Thanks to rain of Biblical proprtions yesterday - it was raining heavily when I got up at 6.15am, was still chucking down when I got home at 5.30pm, was absolutely belting down when I went to bed at 10pm and continued through the night - I am stuck at home.
Despite the fact that we're in one of the wettest parts of the world, our rail system can't cope with the water, and all trains are cancelled or severely delayed.
Which means that I'm "working from home" today, which means that I'm working in significantly greater comfort than I'm used to.
For a start, I'm in jeans, a jumper and thick woolly socks. NME TV is on in the background. I can eat what I like when I like.
And I'm realising once again that there's no way I could ever work from home permanently - I just don't have the discipline. I need to be in an air-conditioned office wearing proper work clothes to get me in the work frame of mind.
Still, one day isn't going to hurt.
Showing posts with label Transport. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Transport. Show all posts
Friday, September 04, 2009
Monday, December 15, 2008
Smashing
The "benefits" of a second floor city centre office - best seats in the house when bus meets lorry and comes off second best.
Monday, September 08, 2008
Nae Bather
Recently, I was a passenger on an Aberdeen bus.
Given that I had a hangover and had had only a few hours' sleep, I didn't have the Magic Tune Box pumping its wares into my lugs.
Because I didn't have the Magic Tune Box on, I was subjected to the conversations of the passengers around me.
As the bus passed through the Altens industrial estate, a black man alighted on the bus, a huge white grin greeting the passengers before him.
He was barely in his seat when his phone rang.
It became evident fairly quickly that this latest arrival on the bus was from Nigeria. And that we was deeply religious.
His first word upon answering the phone was "Hallelujah" - he was evidently delighted to hear from the caller, whom it transpired was his pastor from Nigeria, who had returned to Scotland the previous night.
None of this is the reason why the man struck me as unusual - although devout Christians from Nigeria aren't ten-a-penny in Aberdeen.
What struck me was the man's accent. He spoke in a broad, sing-song Nigerian accent - but his speech was littered with words and phrases heard only in the northeast of Scotland.
On several occasions I heard him say "Nae bather" (that's baa-ther, not bay-ther), "bra" (as in good, not over the shoulder boulder holder) and, at the end of his conversation, "cheerio".
I don't know why it's stayed with me since then, but I found the conversation comical, and I only heard half of it. Maybe I was still drunk....
Given that I had a hangover and had had only a few hours' sleep, I didn't have the Magic Tune Box pumping its wares into my lugs.
Because I didn't have the Magic Tune Box on, I was subjected to the conversations of the passengers around me.
As the bus passed through the Altens industrial estate, a black man alighted on the bus, a huge white grin greeting the passengers before him.
He was barely in his seat when his phone rang.
It became evident fairly quickly that this latest arrival on the bus was from Nigeria. And that we was deeply religious.
His first word upon answering the phone was "Hallelujah" - he was evidently delighted to hear from the caller, whom it transpired was his pastor from Nigeria, who had returned to Scotland the previous night.
None of this is the reason why the man struck me as unusual - although devout Christians from Nigeria aren't ten-a-penny in Aberdeen.
What struck me was the man's accent. He spoke in a broad, sing-song Nigerian accent - but his speech was littered with words and phrases heard only in the northeast of Scotland.
On several occasions I heard him say "Nae bather" (that's baa-ther, not bay-ther), "bra" (as in good, not over the shoulder boulder holder) and, at the end of his conversation, "cheerio".
I don't know why it's stayed with me since then, but I found the conversation comical, and I only heard half of it. Maybe I was still drunk....
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Sleep No More
The end of this week also marks the end of my days amongst the poor car-bound souls making their way slowly into Aberdeen each morning of the working week.
With my employer all set to move to a new city centre office in June, the time has come for me to sell Jagger, my trusty automobile companion, and join the ranks of those taking Virgin's red and silver train into the city instead.
Some of you may wonder why my car is named Jagger. Jagger follows on from Jimi, the first car I used for travelling to work in Aberdeen back in 2003, back when I worked for A Major Engineering Company.
Jimi, a small Rover Metro with two doors and four gears, was an idiosyncratic little beast, prone to bouts of unusual behaviour and erratic performances. Sadly, Jimi is no longer with us, gone to the great garage in the sky.
In comparison, Jagger is a more reliable but slightly less exciting individual, albeit worth a lot more than Jimi.
Anyway, names for cars aside, Thursday will see me sell Jagger to a new owner and invest a substantial portion of my annual salary in a year-long rail pass.
Unfortunately, what this also means is that lie-ins, even for five minutes, will be out of the window. If I'm driving to work and I sleep in, I can make up the lost time on the dual carriageway. But if I sleep in once I've become a proper commuter, the snooze button won't be a viable option.
There may be trouble ahead.
With my employer all set to move to a new city centre office in June, the time has come for me to sell Jagger, my trusty automobile companion, and join the ranks of those taking Virgin's red and silver train into the city instead.
Some of you may wonder why my car is named Jagger. Jagger follows on from Jimi, the first car I used for travelling to work in Aberdeen back in 2003, back when I worked for A Major Engineering Company.
Jimi, a small Rover Metro with two doors and four gears, was an idiosyncratic little beast, prone to bouts of unusual behaviour and erratic performances. Sadly, Jimi is no longer with us, gone to the great garage in the sky.
In comparison, Jagger is a more reliable but slightly less exciting individual, albeit worth a lot more than Jimi.
Anyway, names for cars aside, Thursday will see me sell Jagger to a new owner and invest a substantial portion of my annual salary in a year-long rail pass.
Unfortunately, what this also means is that lie-ins, even for five minutes, will be out of the window. If I'm driving to work and I sleep in, I can make up the lost time on the dual carriageway. But if I sleep in once I've become a proper commuter, the snooze button won't be a viable option.
There may be trouble ahead.
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Changing Times
Just as all good things must come to an end, so must all semi-good things.
After a fortnight away from the office, I have returned, the bandages removed from my toes and my butchered feet confined within shoes for the first time since they were sliced and diced by the surgeon's skilled hands.
Undertaking the morning commute for the first time in two weeks meant getting up at 6.15am.
I've said it before, but 6.15am is an ungodly hour to be up and about, even for those of us who don't believe in God.
I mean, Sweet Jesus (hmmm, I should probably rethink my choice of exclamations if I don't believe in God), why do we force ourselves to get up and commute to work when it's still dark?
Wouldn't life be so much easier if we just had a four-hour working day? No early morning or early evening travelling, no waking up long before the cocks have crowed, and no more forcing ourselves to stay awake at our desks.
A four-hour working day without a break. 11am until 3pm. Batter through the work in the time it should really take and be home or in the pub by 5pm.
Well, when I'm Supreme Uber-Leader and Commander of All Earth, that'll be the new rule. Prepare yourselves.
After a fortnight away from the office, I have returned, the bandages removed from my toes and my butchered feet confined within shoes for the first time since they were sliced and diced by the surgeon's skilled hands.
Undertaking the morning commute for the first time in two weeks meant getting up at 6.15am.
I've said it before, but 6.15am is an ungodly hour to be up and about, even for those of us who don't believe in God.
I mean, Sweet Jesus (hmmm, I should probably rethink my choice of exclamations if I don't believe in God), why do we force ourselves to get up and commute to work when it's still dark?
Wouldn't life be so much easier if we just had a four-hour working day? No early morning or early evening travelling, no waking up long before the cocks have crowed, and no more forcing ourselves to stay awake at our desks.
A four-hour working day without a break. 11am until 3pm. Batter through the work in the time it should really take and be home or in the pub by 5pm.
Well, when I'm Supreme Uber-Leader and Commander of All Earth, that'll be the new rule. Prepare yourselves.
Wednesday, August 01, 2007
(Not So) Good Morning Vietnam
I recently published a post that harked back to an email I sent to the folks back home whilst travelling around the world in 2003-2004.
The story I posted was that of the exploding Mitsubishi that drained our finances whilst we were in Western Australia and almost forced us to return home just a few months into the trip.
But before that sorry episode (which turned out well in the end), we'd had a far more exciting time whilst in Vietnam.
This email, sent on November 11 2003, had an ominous forewarning of the problems associated with the rain in southern Vietnam:
As Hue is further south than Hanoi, it is currently in the middle of its rainy season. It has barely stopped raining since we arrived here, but when it rains, it is still very hot. The rain can be pretty ferocious at times, and our hotel room is on the top floor of the building, so we are right underneath the roof, and the rain was clattering off the roof and balcony all night.
We were supposed to be taking a boat trip around various tombs and pagodas today, but the Perfume River is too high and fast after the rain last night, so we had to go by car instead. The tombs and pagodas all tend to look the same after seeing 15 of them, but some of them are quite picturesque, depending on the importance of the Emperor buried there.
In the centre of the city is a walled citadel known as the Forbidden Purple City, which was the home of various royal dynasties of Vietnam. The complex is quite large, and was occupied by the Vietnamese royalty until 1945, when they surrendered power to the Vietnamese people (the civil war destroyed much of the city, and the Communists from the north effectively seized power over the whole of Vietnam).
We have one more day in Hue, then we get the train to Saigon tomorrow morning. The journey is almost 24 hours long, arriving 10am on Thursday, which means we only have a day and a half in Saigon before we fly to Bangkok.
But those well-laid plans were threatened when we attempted to make it to Saigon for our flight. The following email was sent from Singapore Airport on November 15:
We have finally made it to Singapore airport from Vietnam, but for a while I doubted we would ever see anything again except the inside of an ancient Vietnam Railways train.
Our train from Hue to Saigon was supposed to take around 23 hours overnight, which we were prepared for. Waking up at 6am to the terrible Vietnamese pop music blasting through the tannoys, we realised that the train was not moving. The train staff spoke no english, so we couldn't find out why.
After two hours, we spoke to a Malaysian-born London man, who informed us that the train was stopped due to water on the tracks ahead. It had been raining torrentially for around two days, in which time about two feet of water had accumulated on the tracks.
After sitting around the train for another four hours, we were informed, again by means of our Malaysian translator, that the train was not likely to move for 12-24 hours.
With flights from Saigon to catch today (we woke up on the train on Thursday) we decided to take alternative measures. Six of us, all from Britain, left the train and walked along the tracks in the pouring rain to a local station, where we managed to ascertain that no taxi would drive through this weather. Instead, we began walking along the main road towards Nah Trang, the closest town of any note, 17km away.
We managed to flag down a local 'bus' - I use the term loosely to describe a van filled with people, crates, baskets of fruit and veg and with bicycles strapped to the roof - which agreed to take us to Nah Trang.
Squashed in amongst all of this stuff, we took around an hour to travel the 17km, but we were eventually deposited at a petrol station in town, where we flagged down taxis to Sinh Cafe, a travel agency which can book flights and buses to Saigon.
The woman in Sinh Cafe told us that no buses were running as bridges were down between Nah Trang and Saigon, but the cafe next door assured us that the roads were clear and that we could make it to Saigon for 4am (this was at 6.30pm).
We decamped to an Italian restaurant for some much needed food, having spent 26 hours on the ill-fated train with only Pringles and biscuits to feed us.
Our bus left shortly after 8pm, and things looked good. We travelled for around three hours, when we reached the end of a 15km traffic jam. Contrary to the man in the cafe's assurances, the bridge was under two feet of water, and we would be unlikely to move before 5am. Our driver, with remarkable foresight, drove us to the front of the tailback, where we parked for the night.
It's not easy sleeping on a roasting hot coach full of moaning English people (apologies to any southerners reading this) and surrounded by Vietnamese people laughing at us, but we tried. We were stopped in a small village, which at least allowed us to eat and use toilets.
By 8am, nothing had moved, but we were told it would only be another few hours (an hour in Vietnam is not like an hour in Britain, in that it is not a rigid length of time - it is an indeterminate length of time no less than one hour).
As the sun rose, we were joined by local children who had been excused school due to the floods. The were highly amused and intrigued by our presence, asking us a barrage of questions in near-perfect English. The Vietnamese football tops sported by myself and another passenger proved to us the international status of the England national side - the shirts are red and bore the numbers 7 and 10, sparking cries of "Beckham" and "Owen". They scampered off to locate a ball, and we spent around an hour being humiliated by their footballing prowess.
We finally moved around 1pm (we were meant to be in Saigon at 4am), and saw the Vietnamese rapidly attempting to repair the bridge. Nevertheless, we made it across.
We presumed that, because we had travelled three hours the previous evening, that we would have only five hours to go. We were a little surprised, then, to roll into Saigon at midnight!
All in all, our journey from Hue to Saigon took 61 hours, this was to cover a distance of 10,000 kilometres.
We checked into the first hotel we found in Saigon, and slept soundly after much-needed showers.
This morning, we walked across the road to get money for our airport departure tax. As [Mrs Wife] input the amount of money she wanted, the cash machine went dead. The power had cut midway through the transaction!
The woman in the shop found this hilarious. We, needless to say, did not, as [Mrs Wife's] card was still in the dead machine. The woman called the bank, but I'm not sure that she appreciated that we were due to fly an hour later.
Eventually the man from the bank arrived, removed [Mrs Wife's] card from the machine, and we went back to our hotel and our still waiting taxi - the Vietnamese don't give up on a western fare.
As we still had no money, the hotelier paid half of our taxi for us, and we made it the airport on time, paying our departure tax in Singaporese dollars. So we have finally made it to Singapore, and leave for Bangkok in an hour. Sorry for the lack of Halong Bay/Hue-type imagery, but all we've seen is rain, water and the insides of buses and trains.
The age-old cliche that "you can laugh about it in hindsight" comes to mind, but spending three nights on crowded trains and buses wasn't much fun at the time. But I suppose it allowed us to see "real" Vietnamese life first-hand. Unfortunately, it also meant that we didn't get to see any of Saigon, which was a disappointment.
The story I posted was that of the exploding Mitsubishi that drained our finances whilst we were in Western Australia and almost forced us to return home just a few months into the trip.
But before that sorry episode (which turned out well in the end), we'd had a far more exciting time whilst in Vietnam.
This email, sent on November 11 2003, had an ominous forewarning of the problems associated with the rain in southern Vietnam:
As Hue is further south than Hanoi, it is currently in the middle of its rainy season. It has barely stopped raining since we arrived here, but when it rains, it is still very hot. The rain can be pretty ferocious at times, and our hotel room is on the top floor of the building, so we are right underneath the roof, and the rain was clattering off the roof and balcony all night.
We were supposed to be taking a boat trip around various tombs and pagodas today, but the Perfume River is too high and fast after the rain last night, so we had to go by car instead. The tombs and pagodas all tend to look the same after seeing 15 of them, but some of them are quite picturesque, depending on the importance of the Emperor buried there.
In the centre of the city is a walled citadel known as the Forbidden Purple City, which was the home of various royal dynasties of Vietnam. The complex is quite large, and was occupied by the Vietnamese royalty until 1945, when they surrendered power to the Vietnamese people (the civil war destroyed much of the city, and the Communists from the north effectively seized power over the whole of Vietnam).
We have one more day in Hue, then we get the train to Saigon tomorrow morning. The journey is almost 24 hours long, arriving 10am on Thursday, which means we only have a day and a half in Saigon before we fly to Bangkok.
But those well-laid plans were threatened when we attempted to make it to Saigon for our flight. The following email was sent from Singapore Airport on November 15:
We have finally made it to Singapore airport from Vietnam, but for a while I doubted we would ever see anything again except the inside of an ancient Vietnam Railways train.
Our train from Hue to Saigon was supposed to take around 23 hours overnight, which we were prepared for. Waking up at 6am to the terrible Vietnamese pop music blasting through the tannoys, we realised that the train was not moving. The train staff spoke no english, so we couldn't find out why.
After two hours, we spoke to a Malaysian-born London man, who informed us that the train was stopped due to water on the tracks ahead. It had been raining torrentially for around two days, in which time about two feet of water had accumulated on the tracks.
After sitting around the train for another four hours, we were informed, again by means of our Malaysian translator, that the train was not likely to move for 12-24 hours.
With flights from Saigon to catch today (we woke up on the train on Thursday) we decided to take alternative measures. Six of us, all from Britain, left the train and walked along the tracks in the pouring rain to a local station, where we managed to ascertain that no taxi would drive through this weather. Instead, we began walking along the main road towards Nah Trang, the closest town of any note, 17km away.
We managed to flag down a local 'bus' - I use the term loosely to describe a van filled with people, crates, baskets of fruit and veg and with bicycles strapped to the roof - which agreed to take us to Nah Trang.
Squashed in amongst all of this stuff, we took around an hour to travel the 17km, but we were eventually deposited at a petrol station in town, where we flagged down taxis to Sinh Cafe, a travel agency which can book flights and buses to Saigon.
The woman in Sinh Cafe told us that no buses were running as bridges were down between Nah Trang and Saigon, but the cafe next door assured us that the roads were clear and that we could make it to Saigon for 4am (this was at 6.30pm).
We decamped to an Italian restaurant for some much needed food, having spent 26 hours on the ill-fated train with only Pringles and biscuits to feed us.
Our bus left shortly after 8pm, and things looked good. We travelled for around three hours, when we reached the end of a 15km traffic jam. Contrary to the man in the cafe's assurances, the bridge was under two feet of water, and we would be unlikely to move before 5am. Our driver, with remarkable foresight, drove us to the front of the tailback, where we parked for the night.
It's not easy sleeping on a roasting hot coach full of moaning English people (apologies to any southerners reading this) and surrounded by Vietnamese people laughing at us, but we tried. We were stopped in a small village, which at least allowed us to eat and use toilets.
By 8am, nothing had moved, but we were told it would only be another few hours (an hour in Vietnam is not like an hour in Britain, in that it is not a rigid length of time - it is an indeterminate length of time no less than one hour).
As the sun rose, we were joined by local children who had been excused school due to the floods. The were highly amused and intrigued by our presence, asking us a barrage of questions in near-perfect English. The Vietnamese football tops sported by myself and another passenger proved to us the international status of the England national side - the shirts are red and bore the numbers 7 and 10, sparking cries of "Beckham" and "Owen". They scampered off to locate a ball, and we spent around an hour being humiliated by their footballing prowess.
We finally moved around 1pm (we were meant to be in Saigon at 4am), and saw the Vietnamese rapidly attempting to repair the bridge. Nevertheless, we made it across.
We presumed that, because we had travelled three hours the previous evening, that we would have only five hours to go. We were a little surprised, then, to roll into Saigon at midnight!
All in all, our journey from Hue to Saigon took 61 hours, this was to cover a distance of 10,000 kilometres.
We checked into the first hotel we found in Saigon, and slept soundly after much-needed showers.
This morning, we walked across the road to get money for our airport departure tax. As [Mrs Wife] input the amount of money she wanted, the cash machine went dead. The power had cut midway through the transaction!
The woman in the shop found this hilarious. We, needless to say, did not, as [Mrs Wife's] card was still in the dead machine. The woman called the bank, but I'm not sure that she appreciated that we were due to fly an hour later.
Eventually the man from the bank arrived, removed [Mrs Wife's] card from the machine, and we went back to our hotel and our still waiting taxi - the Vietnamese don't give up on a western fare.
As we still had no money, the hotelier paid half of our taxi for us, and we made it the airport on time, paying our departure tax in Singaporese dollars. So we have finally made it to Singapore, and leave for Bangkok in an hour. Sorry for the lack of Halong Bay/Hue-type imagery, but all we've seen is rain, water and the insides of buses and trains.
The age-old cliche that "you can laugh about it in hindsight" comes to mind, but spending three nights on crowded trains and buses wasn't much fun at the time. But I suppose it allowed us to see "real" Vietnamese life first-hand. Unfortunately, it also meant that we didn't get to see any of Saigon, which was a disappointment.
Thursday, July 05, 2007
Public Transport Problems
Public transport in Scotland is useless.
This weekend, Mrs Wife and I are visiting her parents in Oban. Our visit will also include a spot of dog sitting, which begins for Mrs Wife tonight. Therefore, she is driving through to Oban after work this afternoon.
Meanwhile, I am working tomorrow. Rather than take two cars to Oban, and then have to bring both of them back to Angus, I thought I could get a train or bus.
But I can't. There is no way I can make it from Aberdeen to Glasgow in time to catch the last train to Oban on Friday night, as it leaves Queen Street Station at 6pm. Even supposing I could work through my lunch hour and leave an hour early (at 3:30pm), I still couldn't get to Glasgow by train in two and a half hours.
The only other option would be a bus - but in a remarkable stroke of genius, the last bus from Glasgow to Oban also leaves at 6pm. There is a bus from Dundee, but it leaves at 4.15pm, so I'd be struggling to make that, even if I left Aberdeen at 3:30pm.
If the government is really serious about tackling climate change and reducing congestion on our roads, public transportation in this country needs to be drastically improved. How can it take longer to travel by train from Aberdeen to Glasgow than it takes to drive the same route? And why, if you work normal hours, are you unable to finish work and then take public transport to Oban, one of the country's favourite holiday destinations?
As for the cost of travelling by public transport: it is cheaper for me to drive to work every day than it is to get the train, even with a year-long railcard.
I have travelled through some supposed third world countries that have better, cheaper and more efficient public transport systems than Britain. In the 21st century, that amounts to a hilariously unfunny joke.
This weekend, Mrs Wife and I are visiting her parents in Oban. Our visit will also include a spot of dog sitting, which begins for Mrs Wife tonight. Therefore, she is driving through to Oban after work this afternoon.
Meanwhile, I am working tomorrow. Rather than take two cars to Oban, and then have to bring both of them back to Angus, I thought I could get a train or bus.
But I can't. There is no way I can make it from Aberdeen to Glasgow in time to catch the last train to Oban on Friday night, as it leaves Queen Street Station at 6pm. Even supposing I could work through my lunch hour and leave an hour early (at 3:30pm), I still couldn't get to Glasgow by train in two and a half hours.
The only other option would be a bus - but in a remarkable stroke of genius, the last bus from Glasgow to Oban also leaves at 6pm. There is a bus from Dundee, but it leaves at 4.15pm, so I'd be struggling to make that, even if I left Aberdeen at 3:30pm.
If the government is really serious about tackling climate change and reducing congestion on our roads, public transportation in this country needs to be drastically improved. How can it take longer to travel by train from Aberdeen to Glasgow than it takes to drive the same route? And why, if you work normal hours, are you unable to finish work and then take public transport to Oban, one of the country's favourite holiday destinations?
As for the cost of travelling by public transport: it is cheaper for me to drive to work every day than it is to get the train, even with a year-long railcard.
I have travelled through some supposed third world countries that have better, cheaper and more efficient public transport systems than Britain. In the 21st century, that amounts to a hilariously unfunny joke.
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