Return to the Rhone

A week in Provence, land of almonds, figs, the magnificent limestone gorges and cliffs of the Luberon and the rolling vineyards of the Cote du Rhone. It was almost liberating to leave Brexit-torn Britain behind and head out for the sunshine. We stayed in Avignon, a city that one can reach on a single train journey from London (though the return must be made via Paris or Lille because Avignon is not yet equipped to handle outgoing international passengers). Imagine my pleasure to find that this delightful city is now installing a tram system; it is still under test and we saw nothing of it until one morning as our coach whisked us past the ancient ramparts ...

Avignon has a severe rush-hour problem (as we can testify having spent about twenty five minutes driving about half a kilometre one evening) but I am not sure what impact the trams will have. They do not go inside the old, walled, city at all and don't seem to follow the ring road around the walls for very far. But no matter. It is always nice to add a tram pic to the collection.

The last time we were in Avignon, French railways did us no favours by running our homeward-bound TGV so late that we missed the Eurostar connection; This time they did run to time (but a four hour journey with no buffet or even a refreshment trolley?) and it was Eurostar who gave us a thirty minute delay in Lille.

French rails old and new

Been a while since my last post. Part of the reason is that Mrs C. and I were holidaying in the far south-west of France.We spent a highly enjoyable morning trundling up a mountain side on a cog railway.

This little chap takes you to the top of La Rhune, some 1000m up, overlooking the rolling Pyrenees between France and Spain.  And for those desirous of something a bit more modern, here's a nice tram pic (and you know I can never resist a tram shot) from the centre of Bordeaux.

These trams need some watching - they hurtle around the square seemingly in all directions and with almost no noise.

The holiday was mainly about cruising around the rivers that make up the Gironde estuary and sampling (as one has to, really, so as not to offend the locals) some of the great wines of the region. How we managed to return without needing new and much larger clothes I shall never know.

A Holiday Suggestion We May Decline

There is a wonderful website called Terrible Real Estate Photographs which is, for those of you who are unaware of it, a source of great joy not just for the very terrible pictures that some estate agents choose to illustrate property for sale, but for the witty captions with which Andy Donaldson (the site owner) embellishes them.

I dare not try to compete with the estimable Mr. Donaldson. However, I feel bound to make some sort of comment on the following image which was presented to me recently by a well-known interweb enterprise that facilitates making bookings with hotels and guest houses. I had been doing some lazy research in places near to where my mother-in-law is currently resident and this was high on the list of recommendations. It is described as a three bedroom holiday home featuring a garden.

The front

Not the front.

The proud owners did not add that the property benefits from two wheelie bins, placed so you always have to see one no matter whether you are relaxing on the spacious lawns at the back or strolling up the impressive drive to the front. The pleasing playfulness of the lack of symmetry in the arrangement of the windows and doors at the front is matched by the no-nonsense design of the whole. "This is an honest box" it says in forthright tones, the plain-speaking parlance of the hard-working down-to-earth folk of Derbyshire. [Don't want to worry you but we may run out of hyphens if you go on with all these compound phrases: Ed]

I decided not to make a booking.

Stepping back in time on Man

Mrs C. and I escaped the heatwave in the south-east for a few delightful days spent roaming around the Isle of Man. This was our first visit so we did all the usual touristy things but with a special emphasis on the island's heritage transport systems. Horse-drawn trams run along the promenade at Douglas (right outside our hotel bedroom), there is an electric light railway going north from Douglas to Ramsey with a spur that takes you right to the top of Snaefell (and we were lucky to be there on a glorious day of magnificent views and brilliant blue skies) and the steam railway (on a three-foot gauge) runs to the south via the old capital at Castletown to Port Erin.

I haven't put many tram or railway photos up for a while so I'm going to make up for it now. Enjoy!

Summit of Snaefell at 2036'

Electric tram

Steam loco ready to leave Douglas

Horse tram along Douglas promenade

Across the Alps

Mrs. C. and I enjoyed a week in Piedmont recently, with a heavy (and I mean that in more than one sense) emphasis on the gastronomic delights of this beautiful region. As usual we travelled by train and this in turn meant an overnight stop in Lyon, following a fearfully early start in order to catch the only Eurostar that goes directly from London to Marseilles (thereby cutting out the usual faffing about trying to cross Paris). Our hotel was placed almost directly outside the main train station in Lyon and what could be more natural than to picture some of the highly modernist trams that serviced the area.

After Lyon we took the train to Turin, a wonderful journey cutting directly through the Alps and on to  four nights in Cuneo sampling what must be one of the finest cuisines in the world  (with an enormous emphasis on local production and rigorous standards) and then two nights in Turin, a city previously unknown to us. Unlike other Italian cities of its size, Turin is amazingly well-ordered, and easy to navigate. The whole centre (with only a few exceptions) comprises handsome buildings of some 5 floors in height, laid out on a regular grid system so precise that one can stand at the gates of the Royal Palace and look down through piazza after piazza to the equally imposing railway station 1km away. It has a large number of pedestrian only areas and many miles of porticos - wide streets with arched arcades running on both sides in Renaissance style. And it also has a tram system, but unlike those in Lyon, the impression is of a hotch-potch of styles that suggests either a devotion to preservation or a lack of cash. 

Perceptive readers will spot the that the two trams on the right, one rather old-fashioned in appearance, the other modern, are both working the no. 13 route. It's rather refreshing compared to the Underground where every train on each line is identical pretty well all of the time. Alas we were not able to ride any of them so as to determine which was the more comfortable.

London Bridge and the Election

Mrs Commuter and I escaped the election for a blissful week of cruising down the Rhine and into the Main, visiting several spectacular medieval towns in the "Franconia" region of Bavaria. Alas, we could not escape the terrible news of another terrorist attack on London; in a copycat of the Westminster Bridge attack, a group of lunatics attacked people near Borough market and killed eight before the police got them.

The pressure on politicians to make instant reactions is overwhelming. Today it seems that the Conservatives would like to ditch some of the human rights laws and have longer prison sentences; their inability to understand that the attackers do not care about prison is deeply worrying. This is the same party that is proposing to cut the budget allocated to the police.

On our return we found another A4 flyer from the Green party, a leaflet from the LibDems (who continue to make Brexit the key issue) and no less than two colourful leaflets featuring Brexit betrayer B. Johnson. His slogan "standing with Theresa May" may well send shivers down the spine of the PM when she reflects on how he supported his dear and faithful friend Dave.

The election is tomorrow and we shall be glad to be shot of it, to be honest [I thought we were always honest: Ed]. How this country negotiates a new future with the EU remains the single most important political choice and I don't have the slightest idea what the options are, not least because so much depends on the other 27 member states who are themselves considering their positions. This country will presumably opt for "strong and stable" (and she never panics, at least not too much, well,okay a bit, well, quite a lot really but no worse than anyone else would) Mrs May in the same way that Germans have put their trust in "mutti" [Angela Merkel:Ed]. Labour will have another bitter period of in-fighting and I look forward to UKIP splitting into "Continuity", "Real" and "Original" factions who can spend the next five years denouncing each other.

Or will Jeremy Corbyn confound the polls (and this columnist) by winning?

 Anyway, returning to the holidays theme with which I started, it's been a long time since I put up a tram photo. Here is one in Wurzburg where an inattentive tourist is about to get a nasty shock (it's ok, she was not struck)

The mercury rises

Mrs. C and I have been away in the north, gracing Liverpool, Dumfries, Borrowdale and Newcastle with our presence before a final family rendezvous in Sheffield. Returning to London was a surprise for, with the aircon fully on as we raced back down the motorways, we hardly noticed the temperature outside. Emerging to 34c in beautiful Ruislip felt like arrival in the tropics. The heat has been cruel to some of our plants and the pond is full of muck (but the fish seem unfazed). Still, a few minutes in the chilled counter section at Sainsbury's and we cooled off nicely as we restocked our depleted larder.  Fancy it being hot for the August bank holiday weekend - these have been awful in recent times.

My new "ten years ago" feature highlights a typically unpleasant day travelling home on the tube during that long hot summer. Seems a world away now.

You go away for a few days ...

and the world goes insane.

Mrs C. and I enjoyed 10 days travelling mainly by rail to the Harz mountain region of Central Germany and then to the Rhine Gorge, returning today. It was intended to be a relaxing and peaceful break. And it would have been, had not the major news issues of the day kept breaking through. The sudden demise of the Cameron government, the crowning of Theresa May as PM, the eclipse of George Osborne and the crushing of the back-stabber Gove, all stories put in the shade by the resurrection of Boris Johnson ("a liar with his back to the wall", the French foreign minister). Ashen-faced and white-lipped a few days ago with the utter destruction of his own leadership hopes, the bouffant buffoon is now Foreign Secretary, an announcement met with barely suppressed laughter from news readers and Government spokespeople in many countries. As it was indeed by the other members of our holiday tour group.

And then today two stories that cause real alarm and revulsion; the atrocity in Nice by a thug who drove a lorry into Bastille Day celebrants killing over 80, and the coup in Turkey that threatens to destabilise an already chaotic and dangerous region. The laughter has stopped. The holidays are over.

The Prince and the Meteorologist

In a story in today's Guardian I find the following gem from reporter Simon Hattenstone

Leicesterarians¹ looked at the snow falling, and read the unseasonal weather for significance. "Prince has just died and he wrote a song called Sometimes It Snows In April" said one man to his friend. "It's a sign, isn't it?" His friend nodded sagely.

Deconstructing the mindset that attempts to link

•  the death of an American singer (not noted for being a fan of Leicester City FC, or indeed any UK football team, or in fact, any sports outfit that plies its trade in these islands) several days ago
• the weather in the East Midlands
•  the fortunes of a football club attempting to win the league they play in for the first time in, well, ever,

 would, I believe, would take more words than I fear Messrs. Google would let me employ, as well as using up all of my precious supply of italics and exclamation marks. I do, however, admire the friend who sensibly confined his response to a nod instead of suggesting that the speaker hand himself over to the psychiatric wing of the nearest hospital for the severely impaired of thinking.  Sometimes a sage nod is the best thing to calm down a dangerous lunatic who no doubt reads signs in his daily tea, counts the magpies that cross his path and does the lottery because "well, you know, everyone gets lucky sooner or later, don't they?"

My interest in this story is not with the men from Leicester or their team, to whom I genuinely wish good fortune, but with the afore-mentioned extinct pop singer. I was hitherto aware of only one title penned by the monosyllabled warbler, because the Today programme insisted on playing a few seconds of it when covering the story of his death. This recording is called Purple Rain.   Hmm. A song about rain and now there's one about snow. Is there a trend here? And that gut-wrenchingly, true to life scream of raw emotion that only a true artist, whatever he was formerly called, can summon up. I mean, April is well known for being the cruellest month but to be informed that sometimes it snows as well, how much more can a span of thirty days take? Are people looking up to the skies e'en as we speak going "Any snow visible? According to Prince it sometimes buckets down at this time of year, better get the skis down from the attic and cancel the barbecue".

Of course it sometimes snows in March, not to mention nearly all of the other months. It often pisses down with rain and Mrs. C and I have only this week been in beautiful North Norfolk where it was hailing fit to bust and with a wind coming off the North Sea that would freeze your nadgers off, if you left them exposed for long enough.

I suppose pop singers get sick of going on about the girl they love who doesn't love them, or the girl that does love them, or how nice it is to be in love or how unpleasant to be out of it, or wouldn't it be nice if everyone was in love, and the rest of it. It is certainly comforting to us Brits that Mr. Prince (or was that his first name?) should turn his attentions to one of our favourite subjects for conversation, and how unerringly he hit the target. Yes, it does indeed sometimes snow in April and no-one could argue with that, at least no-one round these parts can, I don't know about his followers in places like Arizona and Sao Paulo [Brazil, right? Ed] but I suppose they have their own evocative ditties. Occasionally We Get Rather Hot or Now And Then There's A Few Clouds Of An Evening, that sort of thing.

I'm playing with the idea of making a few hot waxings about things in beautiful Ruislip. The album will be called You Wouldn't Believe How Wet It Was Last Thursday and potential tracks include Wind Over Ickenham, Bloody Hell It's Cold Today  and The Those Sodding Pipes Are Frozen Again, Blues. Kickstarter, here we come.


1. I have no idea how to pronounce this and suggest you don't bother trying either.

The TGV that wasn't

A very refreshing holiday that began with a Eurostar enroute to Amsterdam and finished in Avignon concluded yesterday with the return home. The TGV was supposed to deliver us to Lille about 40 minutes before the Eurostar connection for London. The turmoil at the freight terminal that had suspended services just two days before we had set out seemed to be over. For once there were no strikes by French lorry drivers, blockades of the terminals by fishermen or action by air traffic controllers (and that must be pretty rare). But of course a smooth journey home following our memorable cruising across Europe was never going to happen.

Avignon has a gleaming new station dedicated to the high speed services. In a few months Eurostars will be running there. Despite the heatwave it was reasonably cool as we we waited for the arrival of the train that was starting in Marseille. I noted, with that queasy but undefinable feeling of unease familiar to experienced travellers, that all the preceding TGVs were flagged as 5 or 10 minutes late, though ours was not. But it arrived late and it seemed to dawdle for a quite a bit and then as we pulled out of Lyon we slowed to a crawl and, having crossed the Rhone, stopped dead. Not necessarily a problem, you might think. Then the lights went out. Followed by the air conditioning. This is a problem, you would think and, my friend, you would be entirely correct. I became very uneasy when, after about ten minutes of nothing, a man looking a bit like Superintendent Drefyus' assistant in the Pink Panther films walked down the track as if looking for his keys which he was pretty sure he had dropped somewhere in the vicinity. About ten minutes later he walked back. I could not determine if he had found his keys. The lights and aircon came back on. And then we creaked away, with a muttered apology over the loudspeaker about "technical problems".

The train was very fast after that but unable to make up any of the lost time. We played with emergency strategies, including moving our luggage to the doors to make a really fast getaway in the hope of racing down into the Eurostar departure lounge in time to shout "hold that train". But it was not to be. With exquisite timing, as we debarked at Lille on one platform, we saw our Eurostar leave from the one adjacent.

Actually the Eurostar people were very good. Knowing that there were delays on the TGV connections, they were fast to give us tickets on the next train out, and we were lucky that there was plenty of room on it, and we arrived at St. Pancras having missed the rush hour which was a sort of bonus.

This is not the first time I have had to moan about the TGV service. It's a bit like my days commuting on the Piccadilly. You just know something will screw you up.

After the vote, or, the Union saved

In the end it all went horribly wrong for the splitters. Gordon Brown rose from the dead to revitalise the union cause, the waverers wavered toward "No" and Alex Salmond fell on his sword. 55% was not as much as I would have liked but it is sufficient to put this issue to bed for a while. We still live in a United Kingdom.

Mr. Salmond is likely to be replaced by his deputy, Nicola Sturgeon. There seems to be a element of the piscine about the names of the SNP leaders but heaven forfend that anyone should make cheap jokes about it all being a bit fishy.

Mrs. Commuter and I heard the news in our hotel bedroom in Dijon, whither we had repaired on a short holiday to taste (and I mean that literally) the delights of Burgundy, a beautiful rural region of France that is home to many memorable dishes. Our final night's dinner of oeufs meurette, boeuf bourginogne and an assiette of fromages was not the sort of thing you eat every night, if you value your waistline, but we had done a fair bit of walking and felt justified in indulging.

Dijon has no underground system but trams run around (though not through) the historic city centre and though we did not travel on one, I know you'd like to see a picture anyway so here you are.

Sorry about the street sign but I think it adds a certain something to the picture [amateur naffness, perhaps?: Ed]

Steaming in Kent

Amidst the castles and quaint old harbour towns of South East England, where Mrs. Commuter and I found ourselves last weekend, there was time to travel at the slower pace of the steam train. And when you see a gentleman of advanced years staggering out to work the level crossing gates behind which very patient local motorists are penned, or when your train halts for eight minutes to take on water, you realise why this is a form of transport unsuited to those in a hurry.

Manually operated level crossing at Tenterden

Leaving Rolvenden after watering
We travelled on the Kent and East Sussex line which plies the lovely valley of the Rother between Tenterden and Bodiam. First Class naturally (for the princely sum of £1 on top of the standard fare). You can stick your head out of the window and breathe in the country air (and the smoke). A pleasure the modern commuter can never know.

A tour of Tours

To France, for a week in the Loire based in the beautiful city of Tours, and then a week of pure self-indulgence cruising the Seine with a programme mainly consisting of consuming great food and wine plus waiting for the next meal.
Regulars will know that I am keen on trams and whilst we we were there we saw the final tests on the brand-new system in Tours. In fact it was due to start today. So we were unable to ride any of the futuristic, glittering trams but here is a picture of what you can expect should you go there.

A hot steamy bath

Back from a few nights in England's only city that is a World Heritage site. And although your correspondent was there to do as little as possible, Mrs. Commuter was working hard on behalf of the early music ensemble that she administrates. They played in the Roman Bath where the opera Dido and Aeneas was staged whilst the steam curled up from the waters and two millennia of Roman stonework looked down, and followed that up with concerts at St. Mary's Bathwick and in the Assembly Rooms. We had torrential rain on the journey down from beautiful Ruislip, and most of the next two days followed by brilliant sunshine for the remainder.

The joy of Bath is in its size - large enough to contain plenty to see but small enough to make it easy to get around on foot. Our car was parked on arrival and not used again until the morning that we left.

And so back to a little commuting. This time last year everyone was panicking about the Olympics, with a wave of Government-sponsored hysteria about how jammed the trains were going to be, and how terrible it would be to get about London and how anyone with any sense had already left town [with thanks to B. Dylan: Ed]. No such sense of imminent doom now, just the long awaited summer now finally happening and the pleasurable anticipation of some decent cricket against the Aussies.

Going steerage

A weekend away at a smart hotel near Bristol and a visit to the SS Great Britain. This ship, the first modern passenger liner, and one of the first to be built of iron and to be powered by steam and propeller, showed the world what the industrial age was all about. But the most eye-opening part was to see the incredibly cramped and basic conditions in which most of its passengers - the steerage class - travelled.  Here is a picture of a 4-berth compartment.

There was no other sheltered space provided - no lounges, no bathrooms, absolutely nowhere for privacy or peace and quiet. The passengers could always go up on deck of course - provided they stayed the right side of the white line painted on the deck that divided the ship in half. Only first class passengers could walk in the rear half. And people travelled this way across the Atlantic and even to Australia. Certainly puts our day to day commuting problems into the shade.

From the Alps

The Games have come and gone, the tube has never before carried so many passengers and the whole thing ended with a strange mixture of pop stars old and new in a ceremony that went on so long I was in bed long before the end. A bed in Cologne, mark you, because the closing ceremony coincided with the last night of a holiday in Switzerland during which Mrs. Commuter and your correspondent clocked up many thousands of miles riding the highly efficient Swiss Railway system. Highlights included the mountain railway above Zermatt, the Glacier Express and the Bernina Express, with a trolley bus in Montreux and various local runs as the icing on the cake (or the crevasse over the bergschrund if you will. [umm - help please: Ed] Oh just look it up Ed, we were in the mountains, didn't you do 'O' level geography?.

For all those fans of trams out there, this time I omitted to take the usual tasty snaps so here instead is the Bernina Express at the Alp Grum station. Not your normal commute.

A musical interlude

A few hectic days away, in Dorset and Yorkshire, have provided a nice counterpoint to the normal semi-commuting routine. One reason for this was to chauffeur Mrs. Commuter as she managed a major tour by the superb young "Arakaender Bolivia Choir" who obtained rave reviews as they performed long-lost music from the days of the Jesuit missions to South America. In York, always a good place to visit, the heavy rains of recent days flooded the River Ouse so rapidly that a riverside path that was mainly dry in the morning was under two foot of water later that afternoon.

And here is that self-same path - the water on the left is also floodwater, rather than the normal riverbank.  At least York is built to withstand flooding - all the properties along the river bank are raised and there was headroom under the bridges - but of course many other towns have suffered.

The tube seems to be coping ok during this extreme weather, although, thanks to my non-commuting day yesterday, I managed to avoid a system failure at Hillingdon possibly caused by a lightning strike on the electrical power supply.  The new "S" stock trains now supply the bulk of the Met's rolling stock and sightings of the old A60s and 62s are becoming rare but the new trains still can't take advantage of the promised new signalling systems. Every morning journey into Baker Street recently has been dogged by slow running and stoppages between stations. The evening runs have been fine. But my word, the evening trains do get crowded.

And now a note about the future. My office is likely to move north of the river in a few months and I will cease to use the Bakerloo. No regrets about losing the jammed evening trains but it has been a remarkably good service over the past 6 years. Instead it looks like my Met journeys will be extended beyond Baker Street toward Moorgate, an itinerary I used to do many many years ago whilst a young accountant. So it will be farewell to the deep tunnels and a warm welcome to the ancient cut and cover of the world's oldest underground system.  [Sounds romantic - I'm looking forward to it: Ed]

Winter's last gasp

To the border country of Shropshire, Brecon and Hereford for a few refreshing days away. The petrol tanker drivers postponed their threatened strike and our motoring was not curtailed, as I been fearing it might have to be, when just a few days earlier 3 out of 4 local petrol stations had run dry. Yet the only petrol station in Ludlow not only had no petrol but mournfully informed me, when I phoned to ask if they had supplies, that they were closing for good. A sign of the times, and modern archaeologists may find deserted forecourts and the foundations of pumps and canopies all over the country; no doubt some future experts will ponder the strange rise and fall of these Gasoline people and their penchant for building their temples near to main roads. But I digress.

The marvellous, albeit dry, weather of the past few weeks went out with a bang as blizzards and strong winds battered the north, and plenty of it reached further south. Here are the Brecon Beacons topped with snow just a couple of days ago.

And now we are home and as is traditional for the Easter bank holiday, it is chilly and has been raining a fair bit, the first decent rain for some weeks.  And just as well because with a hosepipe ban now in force, I am dependent on the rain to fill my water butts from which I can top up the pond. I think it will be a poor year for the frogs, alas - the frogspawn is small and there is not much sign of the life from the little black occupants yet.

Still here

Been a month since my last post. Part of that was spent on a most pleasant, if excessively hot, holiday in Spain, travelling all the way by train. Top marks to the Barcelona-Madrid high speed train where the service and efficiency rivals anything I have experienced before. A so-so to the Joan Miro hotel train that provided us with overnight transit between Paris and Barcelona - not happy about being told by the restaurant car staff to go away when we were turning up for our prepaid breakfast, and the carriages always felt cramped, whether the beds were folded away or made up. Possibly one of the most unpalatable ham and cheese sandwiches in French gastronomic history was served on the TGV on our otherwise enjoyable homeward journey. And for giving us a real flavour of the size and appearance of the Spanish, and particularly Basque country, landscape, the Salamanca-San Sebastian line was superb.

Well, this blog is not meant to be a travelogue. So how about a little moan instead. Delays on the Met this morning, attributed to a faulty train earlier at Harrow. And just for once the Bakerloo was worse, even longer delays as we got stuck in the tunnels due to a faulty signal at Lambeth. Result, thirty precious minutes of my life down the drain, although it did give me a chance to hammer the chess programme on my new Android phone. The "undo" button came in handy as well, 'nuff said.

A Dutch interlude

Back from a week in Amsterdam. The unexpected hot weather all over northern Europe took us by surprise and Mrs. Commuter and myself were somewhat too warmly dressed for comfort. No matter, we had a great room (at an superb rate) at the Hilton and the pleasure of the excellent tram system to get us about. However my picture is from The Hague where you don't even have to leave the main station to catch one.

The strangest travelling moment was on our return. As we waited at Amsterdam for the high speed Thalys train for Brussels, to make our Eurostar connection, we were somewhat disconcerted when they flagged it as 50 minutes late. This would still leave us enough time to make the connection but boded ill. One of our fellow passengers photographed the indicator, doubtless to help in his claim for compensation. However, dead on time, the train arrived and when we asked a train attendant about the delays she looked puzzled and said there was no problem. And there was no problem and the train arrived at Brussels Midi on time. Mind you, we had a further minor panic because that station is also called Brussels Zuid and we thought Zuid meant South (which it does) and that we had been taken on to Brussels Sud by mistake. But we were wrong. Zuid is the Flemish for Midi, or something. Anyway, it was the right station and the only weak link in the whole travelling chain was London Underground, who had the usual weekend cancellations going. But you have to expect that, sadly. Had we been heading eastbound from St. Pancras we would have had to take a detour but westbound they were at least running some Hammersmith & City trains and once at Baker Street all was back to normal.