Category: Travel

Freedom of Movement Update

May 27th, 2023

Although there were distressing levels of gridlock at Dover at Easter, our Channel Tunnel crossing was relatively painless. I was convinced we’d pay for the relative ease of both our Easter crossings with a woeful Whitsun.

The usual red stretches appeared in the Maps apps as I plotted which route to take to Folkestone on Friday afternoon. In the end, I opted to take the Southern Route, which means a blast down the M40 and then and anti-clockwise loop past both Heathrow and Gatwick. Risky. It’s 20 miles further, but looked as if it would be marginally quicker on the day; the Southern route also avoids the Dartford crossing, which can be a horrible bottleneck, even with 4 lanes and automatic numberplate recognition. Either way looked like it was going to be super-busy, but the Northern/Dartford route took us 4 hours at Easter, so I gambled that it wouldn’t be worse going South.

And it wasn’t. It was indeed busy, with lots of stretches of much-reduced speed, but I think it’s fair to say that we were never static for more than a half minute. We reached Folkestone shortly after eight. Check-in for Le Shuttle was pretty fluid (there were longer queues for the rich person’s queue-jumping option, Flexi-Plus, which made me laugh).

There are modifications happening around the terminal car park. Extra electric charging points being installed, and other stuff going on, so traffic heading for passport control was being directed against its normal flow. This looked as if it might be challenging, and it took a few minutes to get in to park because traffic heading out and in were both going the same way. As at Easter, there was a lot of traffic, but it was fluid.

A quick trip to Pet Control for Oscar, and an earlier crossing was offered at no extra charge. We took it, but it looked unlikely we’d be on a train at the indicated time of 21:05. I was quite pleased with my lack of anxiety at this point. I ate a bag of Hula Hoops and stood watching the outdoor screens as the traffic ebbed and flowed.

It was apparent that things were not too bad, because of that ebb and flow. It got busier when letters were called and then died back a bit. I saw the usual evidence of people being terrible: cars whose letter had not been called heading off anyway, and basically being in the way of people who were supposed to be in the queue for passport control. Again, I didn’t get stressed, because I think my silent curses and the karmic wheel mean that they’ll be pulled across for a explosives residue test, or get stuck behind a ditherer. Or come back as a dung beetle when they die.

When we were called, it was actually fairly quiet. I mean, there was a queue for passports, but you had to drive a few hundred metres to join it. Passport Control assholery was again low, and we were through and through really quick. Again, the Special Queue For Special People (Flexi-Plus) seemed to be more trouble than it was worth. I refer these people to Michael Sandel’s What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets.

We arrived in France around 11pm local time. It was a clear night, dry roads (a contrast to Easter!), and we were in my car, which is a bit of a hypermiler. We’d managed a very pleasing 59mpg on the way to Folkestone in that heavy traffic, and although we were blasting along motorways with the cruise control set at 130kph, we had no need to stop for fuel. In fact, as we left the train, my car’s computer was predicting a greater range for the fuel that was left than it had when we set out from home with a full tank.

After a bit of a wobble at Easter, I was back to being hardcore in terms of the overnight drive. We made three short pitstops: a bit of a walk, a coffee, a toilet break; and crossed France in just over 6½ hours, including the stops. As we drove up into the hills past Vesoul, the sun was rising behind the purple mountains ahead of us and all was good with the world.

Twelve hours, door to door, and really no complaints about being stranded on this busy travel weekend. And the lesson, as always: people really enjoy leaving the UK.
About the hotel

May 8th, 2023

I won’t name the hotel, because I wouldn’t want someone to google it and find my comments and treat them as the be-all and end-all. Older readers will know that I prefer a modern chain hotel to the traditional kind, anyway, so I’m starting from a position here where I’d rather be in a modern Novotel than something that looks like the kind of Victorian rooming house the Good Companions might stay in.

So this Hotel was on the outskirts of Southwold rather than having a sea view, etc, but it was still over £100 per night for a twin room, bed and breakfast. I would say that, on the whole, they did the basics right, but it was a bit rough around the edges. From the outside, it looks like a faded relic.

But inside, the room was clean, for example, and the beds fairly comfortable. The pillows were a bit shit. I always regret not taking my buckwheat pillow with me. There was a lovely big window with a view out to the hotel’s outdoor seating area, which looked okay but was in need of some attention. There was a pile of old timber in one corner, and several broken chairs and tables. On the other hand, it was a nice sunny spot and at least one pair of guests spent a whole afternoon out there, reading and sunning themselves.

To be fair, it was early May, so perhaps whoever owns the place hasn’t got around to all those little jobs that need doing before Whitsun.

There was a decent chair to sit in next to this lovely window, but only one in a room for two. And while the window was lovely, its paintwork was in need of attention. Some of the openable windows were painted shut, and paint was flaking elsewhere. There was a TV, which I didn’t bother much with (my OH did, and it did work) and there were enough places to put your stuff, and coathangers you could remove from the rail. The shower room made creative use of a tiny space, but the toilet was in a challenging position for a tall person. The bath was huge, the water pressure for the “rainfall” shower head was great…

But… you did wait a really long time for hot water, and when it came it came in short bursts, interspersed with longer periods of cold. So it was not possible to have a nice hot shower.

As to that toilet… lots of limescale gave it a soiled appearance. The water in Southwold is very hard, harder than round here, even. There was a kettle and tea/coffee in the room, but the scum on the cup was noticeable.

A mixed picture then. Nothing to really complain about, but there was enough wear and tear around the edges that it felt a bit seedy at times, with a smell of damp socks in the corridor. The photo above is a perfect illustration: you can see the nice view out of the window, the scum on the tea mug, the slightly cracked looking paint. Not pictured: me wishing I’d remembered my damn Kindle.

The breakfast part of the bed and breakfast was good. There was a conveyor toaster, which was exciting (though set quite low so that you had to run the bread through twice), and you could set yourself up with toast/marmalade etc, a yoghurt, some cereal, fruit juice, coffee, tea, etc., and then order a big fry up, or eggs Benedict, or scrambled eggs with smoked salmon. So you could set yourself up for the day with a huge breakfast and not feel hungry till much later on. The restaurant/bar area was the best bit of the hotel really. Clean and modern, light and airy. You could forget the Victorian pile over your head while you were in there.

So it was all right. No horror stories. But a lot to pay for an okay place in a nothing town like Southwold.
And the queue went down the street

May 6th, 2023

We’re spending the weekend in Southwold, on the Suffolk Coast, and we were just walking back from dinner when we passed a queue of people waiting to be served in one of the many fish and chip shops. ‘That must be the good one,’ said my OH, and I had a flashback to a time when a previous gf and I had spent a week in Fife, just across the Firth of Forth from Edinburgh.

I think the village was Anstruther, and the Anstruther Fish Bar, even now, claims to have “the best fish and chips in Britain”. I was there some time in the 1980s, but back then its reputation was such that the queue for very fresh fish and chips snaked down the block. Exciting! Most of the time, a queue puts me off, but a queue for fish and chips is something else.

I’m reminded that back in the days before multi-screen cinemas, we used to queue to see films down the street and around the corner and up another street. I think one of the last times I did that was for the original Ghostbusters. There was a slight return to that kind of thing when The Point cinema opened in Milton Keynes. I went there on opening night, with the same ex gf, and the queue for tickets snaked up from the cinema bit through the connecting corridor to the bar bit and out of the door.

Anyway, in spite of the cloudy weather (see above) and the fact that it started raining around three in the afternoon (just after I took that picture), I managed to catch the sun on my face. Red forehead, red nose, so I can’t go out for a few days, I’m in purdah. Because I consulted the weather forecast, I managed to come away without sun cream, sunglasses, or a hat. Also forgot my Kindle, which is really annoying.
the topsy turvy world where peak = quiet

April 16th, 2023

I have a disease. It’s called Always Being Early Syndrome. With treatment, and years of therapy, I have managed to mitigate this lifelong condition to Always Being On Time Syndrome. But whether ABES or ABOTS, the problem for me is that my OH has it worse.

So it comes to the last day of the holiday. Our booked crossing on the Eurotunnel is at 01:20 Sunday morning, which means that check-in (officially) opens at 11:20. Counting backwards, knowing exactly how long the drive from the East of France to Calais takes us, and even allowing for breaks longer than we ever actually take, I worked out that the absolute earliest we should leave the house was about 15:00 on Saturday.

Reader, we left at 13:00.

You may very well ask. Well, you see, my ABES-afflicted OH started putting the house away really early. We moved all the temporary furniture out again so the tiling can be done, leaving just a single garden chair and a pile of ceramic tile packs to sit on. We closed all the bedroom doors so the cat couldn’t hide under a bed (he has done this before), and my OH even closed all the shutters. So there we were, at noon, with three hours ahead of us, and my OH grumpily questioning why we didn’t just leave.

So we did. I tried to resist, but she wore me down over an hour. I said, it’s better for the cat to be hanging around in here than to be hanging around in the car for an unnecessary two hours. But we left at one p.m. and set off. A bit of rain at first, but then it was dry, and by the time we passed Reims, it was actually sunny and warm. We’d used the usual motorways, having been traumatised by Belgium two weeks ago. So we made good time. I tried to extend our brief pit stops, a bit, but we still ended up arriving at 20:20, three hours early. LOL.

The check-in machine offered an earlier crossing, but for a price: an extra £86. Since this had already been one of the more expensive trips, I hesitated a moment, but then thought of the cat and paid up.

Before the pandemic, we were on the Frequent Traveller scheme, which meant that if you paid up front, you could get 10 (one way) crossings for £40 each. But the Frequent Traveller scheme is no more, which meant that the cheapest return crossing this time was £140. So it was £100 extra, even crossing at the anti-social hour of 01:20, and getting home about 04:00.

So, an extra £86, bringing the total to £226, which in my mind ought to be the total price allez et retour.

But no: the total out-and-return price this time was an eye-watering £402. I know this is still reasonable compared to flying a family of four somewhere and hiring a car, say, but when you cross as often as we do, you’d now be looking at an annual travel budget in excess of £2500. I know, I know, middle-class problems etc.

But that’s not my point.

My point is that the train was half-empty. I’ve complained long and hard since Brexit about the shit show of the channel crossing, and you’ve seen on the news the apocalyptic queues at Dover etc. As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, the Channel Tunnel, on the first Friday of the Easter break, was slammed: as busy as I’ve ever seen it, almost. But fluid! Everybody was moving. The car park was full, and the queue to border controls was long, but everybody was moving. And by the time we crossed, it was fine. Not even that busy. At around 23:00, we boarded a train. And it was half-empty.

So to summarise: we paid £402 and had two relatively easy crossings on half-empty trains. The train coming back last night was so empty that the carriage behind us contained but a single motorcycle and rider. But what if we’d paid £201 and crossed on two full trains?

It seems as if Eurotunnel have deliberately hiked prices to push most people into the middle of the night as a form of crowd control. Meanwhile, people who can afford it (and I don’t really include myself in that number: I’m dreading the next credit card bill) are crossing at what used to be “peak” times but are in fact relatively quiet because too expensive. It’s a topsy turvy post-Brexit world. Peak means peak price, but it doesn’t (surely?) mean peak profits because the trains are running half-empty. I’m sure some galaxy brain accountant can explain this to me.
eating out

April 15th, 2023

We’ve been invited out to dinner a lot this holiday. ’Tis the season, I suppose. I think in the summer, the tendency among my OH’s friends is for big parties. Christmas being Christmas, people are generally up to their eyeballs in family. But at Easter, a bit of breathing room. There was also a sense, I think, of people taking pity on us, because while my OH’s house in France is habitable, it is in the middle of a major refurbishment. The soggy wooden floors have finally been replaced with smooth concrete, but the final touch (the laying down of some lovely ceramic tiles) won’t happen till next month.

So we pulled the propane gas cooker from the barn, got a couple of small tables out of storage, two garden chairs, and we’ve been kind of camping indoors for the past two weeks. Cooking a meal, without much in the way of work surfaces, was a challenge. Sitting down to eat it, given that the weather wasn’t very good, meant hunching over a small folding table from the garden storage.

So we were invited out. The first outing was to a local restaurant, Le Vieux Relais, which has a decent reputation for food, and is within walking distance. You can tell it’s quite high end because it has a very short menu, and the dishes change with the season. I confess I find French food intimidating: mystery meats with mystery sauces, mystery fish—and, as the old joke goes, such small portions. After waving my Google Lens over the menu like a magic wand, I opted for the Chef’s menu, which was four courses, small portions indeed. It was actually pretty good. If I say the main course was veal braised in cider, I hope my British reader isn’t too horrified. Proper veal in France is nothing like the bloodless white horror they used to have in British supermarkets with that name.

The ambience of Le Vieux Relais is not to my taste. It’s cluttered with junky antiques, tight for space, and you fight your way through two heavy curtains to get into the main salon. But you get the feeling the place is beloved of the locals and the food was good.

The next night out was to what Americans would call a Brew Pub, the British a microbrewery, and the French a brasserie in nearby Ronchamp. Le Franc Brasserie is housed in an old factory building on an industrial estate in Ronchamp, which is famed for its UNESCO World Heritage Le Corbusier Chapel. The menu was again simple: basically you could have a plate of charcuterie or a tarte flambée, the Alsatian pizza variant made (in its purest form) with cream, onion, and bacon. There were five or six different tartes on the menu, and examples of each were delivered on a regular basis to our table, which was crowded with about 15 or 16 of my OH’s old friends. The beer was good (I tried the blonde and the blanche), cloudy but tasty. I stopped after two half-litres on the basis that cloudy beer = headache, and switched to whisky. I really enjoyed this way of eating. The informality of the pub setting, with the opportunity to stuff your face on a half-decent tarte flambées. This was not the last time my OH was the designated driver.

Our third restaurant night was to a Chinese place in Belfort, the nearby city that gives its name to this small Territory. This was a first for me: the French may eat more pizza than the Italians, but the people I know are not generally fond of spicy food or familiar with the concept of sweet and sour. The restaurant was one of three (ish) Chinese places in Belfort, and not the most expensive one. The friendly waiter was a good salesman and persuaded us to have nems (spring rolls), which were very good (although served with pointless lettuce leaves). The most French thing on the menu was deep fried frogs’ legs, which I did not try. I ordered basically what I’d have ordered in the UK: something something chicken with special fried rice. Not bad, but marks off for seating us by the toilet door. Unavoidable given the tiny space inside, but ho hum.

Obviously, I would never review the meals we had at peoples’ houses, that would be rude, but I will say that I always prefer being fed in that way, where the portions are more human sized, the food less fancy, and the alcohol less extortionate. We were invited for meals by three different people, which stacks up the number of reciprocal invites we’ll be making in the summer. One of these meals also involved the traditional annual whisky sampling session, and I somehow remained conscious through several glasses of wine followed by five shots of various whiskies. The Lagavulin was the winner on the night, closely followed by a French peated whisky from the Loire valley: La Piautre. Recommended! The most disappointing whisky was the one I’d gifted our host, a Cotswolds Single Malt, which seemed to have no character at all. Although to be fair, it was the fourth one I tried.

Our final restaurant meal was at Couleurs Nature, a restaurant in a village called Rougegoutte, which is about 15 minutes away by car, and a place I have passed often on one of my bike ride circuits. We’ve eaten there before: it’s another place with an ever-evolving menu with some quite fancy touches. The last time, I felt the atmosphere was a little cold (the opposite of Le Vieux Relais: uncluttered, clean, but clinical). This time, they’d curtained off part of the room, had fewer lights burning, and had the tables closer together. It was much more pleasant. I wish there’d been more customers: it was very quiet for a Friday night. We sat in a cosy corner near the woodburner and were treated by our neighbours to a great meal. I had veal again (!), this time a T-bone steak served with potato dauphinois and in-season asparagus. Dessert was profiteroles cut into swan shapes. Go back in a month and the menu will be different, I’m sure. The person seated next to me ordered a fish dish which was ignited at the table, leading me to ask of every dish delivered thenceforth if it would also be flambéed. Sadly, the answer was always no.

And now it’s back to England and cooking for myself again, like an animal.
language barrier

April 3rd, 2023

We were sitting in our local restaurant yesterday, and I was trying to work out what was what on the menu. I mean, I know what filet de boeuf is, but I’d no idea about rognons d’agneau, and fish is always impossible because the French eat very different fish from the rest of us, for a start, which is before you get to the menu hyperbole of “the unavoidable sea bream which we no longer present” (or something like that). Anyway, I went for the chef’s menu in the end, four small courses.

Later, I went for a walk around the village, which I try to do every day when I’m here, and I passed the hand painted sign pictured above. It reads, in French: RESiSTONS Pour Rappeler A ces Elus Bornés Qu’ils ne sont que nos REPRESENTANTS.

I assumed this slogan was something to do with the recent protests that have been sweeping the nation (though not so much round here), but there have also been hyper-local protests, with one local resident daubing pained slogans on the outside of his house (see below).

But it’s when you try to translate that the language barrier becomes most acute. Even my (French) wife struggled to say what exactly the sloganeer means. Google renders the sign as follows:

Let’s resist to remind these narrow-minded elected officials that they are only our representatives.

My idiomatic brain wants to change this to:

Let’s resist, to remind these bigoted MPs that they are merely representatives.

But it’s still not clear what it means. Does it carry the sense of “they are representatives, not dictators”; or does it carry the sense of “they’re meant to be our representatives” (as in represent our views)? Who knows?

And as for the slogan daubed on the house. Shrug emoji. I hurt for my village, land of welcome, openness and resistance! They shall not pass. Your guess is as good as mine.
critical incidents are a way of life now

April 1st, 2023

a Belgian motorway, yesterday

I stood wearing a flimsy tee-shirt at the side of a Belgian motorway in a rainstorm and puked by the light of a 38-tonne truck. It was just one in a series of hairy moments on this particular journey. For once, I managed not to get too anxious and stressed about it. The truth is that although the channel tunnel terminal was busier than I’d ever seen it, the traffic was moving. There might have been a delay, but it was “fluid” as they say in their updates. In the event, we were loaded onto a half-empty train without much fuss, and were rolling out of Folkstone at 23:00, just ten minutes after our booked crossing. And they gave the cat an easter egg! (Which he has shown absolutely zero interest in.)

I see today that Dover has declared another critical incident. Well, it’s the school holidays, duh. And as someone with a lot of experience of crossing to France using the tunnel, I’ve got to tell you: from what I can see, more and more people a simply desperate to leave this shitty little island of grifters and racists.

But on this occasion, busy as it was, everybody at Folkstone was keeping things moving as smoothly as possible in the circumstances. It is notable that since the French started taking the piss by checking our passports and stamping them, the British passport control has very much stopped taking the piss. They no longer spend a performative three minutes on each passport (in between gossiping with their mates), and no longer scrutinise you as if trying to see behind your Mission Impossible rubber mask.

No, this time is was the fucking roads. Which I had anticipated. Nothing for it. Travelling in the rush hours on the first Friday of the Easter holiday in a rainstorm was always going to be a shitshow. Took us maybe four hours to do the two hour 45 minute drive to Folkstone? And that’s after a false start. The first thing you realise you’ve forgotten as you drive away from the house, you think, oh well. And then there’s a second, more important, thing, and even though you’re a couple of miles down the road by now, you have to turn around. Oh shit.

Then it was just busy busy busy, rainy rainy rainy, with Google popping up alternate routes to save you eleven minutes every eleven minutes. I tend to ignore these, on the basis that as soon as every other fucker using Google maps has followed the alternate route, you’ve got your eleven minutes back. But when we got to the inevitable queue caused by the inevitable accident (white man? check. Driving an unnecessarily large and powerful car? check. Four lanes into one? check. People trying to get into the one lane early instead of driving all the way to the flashing arrow and filtering in turn? also check), we were sitting there for a good hour or so, grinding along in that awkward spot just between gears in the automatic.

With all that, I was in a state of considerable bladder distress when we reached Maidstone Services. It was touch and go. I felt like Unlucky Alf as I slithered into the service station to be confronted with the Out Of Order sign on the Gents. Bugger. Disabled toilet was free, though.

Which is before you get to the bit where I decided to drive through Belgium and Luxembourg, on the Northern route, as I think of it. The Hell of the North. It adds, on paper, 30 minutes, but saves you all the motorway tolls, which is around €40. But it was a filthy night. Continuous torrential rain, invisible lanes (no cats’ eyes in Belgium, either), runnels filled with water where the heavy trucks go, aquaplaning, darkness. And, as my OH said, you get what you pay for. No tolls means roads of the same sort of quality we have in the UK. Pot holes, missing tarmac, loose gravel, undulations, bumps.

When my eyes started to droop (sooner than usual because of the excessive time getting to Folkestone), we swapped drivers, and my OH took the wheel. Well. How can I put this nicely? I try to be a smooth driver. I don’t think I’m a good driver, or a fast driver, or a confident driver. But I try not to jerk people around. My OH doesn’t try. So after about 45 minutes on these chronic roads, being bumped up and down, together with the odd sudden breaking manoeuvre, I started to get the sweats. I lowered the temperature in my zone. Took off my fleece. But then I just had to quickly lower the window and blow vomit out into the gale.

Fortunately, we were very close to a rest area, although the entrance too it was near-invisible in the dark and rain. My OH pulled quickly in and found a spot between two huge trucks (a lot of trucks were parked up in the strong winds), and I got out to throw my guts up.

Later on, when it was my turn to drive again, I managed about an hour before my eyes wouldn’t focus anymore. This is unlike me, as I’m usually pretty hardcore with the all-night drives. But it was a brutal drive. In the end, we rolled up to the house at around 08:30, approximately 15 hours after we left home. We used to think we’d done well if we did the journey in nine hours. Twelve hours felt like you’d been through the mincer: pounding headache, road shakes. Fifteen hours and you feel like you’re part of some NASA experiment designed to see if you can survive in a tin can on Mars.

Time for a whiskey.
En Route driving lenses (Hoya)

January 7th, 2023

I was long overdue a visit to the opticians, and had also been promising myself since my last visit that this time I would pay for Hoya’s En Route lenses, which are designed to reduce light scatter and glare from oncoming headlights at night.

Loads of people are uncomfortable with night driving. I’ve always been kind of okay with it, though the advent of halogen and then LED headlamps has made life difficult for everyone. I tend to think we should go back to the good old days of dim headlights. We’d all be happier, and maybe drive a bit slower at night. I often follow behind a car being driven by someone who is clearly terrified, slowing down every time another vehicle is coming towards them, and generally showing all the signs of timidity and hesitancy. But most people don’t even know these lenses are even available.

I’ve known about Hoya’s En Route lenses for a while, but had no idea whether they’d really work, or if it was just a gimmick you pay extra for and don’t see the benefit of. You don’t see reviews of them. The only way to find out was to pay for them. And I was lucky, because there was a special offer, and it turned out that my new glasses ended up costing a couple of hundred pounds less than they usually do. For the record: I always pay for the thinnest lenses with an anti-reflective coating, so my specs always cost a small fortune.

Hoya’s En Route don’t actually go down to the thinnest and lightest level of all, but they offer a lens which isn’t too thick and heavy and is a progressive varifocal, allowing you to shift focus between close and distance (as you’d expect), and that tricky middle ground where your car’s instruments and display screens are.

But the real test of these lenses was obviously going to be driving at night. And the recent Christmas break was a perfect opportunity, involving as it did a 12-hour overnight drive to France. What I thought was, I might be able to kid myself for an hour or so, but if these lenses were no good, I could hardly keeping lying to myself for 12 hours.

The good news is, they do seem to work. I drove a thousand kilometres, at night, through clear air, through fog, and through rain, and at no point was I bothered by too-bright headlights coming towards me. And I promise you: I usually am, and I usually complain about it. I’ve tried everything: looking slightly away, closing one eye, squinting, etc., but for the whole of this journey I was fine. I was aware of oncoming vehicles; I was even aware that their lights were bright; but I didn’t feel blinded or unsafe at any time.

Honestly, I’m as surprised that they work as you are. I actually feel sorry for people who don’t have to wear glasses.
Copenhagen Feels

October 30th, 2022

Everybody is a type, but does everybody have a type? I’m the type of guy who wishes he could be one of those slim, grey, well-groomed older men. But I like food too much, so I’m one of those wok-bellied, slightly scruffy older men. As to whether I have a type, I’d have always said, not really. Or if I did, I prefer small women with brown hair. But how far would I travel to find out if I do, in fact, have a type?

83.4 kilometres.

That’s how far I walked in Copenhagen between Tuesday morning, when we arrived, and Saturday night, when we left. So just under 17km per day, including the day we hired bikes at the hotel and cycled (in addition to the walking) at least 20 kilometres. This is what you do when you visit a city like this: a lot of walking, a lot of wandering.

The main purpose of the visit was to see Chloé in her natural habitat. While my OH has been around seven times since Chloé moved there, this was my first visit. Why did I wait so long? Pandemic, mainly. Whereas my OH had a robust (and very French) attitude to travel restrictions, I was generally put off by all the admin. Also, I’ve grown increasingly anxious about travel in general, so I don’t need much of an excuse.

We flew Ryanair, no extras, which meant a small bag squeezed under the seat in front. Chloé reported Baltic weather the week before we went and advised that I dress warm, so my packing consisted of four sets of underwear and four long-sleeved thermal vests. In addition, I wore a cashmere sweater that has always been too warm for work and a fleece and a jacket. I also bought some “Nordic” jeans from Rohan, lol.

Inevitably, the late October warm-wave meant that I spent most of the time feeling too hot. I left the sweater for Chloé and wore two layers most of the time, carrying a hat in my bag for the cooler evenings. But, oh, that first day, before we could check into the hotel, the day I was wearing ALL the layers! I was so hot.

The cost of the trip was calculated so that the travel and accommodation wouldn’t come to more than our normal channel tunnel crossing and motorway journey to France. Not including food, of course. So the hotel choice was a cheap and cheerful 2-star called Saga Hotel near the Central train station. It was clean and modern, the way I like it. We paid for a room with a shower/toilet, though most of the rooms in that hotel are ones that share a bathroom. It was poky, but fine for what we needed, and every day began with the same ten minute walk up to the Rådhus square.

Eating out in Copenhagen can be expensive. We ate a lot of sandwiches etc from the 7-11, but we also ate a couple of times at Jagger Burger, and once at Chloé’s flat near Sydhavn. Our plans to eat there a second time on the day we left were baulked because it turned out the S-train (currently?) only runs Monday to Friday. This meant a long walk or more junk food. Oh well.

I’m not a great one for visiting attractions. My main object was to see my daughter, and I didn’t much care what activities, if any, that involved. We went to see an interesting Matisse Exhibit, and dropped in on the Little Mermaid etc. But inevitably, my main interest was in the city itself, its infrastructure. Because let’s not pretend that we need to be particularly different to the Danes. A smallish northern European country, outside the Eurozone? A Germanic language? They are recognisably like us, and yet, and yet, don’t seem to be as irrational in their anti-humanism, in their enslavement to corporate interests.

You know what’s coming. I’m sure capitalism is as shit in Denmark as it is anywhere else. And I’m sure employers can be as awful and exploitative. But Danes seem to care more about work-life balance. And their capital city is designed around people, not cars. Sure, there are cars, and lots of single-occupancy vehicles. But the bikes! And the pedestrian zones! If you stop to think about why Oxford Street and, say, Regent Street aren’t completely pedestrianised in 2022, your head might explode.

I would really like to see an experiment in which every person in Copenhagen who owned a bicycle went to fetch it from wherever it is being kept and stood next to it. My question is, are there more bicycles than people?

Pedestrians have priority. Then bikes. Then cars. And the cycle lanes are mostly segregated and mostly respected. Which means, you don’t see quite so many cars and delivery vans parked on cycle lanes as you do in this country. But you do see some. And there are still too many vans making deliveries that could instead be made by some of the ubiquitous cargo bikes. That aside, Copenhagen is a cycling paradise, bikes everywhere, and the kind of people riding them who would never in a million years ride a bike in the UK.

That’s what strikes you. Everybody is a type, after all, and there are as many recognisable types in Copenhagen as there are anywhere. But in Copenhagen, they all ride bikes, all the time, in all weathers. Floppy haired men in smart suits. Sporty men and women in lycra. Very tall willowy blonde women in long coats. Hipsters. Hippies. Young mums and dads. Middle aged mums and dads. Older people, all genders. Ebikes, old bikes, cargo bikes, trikes, sit-up-and-beg bikes, fat bikes, sporty hybrids, racing bikes, in all the colours of the rainbow.

Anyway, I loved it. What a fantastic city to live and work in. And, it turns out, I do have a type. I love Danish women.
Homecoming surprise and delight

September 3rd, 2022

Boot abandoned at Eurotunnel terminal

It would be unfair of me not to mention that our return journey from France this time was far less traumatic than others in recent times. We were travelling on a Thursday night / Friday morning, but I don’t really think that during peak season the day of the week makes much difference.

Eurotunnel have reverted to the old way of doing things: check-in, followed by waiting for your call at the terminal, followed by passport control (Boo!), followed by boarding (Yay!). This, for old hands, was the way it always used to be, and the way the terminal was originally designed. But then a few years ago, for some reason, they decided to put border controls immediately after check-in, and it was usually a horrible experience.

You’d think after 20-odd years that they would have mastered the art of moving people around like this and wouldn’t need to keep experimenting. But the sheer quantity of temporary plastic barrier they now have gives the lie to that. My mind always goes to dark places when I think about this kind of thing. For example, theme parks always make me think of concentration camps. The trick is to prevent the “customer” from being able to see too far into the future. One of the terrible design decisions Eurotunnel originally made was to allow the car park to feed into the lane to border controls in multiple places. This used to lead to bad-tempered gridlock, as everyone tried to get twelve lanes into one. Now, they’ve installed bollards which filter you around the car park in a zig-zag route, and they’ve resigned themselves to having people in high-viz direct cars into the queue for the border controls.

The bit-of-a-ball-ache part of the journey home was that we arrived quite early for our crossing. The cat’s in the car, so you don’t want to dilly-dally. But for the first time ever we were told to sling our hooks. Instead of printing out lettered hanger to display in the windscreen, the machine printed out one that said EXIT. Well! I suspect this is part of their master plan to reduce the level of insanity in the terminal. Unfortunately, we’d arrived too late to make wandering the Cité Europe shopping centre worthwhile, so we just parked up in Pet Control and waited 90 minutes.

That was the bad news. The surprise and delight part of the journey home was that – although we were told at check-in that there was a one-hour delay to all crossings – we ended up getting on an earlier train after all. An earlier train that actually left early and didn’t get stuck in the tunnel. I also enjoyed seeing the boot that had fallen out of someone’s car (?) and been left behind, unnoticed. I just think people should be properly attired when they travel. That might not mean top hat and tails, but it definitely means no pyjamas, and keep your shoes on.

We were sitting in the car waiting for our letter to be called (the terminal itself was full of screaming children – or one screaming child, which is the same thing – which is too stressful for Oscar), and a bloke in a hi-viz started walking around telling people they could all go NOW.

I love it when that happens – it’s rare, but it does. So then we went through border controls (which was a standard level of shit rather than the unprecedented level of shit we got last time) and drove around to the boarding area. Now, this is where I felt TOTALLY VINDICATED for my previous comments about the stretchers, faffers, toilet visitors, and sleepers. Because as soon as I brought the car to a stop in the queue, the barrier lifted, and we were off to board the train. Take THAT, all you men who get out of your cars and o-so-casually wander around winding me up.

(There was one tricky moment, because we were all directed down the wrong boarding ramp, and we had to reverse back up. Reversing in the car is something I absolutely hate – it’s my #1 anxiety dream – so this was not fun. But still!)

Anyway, that’s the trick, isn’t it? Managing expectations. First lower them, then deliver the surprise. It’s exactly what Apple are so good at.