Wagons ho and wheels up

Humanity is doomed.  There is no hope.  I have the proof.

Tourists should be the pinnacle of human development.  These are people who are earning enough money to travel for leisure, and have the intellectual curiosity that compels them to visit new places and experience new cultures, rather than spend their holidays on the couch with a box set, a behaviour by the way I hasten to add I do not judge or condemn.

Like early man, tourists are tool users, unlike early man they have pull-along suitcases, and access to room service, and access to people possibly living in fear of deportation back to a country they certainly did not leave with tourism on their minds, to fold down their bed sheets and fold the end of their toilet roll into a point.

Indeed a tourist, in particular a foreign tourist, is more of less using all of the knowledge and development of human civilisation to this point, from the airplane that they travelled on, to the sophisticated fabrics in the sort of colour that once only an Emperor could afford to keep the rain off.

Why then, are tourists such fucking idiots?

Tourists exhibit, for a group that have travelled, have gone to the time and expense and inconvenience of leaving their couch, presumably to go places, baffling behaviour.  For a class of people whose very existence is predicated on movement, why do they love stopping so much?  And not at convenient places, but rather at busy intersections or, my particular favourite, the entrance to a railway station.  These are people who have so little self awareness that they decide to stop in a doorway to consult each other, their mobile 'phones, a map, or for all I know the spirit of a long departed ancestor for advice.

I've got some advice, walk forward ten fucking steps so you don't block the busy entrance to the place like a cagoule cork.

That problem is as old as the Aussie backpacker who thinks that the bottom of an escalator on the Underground is an excellent place to halt to get his bearings.

A more recent phenomenon actually harks back to the early days of pioneering, with tourists with wheely suitcases forming a wagon train along the pavement.  Actually this I don't mind so much, because at least it's picturesque and ordered, and one can always anticipate the spectacle of the tourists circling the suitcases if they come under attack.

Full disclosure, I have done this wheelie suitcase thing myself, forming a very short train with Mrs GandP.  It's actually rather pleasing to glide along, as long as you are aware of your surroundings.

Of course, being at the pinnacle of human development and being a fucking idiot are not necessarily mutually exclusive properties, it's just that I'd like to think they are.

Maybe the explorer, rather than the tourist, is at the summit of the pinnacle, traditionally an explorer is somebody who does not pause when they come to a entrance, especially if it is of a tomb and there may be some bling behind the door.

Oh, and for the avoidance of doubt, if you call yourself a 'traveller' rather than a tourist when visiting a place, then unless you are doing so in a caravan and your arrival prompts headlines in the local version of the Daily Mail and text alerts in the local community about locking up their pets, then you are not a traveller, you are a tourist.  Visiting somewhere where there is a hostel and sporting half a dozen different bracelets on your non-dominant wrist does not make you a traveller, nor does constant reputation of the term once you get home.  You are at best, a visitor, like when you visit a National Trust property at the weekend, except that it is hellish difficult to get a decent afternoon tea in downtown Laos.

Who's been sitting in my seat?

I bet Portillo doesn't have to put up with this!

In possibly the greatest rehabilitation of a personality since Paul went from tax collector to apostle, Michael Portillo is now better known as a presenter of charmingly inoffensive soufflé-weight documentaries about train travel than as The Hammer Of The Poor.  Essentially, the format of ‘Trains to Charming Places’ is that Michael, sporting a wardrobe that makes one question his sexuality and clutching a guide book as outdated as the ideas he had when in the Cabinet, takes trains hither and yon and stops off to discuss heritage trades like being a farrier, fletcher or cooper (back when these were trades and not merely surnames.  Presumably following the tradition of names deriving from trades, a century hence Tommy Callcentre and Susie Barista will be common enough names) before announcing ‘look at my bright trousers and tremble’ and ambling off towards the station.

Anyone watching this programme for longer than the necessary time (which is the length of time it takes to press the button on the remote to take you to the next channel) will note that when the presenter makes his train journey, he is inevitably in a not terribly crowded carriage.  This of course makes perfect sense as crouching across from the presenter is a cameraman, sound guy, director and the girl who fetches the paninis.

Anyone who commutes on a regular basis will know that such space is far from the norm, but then again the programme probably wouldn’t have the same relaxed air if Michael were standing in a vestibule (loom it up, it’s the right word) between carriages with his nose rubbing the camera lens, thanks to the overcrowding.

Neither does Michael apparently have to find his won seat by excavating a pile of used Metros and the debris of what appears to be a takeaway Medieval banquet.

Naturally, railway companies have to make huge profits somehow, and the latest trend appears to be charging ridiculous ticket prices and only employing cleaners every third day.  This means that you usually have the opportunity to play the Goldilocks Game when alighting, in other words ‘which anti-social fucker has been sitting in my seat’.  If you are lucky, it’s somebody who has carefully refolded their copy of the Metro before dropping it on the floor, if you are unlucky, it is somebody who has either breakfasted on the flakiest pastry ever made, or is a leper.

Occasionally though it’s just a single coffee cup.

What, Watson, can we deduce from this.  Firstly, that the drinker favours decaf, as their coffee has obviously not given them the energy required to bin the fucking thing.  Secondly, that there are either an oligarch or a fare dodger, as it is unlikely that anyone purchasing a ticket at today’s prices can also afford store-bought coffee.  Finally, that they have joined the growing tribe of adult litterlouts (yes, leaving a coffee cup for somebody else to clear away, when you actually have to walk past a bin in the carriage to exit, is littering).

Cardboard coffee cups are the new fag butts and as such are the very worst and most offensive sort of litter because coffee, like fags, is a product consumed by adults.  Crisp packets and sweetie wrappers are annoying litter but one can almost understand why Little Fuckers, sorry, why children, discard them, it’s because they are careless, have not been brought up properly and have never spent a Sunday morning tidying their front garden by plucking Haribo wrappers out of their hedges.

Commuting, I think, makes one more intolerant of stupidity, be it passive aggressive littering, leaky headphones or the inappropriate use of the mobile ‘phone in any carriage, actually, on any train I am in or on or even waiting for.

Which is why it would make for a magnificent conclusion to the series to see Portillo completely lose his fucking mind with an annoying fellow traveller who has their shitty music on too loud and beat the little prick to death with his Bradshaw.

Now that I would watch.

Merry Christmas

This should have been all brussel sprouts.  Instead, it's mostly trout.

With the flooding hitting so many people and so many travel plans, it’s clear to see that for many, the pre-Christmas periood is about getting home to see your family, because wherever you live , your home is where your family is.

This migration home was evident on the motorway at the weekend.

One of the best train journeys I ever had was on a Christmas Eve, the carriage looked like a scene from a seasonal Hallmark made for tee vee schmaltsfest, with the luggage rack silver and gold and green and red with wrapped presents poking out of plastic bags, and the travellers either glad to be going home, or glad to be going home for Christmas.  Possibly the general atmosphere of goodwill towards all men was assisted by the noble English tradition of opening the booze at twelve sharp on Christmas Eve, especially if intending to use public transport, but so what?

On the motorway, instead of the usual lone traveller in their car, one could peek into mobile bubbles of Christmas, making their way to relatives.  Back seats were crammed with kids and boots were crammed with presents.  The journey gave rise to an impromptu game of awarding the best presented back sill of a car.  If you are going to totally obscure your rear view, you may as well do so with some jolly packages.

And while a strong contender for most Christmassy car was the one where the lady in the passenger seat had a large, beautifully wrapped box on her lap, the winner without a doubt was the large car with the parents in the front, the kids in the back and the presents and a dog in the large rear boot space.  The dog was well out of sight and reach of any humans and was just beginning to realise this, as it started to carefully shred the wrapping on the box nearest to it.

Loaded cars are part of Chjristmas.  I have friends who make a journey between various family members, clocking up many miles and many hours of radio listening.  They call packing the boot ‘loading up the sleigh’.

With the floods and the rain and the weather stopping trains in the south and ferries in the north, it’s taking some people a lot of effort to get to their loved ones. But weather your present is beautifully wrapped, or in the dog, or just their presence, it’s worth it.

Here's to all the travelers - may they arrive safely to a warm welcome.

Merry Christmas!

A Road England

Motorways have changed Britain, and not just by concreting over large portions of it. For instance, they allow yogurt to travel more miles than a comedian turned traveller can rack up filming an entire series of taking a quirky journey while taking a sideways look at the locals, they allow for family bickering to take place in a controlled enclosed environment for many hours and, of course, they provide an opportunity for the driver to look into the people-pods passing left and right and make judgements about the travellers within, based on how many windows are blacked out with holiday gear and children packed into the back of the family saloon, how loved-up the couple making their way to a mini-break look, or how that mini-break went based on how far away the passenger and driver are attempting to get away from one another while remaining in the same car on the journey home.

They also provide the opportunity to eat an entire packet of wine gums in one go and spend the next two hours wondering if its possible to sweat sugar. They have given rise to the motorway service station, somewhere to pee and eat warm sandwiches in the car park while wondering if the crab paste smells funny or if it’s just the diesel fumes making you a bit queasy. They do have their charms, such as service stations and the occasional decent view, but set against this you have a seemingly endless ribbon of tarmac, only decorated with the occasional tyre debris where stimulation is rare, if you are lucky you can play games such as ‘what the hell language is that on the back of that truck’ or ‘having been sat in a roadwork filter system for an hour, how angry am I that the roadworks appear to be unoccupied?’.

In-car distractions have developed. As well as radio, tape and CD, there are in-car DVD players, the only things more stimulated than drive-time DJs are lab monkeys with electrodes inserted into their thalamus and of course those knights of the road, the long haul truckers, have sex with prozzers in laybys to relieve the monotony. Sometimes they even close the curtains in the cab first.

Motorways have changed Britain. Before motorways we had main roads, now known as A roads. A-road Britain is a slower, more picturesque and, I think, kinder place that M-Way Britain. Motorways may be a great way to get from A to Z quickly, but the M can often stand for ‘misery’ and, what’s more, there’s a lot to be said for visiting B to Y on the way from A to Z.

Driving to Blenheim Palace I kept seeing signs to Evesham, very near my next destination, Malvern, and somewhere it takes another hour to reach by M-Way. I was rather wondering if the M40 takes a bloody huge loop out of the way, possibly there’s some sort of geographical rift allowing more or less instant access from London to the Cotswolds. Thinking that a fold in spacetime sounded more exciting than the M40, I decided to take the A road route.

And so, I rediscovered A road Britain. This is the way to travel, armed only with an AA book of the road from 1957 and a sense of adventure, one travels at a more human pace than one does on the motorway, and is not shut off from the world by culverts and landscaping. Instead, one passes through towns and villages, under the arms of sheltering trees. One follows road signs and tractors, not the instructions of the sat nav.

There is a lot to see. Oddly, although the journey is probably longer, it feels shorter. There’s a lot to do too, with time to study ones surrounding, you can play ‘name that road kill’. Seeing more flat fox than shredded lorry tyre adds to the rustic appeal of the journey.

And it has to be said, travelling through the Cotswolds is a pleasant way to spend the day. One makes one’s way through villages where each is progressively prettier than the last. Just when you thought that the last village, with its Cotswold stone houses, lovely pub, charming shops and good looking population was just the most charming place ever, you happen along the next village and realise that the one five miles back was, by comparison, a right shithole. All of the villages seemed to be thriving and I wanted to stop at book shops, knick-knacks shops and charming pubs.

One of the villages we went through was Chipping Norton and so, naturally, I was relishing the opportunity of bonneting one of the ‘set’ and doing the world a favour.

But, I pressed on because I was on a mission. The summer had ripened fruit to perfection and in the Vale of Evesham one fruit reigns supreme at this time of the year; the plum. I was looking for a roadside stall selling not so much PYO as PBL (Picked By Lithuanians). I didn’t see a stall but did spot a farm shop and screeched to a shuddering halt as I pulled in (apologies to the no-doubt surprised driver behind me and may I also take a moment to congratulate him on his lightening reactions. Congratulations too to the staff of the farm shop who were unruffled by my hasty entry to their car park, safe to say they have probably never seen a car come to a halt that quickly without it deploying a parachute out the rear).

The Wayside Farm Shop was something of a find. There was a selection of fruit and veg by the door (and yes, plums), but out the back was, basically, a delicatessen. It sold Teme Valley Brewery beer (rather lovely, they do a beer called ‘This’, a beer called ‘That’ and a beer called ‘Wotever next’. Seeing these bad boys lined up, one has to purchase the set. Verdict: oh yes! They also had cider on tap, bring your own bottle. Actually don’t bother with the bottle, they recommend that you bring along your empty plastic milk container and fill that up, as it holds more. Classy. There were cheeses, breads, cakes and, best of all, meringues the size of dinner plates hanging from the ceiling. One of these, a punnet of strawberries and a large pot of cream meant desert was sorted. Went in for a dozen plums, did sixty quid. Farms shops. Not threatening Lidl for market domination any time soon.

Travelling the motorway one arrives quickly but somewhat frazzled and smelling of stress and wine gums. Taking the A road, I arrived relaxed and happy with a box of (bloody expensive) fresh veg in the back of the car, not to mention the beer, which I’m drinking while I write this. Overall, there’s something to be said for taking the road less travelled.

Postcard from New York - Food

I don't know if they are representative of Americans in general, but New Yorkers seem to have an odd relationship with their food, testing it more like fuel, or something to be suffered, than something to be savoured and enjoyed. While were were there there was a programme on the telly called 'Man vs food' where the premise is that the presenter travels around America taking part in the various eating challenges that exist there. Not of the 'how many hot dogs can you gulp in a minute' variety but rather the ones run by eating places where, if you eat the enormous sandwich, you get it and a ride to the hospital for free sort of thing. I can say that the American approach to food hinges on portion size. The first place we ate in, 'The Edison', apparently specialised in theatre dinners and I thought we would be OK for a quick meal. Not quite. Look, it might be fancy in NYC to cook proper chips instead of spindly French fries, but knocking up something that any self respecting pissed up Glasweigan could do in an instant on any night of the week and passing it off as a speciality is taking the piss. As were the tinned vegetables.


Americans seem to equate portion size with how good a meal is, rather than quality. A friend who spent some time in the city commented afterwards that they learned that the less that was on your plate, the better the food was going to be. My plate was piled high with turkey smothered in gravy. Even after going at it for half an hour I had barely made a dent. Partly because there was just so much of it, partly because it wasn't great. Obviously, I would be crap as the presenter of 'Man vs food' (which has in it's titles a graphic of a man punching a sandwich. Cute.). Unless, of course, 'Man vs food' is cleverly edited so that he always wins. Maybe I'm not the target viewer, but i don't see that the object of visiting a restaurant should be a struggle to clean your plate. What I would like to see is if the fat fuck exploded or destroyed his loo or something the next day, or a combination of the two. Death by exploding arse. That would make me watch, host mortality.

The odd thing is that you walk past loads of delis that are stuffed with exotic oils and decent looking food. I assume that, lacking a supermarket in the centre of this busy city and having seen no grocery delivery vans puttering around, New Yorkers do a daily rather than a weekly shop from their local grocer. In a space constrained city, this would also make sense as it means that you don't have that particular English affliction of a fridge and freezer full of food after the Saturday shop, and a fridge devoid of anything tasty by Friday.


One place we ended up eating in turned out to be one of a chain of organic restaurants. The decor is all stripped pine, school chairs and refractory tables where you may have to sit down side by side with a stranger. It's odd that the decor should reflect the food in a way that suggests that just because something is organic, its austere and almost a form of punishment. Obviously these people have never tried an organic bacon double cheeseburger.

Postcard from New York City - Staten Island Ferry

Ah, the heady smell of diesel, commerce and commuting. Commuting by ferry brings a touch of glamour to what can be a very mundane process, especially of your journey takes you past an iconic landmark such as the statue of liberty, on a journey to or from an iconic skyline.


You can tell who the locals are. When I caught the hydrofoil across the bay of Naples from Naples to Sorrento I was running around like a loon with my camera, trying to capture the views. The locals were more interested in their books. So it was the case here also. Tourists rushed from port to starboard and back again to take in the view, while real commuters either sat inside in the warm or were content to sit in the chill winter sunshine ignoring the view.

Riding an iconic piece of transport immortalised in movies past one of the most famous landmarks in the world, you realise that the city is genuinely woven from a collection of landmarks and icons. All that was missing was a giant monkey.

At Staten Island everyone rushed off the ferry, round the terminal and straight onto the next ferry back. The ferry out had a hurricane deck, which is something you don't expect to see on a commuter ferry, the one back did not, so everyone was on at the open space at the front. It was so cold that I lost all feel in my head and had to keep touching my nose to see if it was running, for fear of an icicle forming. And the ferry is free! I was astonished. I wasted five minutes looking for a ticket office at the terminal, not quite believing it.

The weather the whole time was cold and with brilliant sunshine. The mains of the snowfall were piled up in Cental Park. You could tell it had really, really snowed here.

Walked back uptown via the site of the World Trade Centre, which is at once bigger and smaller than you'd think. Smaller because everything around it now is so neat and tidy, you can't imagine it was the site of such destruction. And people live there, continue to live there, in the neighbouring streets. That amazed me. We were sat at a cafe and a school bus stopped and let off the kids, and they looked ordinary kids, not rich kids, living in apartments one block from the most expensive property in Manhattan. This happens in London of course, with council flats dotted around the centre of town, but you just wouldn't get ordinary people living next door to the city skyscrapers. It really came home that when the towers came down, there was nowhere to run to. If you ran for a minute you'd be at a river. Best haul your ass uptown and don't stop for Starbucks. And it's bigger because, once again, New Yorkers are seeing just now many skyscrapers the can put on one block. The answer here is 'a lot'. Apparently there are so many skyscrapers in the because New York is on granite. London is on clay, hence spreading out rather than up. Try building a skyscraper on loam and before you know it you have a bungalow with a lot of basements.

Stopped at the 9/11 gift shop (yes, really) and picked up the obligatory NYPD and FDNY tee shirts. Bought wrong size, XXXL. American XXXL at that. The bloody thing could have sheltered a family of five, or a Rangers fan.


Back to exchange the next day, the last in the city. This gave me an excuse to check out Greenwich Village, the only area of the city not to be laid out in a grid, meaning I promptly got lost. This was, I think, one of the nicest parts of new York, it has a more intimate and laid back atmosphere.

Postcard from New York City - sport

As well as doing a suicide dog, another tick box experience was to go an see a Rangers game while in New York. Ice hockey always looks so dangerous and glamorous and what could be better than seeing a local team in action. The reality was that by eight o clock in the evening I was knackered and so was flopping on the bed with barely enough strength to flick the remote, never mind scream encouragement or abuse at ice skaters while using the word 'puck' as often as possible because I like the way it feels in my mouth. The Rangers game was actually televised and maybe it was the jet lag but the reality of an ice hockey game is: loads of blokes in body armour, zooming about randomly chasing a puck that is too quick and too small to be seen, while the goal is defended by a bloke with shin pads so huge that when he brings them together, they form a perfect seal over the goal. With no real sport to be had it is no wonder that the players seem to spend most of the match attempting to beat up on one another. This in itself is pretty comical as they all have huge mittens on and are all wearing more body armour than a medieval knight. Still, it's the thought that counts.

The actual Rangers fans I saw outside Madison Square Gardens ahead of the game though, looked like the real deal. These guys were wearing their replica Rangers shirts which fitted them snugly despite them not wearing any body armour at all. They were the size of trucks and looked like they had real jobs, the sort that result in nicknames. Jobs like punching the cows to death in the slaughterhouse when the humane killer is out of order, so earning themselves nicknames like 'The Bolt'.

Postcard from New York City - Modern art

The Museum Of Modern Art is one of the must sees of NYC. It's an interesting visit, even if for the European visitor the two top floods are a waste of space, containing as they do a collection of impressionist works that are better curated in the shows they visit in London. Still, in a city of strangers it was good to see a familiar face or two (or a familar bottom or two in the case of the Rubens) and, to be fair, there is at least one exceptional Barbara Hepworth on display.

The oddest thing about American galleries (after you get over the fact that you don't have to pay for an audio guide, which I think is great and a policy UK galleries should adopt at once - having coughed up thirty quid to peer at a daub through a crowed of other visitors, I'm not sure I am in the mood to fork out a fiver to hear John Nettles giving me a lecture on how the artist expired of syphilis in a Danish brothel), is that the public are allowed to take photographs of the pictures. As long as they don't flash, which is good because there are quite enough nudes on the walls as it is. And people do. They not only take pictures of pictures, but take close ups of pictures, presumably to be used as one of those 'what famous painting is this a detail from' questions in their pub quiz, or have pictures of themselves taken standing beside a painting, as if you would beside any other landmark.

The gear delight of the museum is the collection of Warhols. I've never really appreciated Warhole before but, having spent even a little bit of time in the city you can see that they have the same sort of cheeky energy as the city itself, a mixture of commerciality and icon.


Not to be outdone by the smaller Whitney across town, the MOMA had it's own disturbing painting: 'Christina's world'. No wonder writers flock to New York, you are never stuck for inspiration. Every street corner would fill a notebook and a visit to a gallery is not unlike flicking through the bumper book of creative writing questions where you have to compose a short story based on the picture above.

The cafe on the top floor of the MOMA delivers a new twist on catering to hungry gallery goers. Because it's in close proximity to the paintings, they don't cook hot food! Luckily, soup was a loophole. I was betting that even new Yorkers couldn't screw up soup, especially with so many paintings of the damn stuff hanging downstairs, and was right.





It was delicious, and very orange. As was my beer, which had a slice of orange in it also. Which was interesting.


The beer on draft was your typical che che artisan brewery type light beer, which the Americans do very, very well, turning out seemingly endless versions of beers with a distinctive flavour that are a pleasure to drink in a way that six pints of Stella on a Friday night are not. But the wedge of orange on the glass? Were they taking the piss?


Highlight of the MOMA was the trio of pictures detailing how the 'I heart N Y' logo came into being. Lowlight, a painting that was black. The audio guide then told you to look at it and you could see it was different shades of black. Indeed it was, you could make out different shades of black if you looked at it for about thirty seconds. That's half a minute of my life wasted, because even when you can see the different shades it's still a black painting and it's still toss. Suspect the artist was crap and painting flowers.

Evening comes early to certain sections of NYC. If you are in the shadow of a skyscraper (and unless you're on an even taller skyscraper, almost everybody is) you can expect to see your last sunlight around about the same time you finish your breakfast.

Postcard from New York City - Iconography

NYC is enormous. Although you can walk a block in a minute, there is block after block after block, and the city expands vertically as well as horizontally. Other cities may have their showpiece spires and single tall buildings but New York has hundreds of the bloody things. Block after block after block of skyscraper and money. Each block looks, if not the same, then similar. When I visited many New Yorkers looked the same too, in that they had enormous puffa jackets, scarfs and hats on. This is not a fashion statement, New York is a coastal city on the Atlantic with no Gulf Stream to keep it cosy and is bloody cold.

Each corner has a hot dog cart on it and although I had promised myself that I'd have a hot dog off a street vendor in new York as an 'experience', the phrase 'suicide dog' kept going through my head and I bottled it.

One of the most constant images in new York, on it's way to becoming an icon like the yellow cab or statue of liberty, is the Starbucks coffee cup. Not only was every second person in the street walking along with a bucket sized Starbucks cup in their hand, but our hotel was 'proud to serve' Starbucks coffee in the restaurants and even the tea making facilities had Starbucks paper cups, well, beakers more like, rather than china cups. New Yorkers love their Starbucks so much that they actually take their Starbucks coffee into restaurants. In two places I saw people sitting eating with a Starbucks coffee beaker next to them. That's one trend that I can't see catching on in London, although having tasted the food in NYC I can see the attraction of taking your own food and drink into a restaurant and treating it as you would a picnic area.

On the sidewalks though, every second person has their Starbucks in their hand as they walk along. Actually, it's more like amble along, strolling to work at half nine in the morning. This might give a clue as to why America's title as an economic superpower is slipping. While the suits are walking down Forty Third street to work, slurping from their their bucket of latte, Shen Zhao has been at his desk for ten hours already. In fact he doesn't sleep, he doesn't have a bucket of coffee, he's got a bucket of black market amphetamines supplied to him by his bosses.

Postcard from New York City - Art

The hotel charges for wi fi! Where the hell are we, Paris? In the wooly wilds of Norfolk you go into a pub with wi fi and ask for the password and you get it, here in the Westin you are expected to pay an extra charge? That might have been acceptable, just, in 1998 but not today. At least the view is free. The Mandarin Oriental has a much more enlightened approach, simply asking you for your room number and password. If it works like it did in the hotel in Dublin, wi fi is included in the price of your room.

Or possibly I'm missing something. New York is all about making money after all and if you gave away your wi fi you'd not only lose out on that charge but also on any money you might make charging for your adult entertainment channels. A hotel, I suppose, has a right to ensure that they can continue to make a dime from those traditional bastions of adult entertainment, porn flicks and kickbacks from hookers.

Walked through Central Park. There are play areas dotted around the outside edge so that New Yorkers don't have to walk across the park to let their kids have a go on the swings. Presumably this means that the kids are in no danger of mixing with kids from other, potentially rougher, neighbourhoods. Because Christ alone knows it's bad enough that your toddler has started using Romanian it's picked up from the nanny without learning Spanish curse words too.


The Alice in wonderland statue is impressive and also surprisingly sinister, the Mad Hatter in particular looks like a demented ken Dodd, with enough teeth to give an ivory poacher a hard-on for a month. The giant mushroom is shiny at the front, where millions of children have polished the bronze with their bums.


Spent the morning in the Whitney gallery, home to the largest collection of Edward Hopper paintings in the world. Seen in the flesh, or rather in the pigment, the paintings are astonishing. Previously I'd only seen them in books, post cards or posters. The custodian gave a broad grin when the lift doors opened and I gasped at the size of the paintings, no doubt sensing a rube among the sensitive bohemian gallery goers that normally frequent the place.

They were all impressive, but also had that subtle Hopper menace. Not just a sense of isolation or loneliness, but the real sense that waiting, just out of picture, is a serial killer. Of course such a sensation is unfounded, unless Hopper himself was the malign presence always just out of shot...except in self portraits. Much more likely to be a serial killer is the sort of person who goes fluently to the exhibition pretending to be a sensitive bohemian.


Of course they were not all disturbing. One painting totally devoid of menace and instead suffused with charm was 'Early Sunday morning', a picture of a typical street in a small town anywhere in America. The painting is to art what Ray Bradbury's stories are to literature, evoking a nostalgic time, a golden age in the life of small town America that may or may not have actually existed but, mythical or not, is instantly recognisable. Hopper blurred the writing on the storefronts in a deliberate act of making the street anonymous. He did such a good job that I think the place resembles not only a small town I passed through once on a visit to Colorado but also a little place I know in the Cotswolds.

The gallery is also home to early photographs of New York city, antique black and white images of steam and skyscrapers that could have been taken yesterday.

As well as Hopper, the are contemporaries of his exhibited here also. The Charles Burchfield paintings were of shopfronts and streets in the snow, essentially depicting the sort of towns that H P Lovecraft used to write about, looking like they were pictured just before everything kicked off in the tentacle and madness department. He's in good company here. If Hopper's early paintings are Ray Bradbury, his later ones are Stephen King. All that's missing from 'Gas' is the shadow of a Lurker. The paintings are fascinating to look at, but I'm not sure I'd want one hanging in my house, they are definite candidates for the sort of pictures that the owner starts to notice disquieting changes in and are usually purchased from Peter Cushing in a portmanteau horror film from the 1970's.


Top prize for disquieting painting? 'Blue evening'. The image alone is terrifying enough, with the scariest clown ever in the centre of the composition, smoking (what's the only thing scarier than a clown? A clown with a fag on), but my travelling companion managed to ratchet up the tension by asking: 'did the audio guide mention a clown? I don't think it mentioned a clown. What if we are the only people that can see the clown, what if when they make reproductions of this thing there is no clown, just an empty chair? Why are you crying?'.

Can you see the clown? If so, it doesn't mean that everyone can see the clown, it just means that you can see the clown too!


The other curious painting is one of a shop with an unclear purpose. Hopper's wife called it a 'blind pig', that is, a shopfront that was essentially camouflaging a speakeasy. Of course, let's have a sinister term to describe what was, up until I heard that, a rather good picture of a shop in the sunshine.

Postcard from New York City - Times Square

Times Square is magical, an amazing place where the city begins to cast a spell. The billboards are not just electronic, or tickers, they are moving images the size of tennis courts. Recognising its charms, it has a viewing platform where you can watch the advertising billboards, like a show. Best time to go is sunset, when the light drains out of the sky and the neon wash becomes more pronounced. With all this clutter, advertisers work hard at getting you to look at their billboard, one having the genius idea to have a camera rigged to a huge screen that puts the crowd in the picture and then superimposes a giant woman walking into the square. I have no idea what it was advertising, I was too busy taking the photograph of my pixalated image, waving and expressing shock at the attack of the fifty foot woman.



Possibly the reason that al the bars in the city are so gloomy is because all the energy, or light bulbs, is being used in Times Square. Certainly, looking at the place, you would think that America doesn't give a shit about the energy crisis. So there's me using my energy efficient light bulbs at home, with the result that my front room looks like it's being viewed underwater, while here in this city they have decided to go down the route of conspicuous consumption. And they do love their gloomy bars. Even the lobby of our hotel was apparently lit my a single forty watt bulb. Is this to save on electricity, or cleaning? Some bars I can understand being dimly lit but surely every single one can't be used of illicit assignations? And what if you spend twenty minutes flirting with somebody before you realise that they've been talking to the wrong person?


This is a city of sights no doubt, but also a city of smells, the most common being burning pretzel, closely followed by frying onion and falafel coming from just about every street corner where the hot dog cart vendors have branched out. The pretzels are truly amazing. New Yorkers have taken something that is supposed to be a bar snack and turned it into a main by the simple expedient of supersizing it until it's the size of a steering wheel of a small car. It's also a city of sound, the predominant one being a local shouting into a mobile phone, always sounding more like an opinion than one end of a conversation.

NYC is also city of proximity, close proximity. In NYC even the buildings huddle up close to one another, the streets are never less than crowded and the cars pass one another with barely enough space for an extra coat of paint, sometimes passing so closely there must be friction.


You can see why anyone coming to the city would think that it is special, but New York needs to be careful that it does not turn into the theme park version of itself. Helping to keep a sense of reality is that the city is very much a place to live as well as a place to work or visit. Real people live in the heart of the city. It's possibly the reason why the city also appears to be totally devoid of litter, a feature which only adds to the theme park appearance.

And it's odd to see so many British bands transposed here, Pret is here, as is HSBC meaning the street features familiar corporate colours. In the New York Pret they have adapted the business model to take account of the free refills that American coffee shops offer, the coffee sits in the middle of the shop and you help yourself to refills. Can't see that catching on in London.

Postcard from New York City - Hot dogs

The hot dog cart guys are a piece of work. They stand on the street corner all day, after wheeling the carts through the NYC traffic in the morning. Apart from lunchtime, I never saw anyone, ever, buying anything from one of these guys, and even between twelve and two there was hardly ever what you'd call a queue, like you see in the movies.


What I love though is the optimism of anyone who thinks that somebody is going to want to buy a hot dog loaded with chilli sauce and onions at nine in the morning.

Postcard from New York City - NYC first impressions

Now that the twin towers have gone, when you come over the bridge from JFK and catch your first sight of the city, you are confronted with heavy metal bridges, gothic architecture and art deco skyscrapers. These are reflected back in the more modern, but smaller, steel and glass towers that intersperse them. If the heyday of a city is marked by it's tallest structure then this is a city in decline, the most prominent architectural features were built in the nineteen twenties and thirties, in the last depression.

The riveted girder bridges are an interesting contrast to the modern, elegant swooping arcs that form modern bridges in Europe. Possibly the bridges need to be on steroids because everything is bigger in America, including the super sized lardy arses of the drivers of the huge and heavy cars that pass over the structures.

Also visible in the heart of the city are vacant lots, something you would just never see in London, where construction on a new building is started the second the dust settles from the demolition of the previous one. One ingenious use that vacant lots are put to is car parking. But, this being New York, it's not just a case of a few shoddy square yards of mud and gravel being used as park up a few cars. Rather, instant multi-story car parks pop up, basically static car transporters where cars sit on, for the want of a better word, shelves. Usually a simple double decker arrangement, I did see one with three levels. Ingenious.


The entire city appears to be constructed of iconic images, every one a mini landmark. Steam venting out of the street, cops as wide as houses, yellow cabs, hot dog carts on every corner and steam pipes in the street looking like cat in the hat hats.




But the defining feature is the skyscrapers. They may have been surpassed in height elsewhere but the sheer density and variety of tall buildings here is staggering. You really do walk around constantly looking up, you can't help it. Other cities may have a single showpiece tower but New York has hundreds of the bloody things. It's quite a sensation to sit on the twenty fourth floor in your hotel room and look down on the tiny dots of people below, then look up at the distant tops of towers above.


The incongruity of the modern and antique, small and large, side by side is most pronounced when you see a church sandwiched between two skyscrapers. Churches are not small buildings, but here they look tiny. One expects the tower or spire of a church to be the tallest structure, especially if you are familiar with English villages, where a spire pops up above the treetops every few miles, dotting the countryside, ready to annoy the hell out of any nearby second-homeowners by having a two hour Sunday morning peal that starts at dawn. Not here, here the churches sit between office blocks. But somehow still manage to look imposing.

Yet New York is built on a human scale too, at least on street level, with the street vendors plying their trade with hot dogs, pretzels, gyros and halal food. And also selling children's books. One guy just had children's toys sat there on the sidewalk, with clockwork cars and helicopters whizzing round in circles around him. Maybe they do need to polish their sales technique however, as the chap drumming up trade on the sidewalk for his barber shop screamed 'shave and a haircut goddamit!' into the faces of passage by. I was so shocked I nearly went in for a bit of male grooming.

Postcard from New York City - Welcome to America

On arrival at JFK we were fingerprinted and photographed. They make you take off your glasses, which is odd because everyone knows that if you want to assume a secret identity, you keep your glasses on. There must be millions of photographs of short sighted tourists squinting to try and work out where the hell the camera is so they can peer into it. Once fingerprinted and photographed we were awaiting the secret police kicking the door in at three in the morning. Actually the immigration guy was polite enough but I thought this was a country with a reputation for welcoming anyone - except Mexicans - so this was a bit of a shock.

Postcard from New York City - Virgin Atlantic

Recession is obviously biting even the hitherto glamorous world of transatlantic air travel, with only one glass of wine per passenger the whole way. Must be because we were in economy, or because it was a dawn flight and not many people do an entire bottle of chardonay for breakfast. Instead of booze, passengers are kept pacified with the bewildering amount of entertainment available in the seat back. Not just the in flight magazine, airplane safety card and complimentary sick bag, but a mini multiplex showing films and telly programmes. Watched 'The King's Speech'. With all the hype I was a little worried that it would disappoint or at least not meet expectation. It's not as good as the hype, it's better. It's so good that it makes you want not to watch another film again that's not as good, as true, as moving or as well acted. Sitting in the middle of a crowded aircraft sobbing was probably not the best way to enjoy it but you just know that the BBC are already desperately bidding for the rights to broadcast it, scheduled for ten past three on Christmas Day if they have any imagination.

Sat belted into a seat watching movies, you become a sort of pleasure prisoner. Virgin recognise this and one of the annoying adverts that play before the movies is of a bloke sat in his seat remarking to the same sex travelling companion he refers to has his 'son' that he would very much like this sort of thing in his front room. The 'son' then goes on to extoll the virtues of Virgin media, explaining that he can get endless entertainment piped into his telly. The advert finishes before the 'dad' can correct the other fool and explain that what he really wants is to be brought endless booze and snacks by a camp steward and sod the movies.

However, there is a glimpse into a better life. One disembarks the aircraft from the very front, so you have to walk through the long and crowded corridors of economy, through the slightly less crowded premium economy until you come to the bar, and business class, and then it's forward still until you get to the first class section. Here there are not so much seats, but little pleasure pods where one can curl up in like a pampered pooch and, presumably, be brought endless glasses of champagne and swans blood while dining on cruel food. This, I think, is supposed to make you think 'next time I will upgrade'. However, having seen the upgrade prices and the cost of a first class ticket across the Atlantic, I would expect not a plastic cot but rather a four poster bed with it's own plasma telly, not so much a bar as a pub, and at least a ten minute go in the cockpit.

Surely a compromise might be reached. If the small seats in economy are the cheapest, is there not scope for further saving by simply sitting on a bar stool the whole trip?

Shackleton's scotch

Ah, the delights of camping food. Modern camping food tends to be the sort of thing that, as a lad I thought astronauts, or people from the future, ate all the time. Freeze dried and packed with artificial flavour and artificial colouring, it is instead actually the sort of food that kids with ADHD eat all the time, hence the ADHD.

You see it in camping shops, on the same shelves as the wee stoves, one size up from the ones that Outdoors Barbie uses. Foil packets of bricks and powder, all with unconvincing pictures of, to be fair, pretty horrible looking food on the front that is supposed to be the final result of your efforts, which consist of dumping the contents of a foil pouch in hot water and stirring relentlessly until your spoon bends with the resistance of the gunk in the pot.

What these meals have in common; chicken curry flavour, stew flavour, chilli con carne flavour, slurry flavour and so on is that at home you'd think they would only be good for tile adhesive, fox poison or ballast and little else, yet half way up a frozen tor, they taste delicious.

Adventures and explorers from a previous age knew a little about provisioning for an expedition too. Essentials back in the age when more of the map was blank than filled in were; many, many cans of meaty stew, bovril and, that most important of kitchen implements, a bloody huge gun. This was because where others saw jungle, explorers saw a larder.

You know that scene in 'Predator' where the guy with the mini gun lets rip in the jungle, shooting at a shadowy figure, then the rest of the special ops team join in, and they let all hell cut loose with many types of automatic weapon, essentially levelling an area of rainforest? Well, your seasoned explorers would expect to achieve the same effect with one barrel, then wander into the devastation to see what hadn't been vaporised or liquified in the blast and was still fit for the pot.

But first and foremost, your explorer equipped themselves with a crate of scotch.

In tough times, when the jungle is closing in, the crevasse is closing up or the lost city refuses to be found, scotch can be a great comfort. No other drink is quite so right for a crisis. In an emergency, one does not drink gin, that's for later when, at your club, you are explaining the loss of your arm while standing on your new tiger-skin rug. Nor is wine acceptable. The only time a gentleman has anything to do with wine is when he is either plying a lady with it, or he is using a magnum bottle to crush the skull of some castle guard prior to shimmying down the drainpipe, across the moat and to freedom. No, scotch is a man's drink. Just look at the face of any man taking a gulp of the stuff. There's no beatific grin, no smile, instead its the grimace of a man who feels the chill finger of doom pressing on the tightening sphincter of his fate.

Scotch has many flavours. Peat, wood, bracken, grass, heather, moss, rain, granite, coo. Essentially a long list of things that drink is not supposed to taste of. If humans enjoyed the taste of the stuff that Scots throw on the fire, coke would have brought out 'catholic cola' years ago.

Paradoxically, because it is so...challenging, scotch makes certain dishes taste better. Not anything already palatable, obviously; a decent spag bol is not going to be enhanced by downing a tumbler of the true water alongside it. But it certainly makes any sort of frontier fodder, such as husky, pony, seal or penguin, tolerable. If scotch can make even Scottish cooking edible, then it's the perfect accompaniment to a plate of baboon's arse.

Despite their backpacks, sledges and tartan shopping trollies or whatever, today's explorers travel light, comfortable in the knowledge that nowhere today is that far from a Tesco.

But back in the day when men had whiskers like the sort of shrubbery a convention of flashers could hide in and you could still get rickets on the national health, explorers travelled heavy. This is because they had discovered that great secret of the British traveller abroad, that the only thing you can rely on in foreign parts is what you take with you. This extends to food, drink and religion but honourable exception is made for native gals and exotic tropical diseases, both of which were instead brought back to England and shown to your horrified family.

Equipping for an expedition, you'd send some junior off to buy a shedload of rope, brass instruments and wooly undergarments while you would spend the morning purchasing cannons and visiting various food and drink emporiums to secure provisions. The trick was to buy the food before the drink, or you'd end up with twenty crates of booze and a packet of twiglets.

So you had your ship, your crates of booze and your wild destination. Obviously, at some point, things are going to go wrong. There are, after all, no famous successful British explorers, so it's just a matter of how things are going to take a turn for the worse; wild animal attack, extreme weather event or, our old friend, unexpected native. At which point, hopefully before the sky falls in on the whole enterprise, you bury the booze.

This has two effects. The first is to give you peace of mind that at least nobody else will be tucking into your crate of twelve year old Glenglacier. The second is that nothing reminds a chap of the location of a camp in an otherwise featureless environment quite like a crate of buried scotch and, should you have to find your way back there, at least you won't need to worry about a drink on arrival.


The great polar explorer Earnest Shackleton apparently buried his stash as well. We know this because it was recently dug up and shipped back to Scotland for tasting and testing. Apparently the intention is to try and blend a whiskey that tastes the same or similar. But surely the thing to do is to drink the actual stash rather than keeping it as some sort of museum piece, or attempting to clone it like an alcoholic Jurassic Park. We'll never see men like Shackleton again so why do we need polar explorers scotch? Is the idea that we drink it and feel like an adventurer? If you want booze and adventure I suggest that you off a bottle of value vodka and walk the streets of Govan after chucking out time in a Celtic shirt. That'll give you all the adventure and excitement you could ever crave.


With the holds of their ships full of corned beef, handy recipes for cooking penguin and crates of scotch carried by bearer, pony or raft, it seems to me that what most of these chaps were really searching for was a decent picnic basket. And they’re are not the only ones.

Postcard from Edinburgh – the Castle

What’s more festival than seeing a show…having one cancelled. With time to spare we visited the castle.

Bloody. Hell.

OK. First off, the battlements. Huge cannons look over the city, ready to blow the hell out of anyone trying to open a Starbucks. They could now be manned by the many tourists who have their pictures taken next to them. But if ancient cannons aren’t your thing…they have the real deal, a functioning artillery piece that’s described as the ‘one o’ clock gun’ but is, when you think about it, a major artillery piece on the highest point in the centre of the city.

Next up, the stairs and ramps. If you managed to fight your way to the top of the castle, you bloody deserve to run the country. And that’s without an opposed attack.

Have to say though, like many castles, the weak point is attack through the gift shop.

The castle also holds the crown jewels, the ‘treasures of Scotland’. There was a little bit of debate about whether they were actually the real things. But, looking at the two huge safe doors that marked the only entrances to the room where they were kept and based on the idea that they are kept in the centre of a room in a castle, with eight foot thick walls, I can think of no better place to keep them.

Want to rip them off? Bring a siege tower. And an army.

Also, it has an audio tour. I bloody love an audio tour. You know what the sign of a good audio tour is? Mood music and sound effects. The section on the one o’clock gun starts with a huge ‘boom!’. Even as I shrieked like a girl, I loved it.

The Scottish national war memorial.


I am not sentimental, alright. It’s just that, like many of the other chaps who were visiting the spotless, dust-free war memorial that day, I have an allergy, that makes my eyes red and my nose runny. Must be allergic to marble.

The war memorial itself is astonishing. A casket containing the battle honours of the regiments sits atop a marble plinth, which is in turn mounted on the bare rock that rises out of a polished marble floor like a rock rising from a still ocean at night. This is the rock of the castle, the living rock of Scotland, the very roots of the country and the memories of the glorious dead, forever remembered, are directly connected to it.

For the record…just about held it together reading the inscription about the war dead being beyond hurt. Lip tremble time when I read the inscription about even the nameless being forever honoured, for their names are written in the book of God.

As I said, allergic to marble.

Postcard from Edinburgh – the Caledonian Express

The Caledonian Express is that rarest of railway birds; the sleeper. And an intentional one at that, having bunks and berths, stewards and a lounge car, instead of just knackered commuters dozing.

Sleeper trains essentially take the concept of the romance of rail and raise it to the power of crime and sex. Think sleeper train and you think Orient Express; where essentially posh people commit murder by perforating a chap while he sleeps. Knife crime is, as we know, a major issue in our inner cities and among the young, who would have thought it would also be such a problem among rich international travellers. And that’s just on a train. God alone knows what the murder rate is like on a cruise (for answer see ‘Death on the Nile’). And of course sex – the infamous ‘60mph club’, as made famous in ‘Don’t look now’ and ‘Belly of an archetect.


The reality is somewhat different. Trying to sleep on the Caledonian Express is not unlike trying to sleep in a tumble drier. Trains clank, and sway, and rumble and go over-the-points, over-the-points, over-the-points. They speed up and slow down and they are passed by other trains in the dead of night with a sort of swooshing roaring noise that has you reaching for your own genitals because hey, you’ve got to hang onto something in the event of a crash and that’s a good a thing as any.

But who cares about any of that, because charm triumphs over all. For any little boy who dreamed of being an astronaut, the Caledonian Express is as close as you are going to get to a space ship, or a submarine. The little cabin is perfect in every way, you even get a luxury toiletries kit. (Luxury being a relative term here. You may regard toothpaste and shaving as essential rather than luxury. Maybe it’s just there to impress the French). They should use these to offset complaints about prison overcrowding, give people a tiny cell but with a luxury toiletries kit and they’ll think they’re on holiday rather than starting a ten stretch for G.B.H.

I’ve always loved little toiletry kits. They are second only to those dining kits you get on aeroplanes, plastic cutlery and individual servings of condiments. I used to think that these were the height of sophistication because they came from airline meals. Of course the really sophisticated airline meals came with silver knives and forks and home-wrecker trolly dollies. Now, of course, you’re lucky to get a spork and if the security people had their way we’d be trying to eat soup with our fingers.

And who cares how small the cabin is when the countryside is rolling past in so stately a manner. Or, at least, I presume it to be. Even with the blind up the thing about a sleeper train is that it travels at night. I had a romantic notion that I would travel with the blind up and, looking out of the window, see the English countryside slip past, illuminated by moonlight with the occasional soft pinprick of light showing a distant farmhouse or crofter’s hut. Not quite. What trains do is travel, very quickly, through stations which at night are lit by sodium orange lights, the exact colour of sweets that they don’t make any more because of concerns about sugar and e numbers. This means that you have a fluorescent flashing light illuminating your cabin every few minutes and while that’s great if you’re off your tits on ketimin at some rave in Dorset, it’s no aid to restful sleep. Of course, having the blind up also opens you up to the very real risk – and this happened – of waking up the next morning to find yourself parked up in a station with a bloke in a high-vis jacket outside trying to pretend he’s not just seen you naked.

Where reality met fantasy was the lounge car. This was an eccentric mix of foreigners who did look like they had murder in mind if you pinched the last seat.

So while sleep may have eluded me as surely as it eluded MacBeth, the compactness of the cabin did impress. It was small the same way in which a cottage is small. It’s small because it’s just so, right and proper. It’s a cabin on a train and if one were to extend it, then interesting things would happen the first time the conservatory attachment went through a tunnel. The compact cabin means that everything is in reach while you’re lying in bed – genius! More, you get your breakfast and a paper delivered to you by your steward.


The compactness extends to the narrow-gauge corridor running the length of the sleeper carriages. To maximise cabin space the corridor is the width of a telephone box. Ironic that a train that serves a country with a love of fried food should have ‘you must be this thin to ride this train’ attitude. It’s OK for anorexics, corset enthusiasts and those that don’t have a problem wioth salad but what about Americans, Germans and fried-food fans? My bag was just about slim enough to squeeze down the corridor but getting it and me in to the cabin at the same time was something of a logistical feat. All those years of playing tetris finally paid off.

And you end up pitching up in Edinburgh in the early morning, a few minutes after the last reveller has gone to bed and the pavements are still wet with dew and the mixture and the weak solution of bleach they use to remove the signs of over indulgence. Make the most of it because this is the only time you will see the pavements empty of crowds and people trying to give you leaflets about their show.

Hethrow Airport

(On our drive into Heathrow, we gave the strikers from UNITE a friendly toot. This was not out of any particular sense of solidarity; after being comically overcharged by BA on a flight back from Edinburgh to London (my carbon footprint is the size of a yeti’s…what of it?) I’m going to be punching the newly uncluttered air when BA fold like a cheap tent, but I reckon a little toot makes the workers feel a lot better and hey, the flags were jolly. Actually, I can’t see what all the fuss is about over the BA strike. This is cabin crew striking, right? So, if the people who hand out sandwiches, crisps, tea and stun guns (I’m presuming) on National Express coaches go on strike, can we expect the same degree of media hysteria? God, I hope so.)

Heathrow Airport. It’s huge, like a modern urban sprawl composed of places that were once villages in their own right, with customs like inbreeding, morris dancing, scrumpy festivals and duck ponds for dunking witches in. At Heathrow, it’s the terminals that are the villages, with their own shops, cafes and pubs. But unlike most villages, the majority of the population are just passing through and those that do work here come from all over the world, (well, all over Eastern Europe) rather than from all over the surrounding half mile radius.

The main occupations of the transient population of a terminal village (odd name for a place where most people are going from or through rather than ending up) are: waiting, sleeping, eating, drinking, battling constipation or nerves, and shopping. Luckily the shops of the terminal village are there to provide a diversion, reasonably priced coffee and extravagantly priced luxury items.

In the golden age of air travel, rich people flew from aerodromes where the terminal was a hut and transatlantic flight was mostly powered by glamour and hair oil. The arrival of the package holiday meant affordable travel for the oiks – sorry; ordinary folk, while the rich invented first class. Now the terminal is full of the sort of people who might travel standard class on a train or even, throwing caution to the wind, decide that coach travel is for them.

However, if you want to purchase a handbag that costs three hundred quid and, because it’s tax free, still feel like you got a good deal, then the airport is the place for you.

Mostly because in the terminal you have quite a disconnected sense of reality and it does make sense to buy designer sunglasses in preparation for an English summer and a bar of chocolate bigger than your mouth (Toblerone, what’s going on there?). Boredom has a lot to answer for.

And like many villages, it has it’s own backroads, byways and winding lanes, or in this case, a walk to a boarding gate so far away that I fully expected us to be greeted with a different regional accent when we arrived and then asked to adjust our watches to the new time zone.