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My flight out of Sydney to Dubai was delayed. My flight out of Dubai to Manchester was delayed. My train from Manchester Airport to Liverpool stood on the platform for 45 minutes waiting for another train to leave. On going back to Manchester Airport to fly to Budapest, my train stopped two stations short. Thereafter, the train was on and off again at least four times. At one point I was making my way out of the station to catch a cab when the call came that the train was on again, only for it to be off again when I reached the platform. Then, amazingly, it was on again.
I was told that a train down the track had broken down, had been fixed, became unfixed, and then became fixed. People around me with a plane to catch were understandably anxious and agitated. I assume things are going to go wrong and had booked a hotel near the Airport for the night, preparatory to my flight next day.
Oh, the joy of travel. No wonder Albo, Bowen and the Davos crowd favour private planes and helicopters. Incidentally, when I alighted from the plane at Manchester three heavily armed policemen were in the tunnel. Bobbies on bicycles two by two is a relic of the past.
Liverpool FC hosted an event at Anfield stadium “to celebrate the holy month of Ramadan.” (Liverpool Echo, April 8). “Anfield was a hive of activity as people from all faiths and backgrounds arrived at the stadium for a Share Ramadan event.” All faiths? Times, they have a-changed.
Apparently, you must have 4G mobile phone coverage to access most EV public charging stations. Coverage is patchy. That is a problem. It might undermine confidence in EVs, The UK Telegraph reported on April 8. Maybe that accounted for the drop in new EV sales from 16.2 per cent last March to 15.2 per cent this March. The government mandate on major car brands is for 22 per cent of new sales in 2024, 28 per cent in 2025, 80 per cent in 2030 and 100 per cent from 2035. Calls are being made to half VAT on EV sales among other incentives. And the government claims to be spending £1 billion to increase 4G coverage. To wit, the unspeakable (read “politicians”) in vain pursuit of the unwantable.
My coffee here in Liverpool is £4.50. Converted, roughly twice the price as in Sydney. (The current exchange rate is one Aussie dollar equals 0.52 pounds.) My Saturday Telegraph cost me £4; that is $8 more or less. What is going on? Must check the Big Mac price.
Now checked.
A Big Mac costs $8.80 in Sydney. It should be higher — closer to $10, based on the UK price, which hovers plus-or-minus around £5. This suggests the Australian dollar is undervalued. On my calculation we should be getting 0.57 pounds for our dollar. We are being diddled. That is comforting for future Australian travelers if markets lift the value of the dollar by about 10 per cent. That said, I still got a feeling that Australia is on the way to joining that band of countries where the low value of the currency means it’s relatively cheap to eat for foreigners. Tourist moolah goes further in the Third World. We are not nearly there yet, of course, but give Chris Bowen more time and he will do his damnedest to get us there.
IN OTHER news, pediatrician Dr Hillary Cass issued her report today (April 10) on children who believe they are transgender. Four years in the making, the report, according to The Telegraph, affirms that gender medicine for children and young people is “built on shaky foundations … cautions against hasty decisions while children’s brains are developing,” and calls for “unhurried, holistic, therapeutic support for those aged between 17 and 25.”
So, what to say? Sanity breaks through. Is this the start of something big? Probably not. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has just ruled that governments have a duty to protect people from climate change. A group of elderly Swiss women claimed their rights were violated due to their government’s failure to act quickly enough to tackle climate change. Reacting, a group of Tories want the UK to leave the ECHR. That won’t happen — and there is no point anyway. Kier Starmer would rejoin when, if as seems likely by the polls reckoning, he comes into power later this year. In any event, judges everywhere are on the road to wokedom. If the ECHR doesn’t get you the local courts will. Down Under, Justice Bromberg et al will be rubbing their hands.
Think about ‘failing to act quickly enough on climate change’. Even the climate obsessive Bowen would come a cropper measured against the aspirations of the Greens and Teals. And I bet Greta Thunberg is in a perpetual state of dissatisfaction with progress. Her human rights are being violated as we speak by all and sundry.
It’s not all bad. In what other country does the nation’s top cleric know what God thinks about government policy? According to the Archbishop of Canterbury, God thinks that the offshore processing of asylum seekers is a sin:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/apr/16/rwanda-plan-is-against-the-judgment-of-god-says-archbishop
Nice to read a true to life travelogue for a change – very enjoyable, because it happened to somebody else. After 30 years of extensive travel for work to places I never wanted to be, I shun airports and most roads now. Travel has lost its romance. Besides, everywhere has become just like everywhere else. My wife wants a trip to Europe, but the thought of doing that as an ‘economy’ traveller (a misnomer) gives me nightmares.
pgang, you took the words right out of my mouth. On our last trip to the UK and Europe, about 5 years ago, my wife and I would often look at each other and ask, “Why on earth are we punishing ourselves like this?” Best to stay home and enjoy Oz while we still can, and it lasts. The way things are going, that won’t be for much longer — or are we simply a bunch of ageing curmudgeons?
Totally agree. Can’t see the point in being subjected to the vagaries of the human race down the back of an airborne metal tube for 15 hours or more. Dealing with shoppers in Aldi where you can at least escape, is bad enough.
Exception being when you have relatives to see and it’s the only way to get there.
And yes, I’m a cranky old woman these days!
IMO the mistake people make when travelling is to, well, travel. I holiday each year in one of the least socialist countries in Europe (so it is still relatively safe), but instead of travelling around I spend a month in the one place. Working out where to go and how to get there makes travel an absolute nightmare. On the other hand, the benefits of staying in the one place cannot be overstated. First, it means I can rent an apartment, rather than stay in a hotel or B&B, which means that I have the use of a full kitchen and a washer and dryer. Second, it allows one to become familiar with local and regional transport, which takes all of the stress out of travelling around. Third, it takes all of the guesswork out of such things as shopping for household supplies, finding the best places to eat and finding interesting local attractions. Lastly, it means I can do short, multi-day trips to other destinations, carrying just an overnight bag rather than lugging around a suitcase.
Jorge Luis Borges once wrote: “I don’t like traveling, but I like having traveled.”
The eccentric aesthete in the Joris-Karl Huysmans 1884 novel, also loathed travel. Perhaps the first “virtual” traveler, he would pack his bags, go to the railway station and then return home without boarding a train. For him, he had already experienced all the excitement and expectation of a journey somewhere which, if undertaken, would be exceedingly dull, anti-climatic and full of the kind of frustration PS describes here. Bon voyage indeed.
Indeed.
Travelling is one of those ‘youth’ things.
My favourite travel book is The Bible in Spain. That guy did it tough. An extraordinary read.
Albo and Bowen taking separate planes to the same mission is about as dopey as the pilot and copilot taking separate planes. But perhaps there’s method in this profligacy. Maybe they were were splitting their forces in case Opposition bandits got on their six over the primary target: Liddell Coal Fired Powerstation, -in which case either Albo or Bowen could whack on the afterburners in their plane and stunt fly it back to Canberra base therefore eluding any Coalition banditry. That way there would be someone left to resume supreme leadership of the nation. Gotcha! Nothing to see here but good old diversionary tactics.
MAN is the worst airport in Europe. Especially if you’re transitting through there. Those ending or beginning their air journeys there don’t know the half of it!
I still travel a lot, and mostly enjoy it, but I avoid Manchester airport if I can.
And Frankfurt?
Better than Manchester, which I admit is faint praise.
I have travelled travel a lot too, over many years, Tricone, usually with my husband. At nearly 72 (him) and nearly 82 (me) we are not yet ready to give it away. We’ve just finished a cruise through the Caribbean, unusually taking in Devils Island in French Guiana en route down to the Amazon River in Brazil, where we went up-river 1000km with stops on the way to the drug city of Manaus, where the cruise ended. We then flew to San Paolo and Rio de Janeiro still in Brazil and then on to Iguazu Falls on the border of Brazil and Argentina. Entering Argentina there we flew to Puerto Madryn on the Valdez Peninsula of Pategonia, honing in to stay at the pit stop of Puerto Piramides to see wildlife. From Puerto Madryn we took a flight down to the southern glaziers of Argentina at the town of El Calafate, then swooping by plane back up to Argentina’s second largest city of Cordoba. We came home via Chile, flying from Cordoba to Santiago, picking up a 14 hour flight there back to Sydney. It’s enthused me enough to write a blog about it for family and friends.
This pattern of intensive travel has been fairly usual for us over many years. We greatly appreciate that we can still do it just as we did when work was often paying. We are happy to spend our retirement money on this. A tip for older travellers, and one that will keep you on the move, is to take yearly travel insurance. It’s not much more than you’d pay for the single trip we have just done, the US and South America plus a cruise, and you get cover then for any four-week trip you take for the whole year.
For me, everywhere is not the same. Everywhere is excitingly different especially when viewed, not without humour, via a centre-right perspective in a see-for-yourself frame of mind. I don’t mind that its often inconvenient, and I quite agree that British railways are the pits. But even that is part of the travel experience still.
Yairs Mr. Smith, as a bloke who sat up the sharp end for a bit over fifty years and who pretty much lived out of a suitcase I feel for yez to the point where I didn’t use “port” to describe my portmanteau to give away my FNQ bush upbringing. Manchester used to be one of the OK ones as far as we saw it, preferable to LHR where on one arrival when working for a French airline I overheard one customs bloke say to his mate “let’s give this frog a going over” and they did so wonderfully well. I thanked them afterwards using language my bullocky grandfathers would have applauded and asked them politely to get “get yer supervisor, you pair of bastards.” but that’s an aside for a bloke wearing the four bars usually gets treated better than the peasants. When we bitch about the niceties of travel think of one poor Albanian bloke we hauled ex Bari in Italy to Paris CDG where he was promptly thrown in the slammer and deported back to Bari the next day. The wallopers in Bari couldn’t be convinced that we no longer went via Tirana in Albania to CDG so they simply placed the poor beggar back on board so for some time he spent his days on a AF jet eating good tucker and his nights in a French slammer. After some weeks apparently the French gave him residency, but who knows? A trip back to the UK a few years back to have a leisurely poke around had us enter via Manchester and it was as you reported for the train to Scotland did exactly as you described and even left from a different railway station to add some spice. Now, and well retired in the hinterland near Dad and Dave country on our “New” selection I spend time not hearing the sound of an aeroplane and mostly watching the grass grow, a place where people say G’day and mean it, where you can talk about cattle and sheep prices as you did way back before you left the bush, damn the local council and both State and Federal Parliament to hell and gone, and be among the locals who do exactly the same in the “real” Australia or what is left of it. Mind you, the only real perk in all those years was that someone paid you reasonably well to travel so the taxman could have a field day with your earnings, so too the plumber and other tradies who had a field day with the salary remnants when a tap washer (jumper valve) buggered up or something around the house broke.