have in the UK.

Tax Credits are neither taxes nor credits but a socialist means of supplementing the incomes of workers who are paid such atrociously low salaries in the public and private sector that they can hardly subsist on their incomes. In a way, our capitalist framework does not pay fully for the employment and utility of labour and the slack is taken up by the public purse in the quest to lift the poorly paid above the poverty line.

There are probably macroeconomic policies that can be put in place to make capitalism pay up in full for the cost of labour and expertise, allowing for a middle-class kind of existence, but no government has had the guts to stand up to business and demand they do the morally and ethically right thing about wages. In most cases, these businesses that leach of us to exist for the primary profit motive will howl about changes that cost them more when they are not even meeting their basic costs.

The truth is, we’re worse off

What the new Conservative government plans to do is to reduce the level of income at which people will qualify for the full in-work benefits over which the payments reduce and to limit the benefits towards children to a maximum of two.

We are told that changes to the living wage, higher tax payment thresholds, more subsidised childcare access and other tax jiggery-pokery will compensate for the loss of Tax Credits. The fact is like the transport situation I described earlier, nothing could be further from the truth.

Independent analysts and institutions have already determined that all taken together, up to 3 million families will be worse off, losing an average of £1,000 a year whilst saving the government up to £4 billion in their ideological quest to plug the deficit brought on by the financial system gone riot and the government using public money to save private financial atrocities for which no significant member of the financial community has been held accountable for.

The toffs are making it tough

In all, it is the poor and the low-income earners that have taken the bigger brunt of the austerity measures put in place to compensate for the ‘crimes’ of the City and rich investors, the squeeze is still on the poor without respite.

This might well be the Conservative government’s Poll Tax moment, but I guess not much can be said for the concern or consideration of a well-heeled governing class who have trust funds to last generations that the cries of anguish of the masses will only be an irritation to be blocked out in the comfort of their gilded and soundproofed castles.

This is not the Great Britain many signed up for, but that is the way things are. My transport situation was resolved in 6 months, the lives of people dependent on Tax Credits will not get better in the long run and that is a shame.

People on a train of life

Let me sit

The man had splayed himself across two seats when I got on the train and kindly asked him to make room for me. Nothing could have prepared me for one of the most engaging conservations I have had on a train journey in a while.

He appeared to be in workmen’s clothes and I gingerly sat myself beside him just because my trolley bag which is generally heavier and bulkier than a simple rucksack needs more ample space than I can get in the standard seat space.

A conversation triggered

As I settled into my seat, I reached into my bag, grabbed my copy of The Economist’s Intelligent Life magazine and flipped the pages to read, Among the reindeer by Laura Galloway, who left a media consultancy to live amongst the Sami people; Laplanders to you and me, in the Arctic Circle after a DNA test suggested she descended from them.

He saw the page and said, he was on his way up there. Apparently, he is a fisherman who works on a big boat in the seas and oceans within the Arctic Circle.

From then on, for the hour, we talked about fishing, European fishing quotas, fortunes, misfortunes - he once owned a fishing trawler, the cold and how he suffered some of the coldest temperatures ever on one fishing expedition on the Bering Sea.

Fish of a long tale

He had come to Cheshire for a funeral, was travelling to Manchester, and changing trains for a journey all the way to Aberdeen where he would board a helicopter to Wick and then a flight to Reykjavik in Iceland. Quite a convoluted itinerary, I thought, but it must be one of the least travelled routes plied by only those in the know.

He had been a fisherman all his life, manning boats from when he was 10, he being in the fourth generation of fishermen from his family.

One thing I learnt from our conversation was the appearance of a man is no indicator of the wealth of knowledge he might have, how well he might have travelled and what good conversation you might have with the person.

Suffice it to say, I am yet to read the story in the magazine that started off our conversation. At Manchester Piccadilly Station, we shook hands, I gave him directions as to where to board his connecting train and he expected to be in Reykjavik by midnight.

Now, I can see

On another train journey, a mother and child got on and sat in front of me. They were returning from visiting her mother and the son who had glasses on seem to have had a wonderful half-term holiday away.

We engaged in enough small talk for me to discover one amazing miracle of medicine, the son had a very high auditory acuity (heightened sense of hearing) which for a while was sensory compensation for being born blind, but now he could see because he had undergone a penetrating keratoplasty (Corneal transplant).

Great British Railway Journeys - Series 3

The exciting things

I always want to be fascinated, amused, amazed and sometimes surprised by things I see, hear, read or experience, I am, I hope a sponge for knowledge and insight about things, whatever they might be.

History resonates with me, the way one can glean knowledge from all sorts of things like this afternoon, I found myself watching Michael Portillo’s presentation of the Great British Railway Journeys now on repeat on BBC 2, is just good tonic for the brain.

He was travelling from Great Yarmouth down the eastern seaboard of Anglia through Essex to London and in the process showing the linkages between his experiences and historical events using George Bradshaw’s Railway Companion published in the Victorian times as his travel guide.

History, geography and politics

In the third series filmed in 2012, the episodes 1 to 4 now available in BBC iPlayer, the history of the founding of the railways linked up with grave robbing [On YouTube] in Great Yarmouth along with a law - The Anatomy Act 1832 - that passed to allow the corpses of paupers to be used for anatomical research, then to the lost city of Dunwich which was at one time as large as London and the capital of the East Angles but all lost to sea - dubbed our own Atlantis.

He comes face-to-face with the skull of Simon de Sudbury – Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor who introduced the Poll Tax in the 14^th Century and was beheaded for it by the Peasants' Revolt, a lesson of history that Margaret Thatcher did not seem to have learnt when she got Micheal Portillo to introduce the Poll Tax in the 1990s almost bringing down the government because of the Poll Tax Riots that followed the implementation.

History will repeat itself if we fail to learn the lessons it teaches studiously, thoroughly and with proper attention to situation and circumstance.

Places and events

Really fascinating stuff like visiting Waltham Cross which apparently derives its name from being one of the 12 night-time resting places of the body of Eleanor of Castile, the wife of Edward I when she was borne from Lincoln to London at Charing Cross – the king erected lavish stone crosses in all these towns in memory of her.

This all culminated in Hackney where we are told of the first railway murder – a city banker, Thomas Briggs was killed by Franz Muller, a German tailor – that did fill people with fear about travelling on trains.

Great and beautiful Britain and Northern Ireland

This was compelling stuff, I cannot wait to see the other episodes as they come online and I have seen many other episodes over the years that just give you the idea that England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are such beautiful and wonderful places to visit as you tease out snippets of history, legends and yarns from city, town and village alike, of people, industry, events and change – I love this stuff.

The official website for the Great British Railway Journeys can be found here – If you can playback BBC iPlayer content, then if you are as curious as I am, that would have been time well spent.

The almost curse of being particularly particular

Penthouse office views

We moved into a brand new office block this week and it was wonderful to move from a cellar to a top floor office.

I have however wondered how we ended up in the 5^th floor and the big-wigs on the 2^nd, hopefully, it not suggesting anything as Machiavellian as being so close to the airport.

In any event, we have the view of the airport, runway and hangars on the one side and a major road sided by a canal and a typical drawbridge for canal traffic on the other side.

It means after getting to Schiphol Airport by train, I have to board another bus; free of charge because an arrangement between the company and the bus company allows for free travel in the environs of the airport.

That seat is reserved – for us

I had kept my peace and even endured the journey standing once, but I decided not to do that again – the buses have upholstered seats with visible repeated signs of the pregnant, the nursing mother and supposedly the infirm – depicted as someone with a cane.

Now, I use a cane and not for the reasons of re-enacting Edwardian England, my back has been a bit troublesome though not as bad as it used to be – as I got on the bus, the able, the young and overly active made for these priority seats; I was having none of it as I pointed out to them – these are priority seats not reserved for you.

None looked pregnant, with suckling infants or with anything to aid their mobility, so before I got to the point of being forceful, a seat was yielded and I had the basic comfort of getting to work.

I do not normally rush for those seats if other seats are available but when every seat is occupied, well those who need them have priority over those who usurp them.

The bane of being particularly particular

What should not happen is the tendency to become particularly particular with an eye out for those who ignore the obvious – one trait in need of amelioration is that feeling of irksomeness when one sees these things.

Bags on seats, rushing in at entry points, bicycles beyond traffic signs, bicycles on footways, people standing in the way ignoring the fact that they are in the way – what a fuss-pot I’ve become.

Loathing and primed to correct, but without horn-rimmed spectacles and shrill voice to boot – I probably need therapy or have to live in a different world – but for now, we’ll just manage as much as possible not to be too aggravated by it all – we can’t all be so proper.

Ditch the plane and catch the Nigerian Choo-Choo train

The minister and the aftermath

It would appear the Nigerian Minister of Aviation who by now should have been pensioned off for incompetence at best and culpable homicide at worst has found a scapegoat for the air crash that occurred on Sunday – the pilot.

Apparently, the pilot took off against the advice of other professionals like the air traffic controllers or weather analysts.

This allows me to advance the theory that the pilot probably took off against other professional advice because of the influential passengers he was carrying who might have coerced him to move or be reported – anyway, one can only still speculate till the flight recorder black boxes reveal the conversation between cockpit and controllers as well as conditions that lead to the crash.

The carrier has lost its license to operate, even though the last time there was a crash bearing the flag of this carrier was 10 years ago.

This just would not do, we need radical action that would put the aviation industry back to a safety driven footing that instils confidence to fly in any prospective customer. It goes without saying that Professor Borisade, the Aviation Minister is incapable of pushing the necessary reform to avoid tragedies of this sort, how many more crashes caused by incompetent pilots can we afford before that reality dawns.

However, as we mourn the loss of the departed and attempt to give succour to the survivors, there seems to be some good news on today.

Choo-choo coming home

Nigeria has signed an $8 million contract with the Chinese to design, construct and maintain a 1,315km/822 mile railway line from Lagos to Kano – God knows that having this kind of infrastructure would do wonders for the Nigerian economy.

A second phase would be a line from Port Harcourt to Jos, this would appear like a second line without a link to the first.

I remember that the existing railway system was like an inverted Y, with people going to the East of Nigeria having to travel up North to Kaduna and then down to the South-East.

From the map below, I have suggested a better plan.

Map of Nigeria - Courtesy UNODC - unfortunately.

I think we need a triangular system which has Lagos, Kano and Calabar as the termini, then an inverted triangle which has Port Harcourt, Sokoto and Maiduguru as the other termini. Minna and Jalingo could then be at the intersections, if not a direct line between those two cities that would go through Abuja and Jos.

This is a simple serviette paper design of a system that could become the engine of development, if the politics is kept out of the need for the rail to pass through the hamlet of some influential man whilst it would be better for it to pass through a town of less influential people.

I had to run for the train

Got to get out

My itchy feet get the better of me every now and then. The emotion and reaction can be so rash, well more determined, I’ll say, the planning and execution sometimes leaves me enough time to end up in disappointment.

Luckily, that has never really been the case, but my fuse gets shorter and my awareness is heightened and intuition sharpened.

Too alert for my liking

I miss nothing in context and occasion; it has not helped a developing but annoying side of me that I see as aggressive, intemperate, impatient and grumpy all as a result of some of these issues.

For instance, I really cannot afford to get angry because it has a horrible physiological effect on me; I begin to shake, my voice rises into a falsetto and it is suddenly lost, not helping my coherence – now, that is anger management as an evolutionary enhancement to my makeup.

I note that this rarely happens in company of friends, their contributions, interjections or conversation generally offers palliative respite in times of dire human frailty.

Tram 26 again

So, I decided, I would be off to Antwerp for the night. Having decided to catch the last train from the Amsterdam Central Station, I had 25 minutes to spare and the wretched Tram 26 was to arrive in 5 minutes, with a 6 minute ride to the station, I should have 14 minutes to get a ticket and get on the train. All planned down to a T.

Tram 26 came on time and we only have 2 stops before the Central Station and so everyone gets on and we proceed according to plan.

We reach the next stop and a crowd of young ones gets on, the conductor and driver both check tickets or collect fares on entry at any of the 2 entrance doors.

However, some of those adolescents used one of the exit doors and got on, which is fine if you then walk up to either the driver or conductor to confirm your fare.

Conductor misconduct

Some did not, so the conductor announces that the tram would not leave till everyone who got on has been checked.

Nothing happens; I have a train to catch and it is looking like my 14 minute leeway is cut in half and swiftly moving to a quarter.

Wait a minute! I have a season ticket, I have pre-paid for my travel as many season ticket holders have done and then we are denied the service we paid for because some “black riders” - as fare dodgers are called in the Netherlands – got on the tram.

I ran for the train

I am getting exasperated, the conductor could easily have walked through the tram and checked, but no, the protection of the cage and the need to do obeisance at that temple had me literally running for the train, one big leap as a cheetah catching prey, I am on, but panting in the most unsightly way.

Now, I remember, I once had a ride on a cabriolet [1] – not a car, but horse-drawn – (Philistines) as I gracefully got on and looked rather majestic in full African garb, well, as if one looks any less on a bad day.

http://www.museudoscoches-ipmuseus.pt/en/img/coleccao/carrinhos2.jpg

Courtesy of the Museu Nacional dos Coches, Lisboa

Running except for when one is on a cross-trainer is just not the done thing, but that is how well-laid out plans get messed up because others are in being utterly inconsiderate.

My journey to Antwerp is another episode.

References

[1] The National Coach Museum, Lisbon, you should consider visiting in person, like I did in June 2005.