This year was the first white christmas I have ever experienced. Looking around the area things all looked pretty much like your average greetings card picture (or the atypical English winter depicted in The Holiday), so we got some nice pictures of the church thanks to Richard Owen who brought his camera along with his [...]

Much as I’m sure British Airways are keen to promote themselves in these difficult times, I do think celebrating their ninetieth birthday today is a bit rich.
The actual anniversary today is of the first scheduled international flight from London to Paris, run by a company called Aircraft Transport and Travel. The company had been formed [...]

Back in the late eighties and early nineties, for a number of years London Underground ran a number of successful Steam on the Met weekends. It all started with a celebration weekend in 1989 to commemorate the centenary of the opening of the Metropolitan Railway into Chesham, using Met 1, the last remaining operating Metropolitan [...]

So a few weeks after coming into office, midnight saw the high profile enactment of one of Boris Johnson’s election pledges, the banning of alcohol from all London public transport, the logic being that if you curb low level disorder it will help make steps towards curbing the bigger problem. There are needless to say [...]

The latest woe to befall the muppet show that is Heathrow Terminal Four – telling all the British Airways economy and premium economy passengers that they can’t take any hold baggage because the baggage handling system has broken down again!

When I first heard the details of the plane crash at Heathrow yesterday, my first thought was quite what a lucky escape everybody had. The flight was coming in from the east, so would have done the traditional run over central and west London known to so many people – indeed news reports last [...]

First off, a bit of good news to all of our friends who have got one of my moans over about the past week about the complications of trying to book our next trip to Canada – you’ll be pleased to hear that we’ve now actually booked a trip, so no more moans – well [...]

Yesterday I had a decidedly interesting bill from Hertz, the people who we rented a car from on our trip to France in the summer. The bill is for an administration charge, for supplying my details to “the relevant authorityâ€? in Switzerland for a penalty charge. All well and good, but it doesn’t actually say [...]

Today, the CrossRail project was finally given the go-ahead.
To give you some idea of how long the project has been trying to get the go ahead, it was originally announced when I was still at school and Margret Thatcher was Prime Minister but ever since then nobody has stumped up the cash to actually complete [...]

One of the things I did when I sorted out my laptop at the weekend was update the supporting software for my various Garmin GPS units. There were a couple of updates for my little StreetPilot i2, the first being an improved quality British voice for the unit – which does sound slightly different – [...]

I may have baulked at the prospect of my local council spending my taxes on a probably fruitless attempt to stop it, but I’m certainly pleased to hear that Reading has scrapped the loony one way IDR plan. The idea was that turning the whole of the IDR into one giant roundabout would ease traffic [...]

Float planes really don’t like calm water.
One of the things I’ve always wanted to do was fly in a float plane. I guess it’s having watched series like Tales of the Gold Monkey which included a Grumman Goose flying boat. But anyway, since on this holiday Beth was going up the CN Tower and seeing [...]

You can always rely on Ryanair and it’s charismatic boss Michael O’Leary for some entertaining news stories. After discriminating against disabled passengers by charging them for a wheelchair, winding up the green lobby and sitting right at the bottom of the pile as the worlds least favourite airline, today it lost out in another battle [...]

Back at Christmas I posted a big grumble about the fiasco that is Heathrow Terminal 4 – a piece that even got me quoted in the Times. Heading over to France this last week, we went with British Airways, again from Terminal 4, this time into Geneva Airport in Switzerland.
So first up, there have been [...]

The head of IATA is pretty clear what he thinks, and isn’t pulling his punches:
“A particular focus will be the UK, where unique screening policies inconvenience passengers with no improvement in security. The only beneficiary is the airport operator BAA that continues to deliver embarrassingly low service levels by failing to invest in appropriate equipment [...]

One of the most popular posts on the blog is my post of a couple of years ago about the DVLA online vehicle registration. However whilst I have always been able to register one of our cars using the service, the other has always had an old style form. However last week a new style [...]

Yesterday was somewhat of a busy day – not only was it the fifth of the successful series of Developer Days at Microsoft, but we’d also got tickets for the equally successful Watercress Belle, the fine dining train that the Watercress Line preserved railway run on a number of Saturday evenings during the year.
The day [...]

Here is a sequence that demonstrates one of those occasions when having a video feature on your mobile is really useful. I came across this item on the Consumerist site – a video made by a poor passenger who was imprisoned on Delta flight 6499 whilst it sat on the tarmac for seven hours waiting [...]

If you look carefully in the travel section of yesterdays Sunday Times, you’ll see what can happen if you grumble about something on your blog – in this case the spectacularly misnamed ‘Fast Bag Drop’ at Heathrow. The target of the article is the British Airways operation, however the Air Canada equivalent at the airport [...]

After the Potters Bar Rail Crash, all rail maintenance was brought in house to Network Rail because of apparent poor maintenance by the outside contractors – and yet five years on, and the interim report into the Cumbria Crash again blames poorly maintained points, with again the same catalogue of missing parts causing the points [...]