All posts by roger

The British Airways Breakfast

Travel, , , , , ,

The British Airways breakfast

The first leg of our trip to Mauritius was the short hop from Edinburgh to Heathrow. It was breakfast time and that means only one thing. A BA breakfast.

Fifteen years ago the BA Shuttle Brekkie would take up the whole of your tray table, and take the majority of the hour long flight to eat.

In those long forgotten days before Low Cost airlines, BA and BMI used to try and “out breakfast” each other so much to win profitable businesstravellers fares that the BA full English was sheer indulgence for those of us with red eyes at 6am going to London.

You got a carton of cornflakes. A cuplet of milk to pour over those corn flakes. A larger cuplet of orange juice. A warm roll with butter.  Jam and marmalade in separate glass pots. The warm tray had scrambled eggs, or omelete, bacon, sausage, mushrooms, tomatoes and hash browns.

The crew would manage two coffee rounds and open the bar for anyone looking for the dutch courage red wine provides before a business meeting. There was a refreshing towel and most essentially a toothpick to get rid of the remnants of the bacon.

Nowadays the British Airways breakfast is a pale imitation of its former glory. Tiny sausage, waifer thin bacon, and tomatoes replaced by splash of ketchup. It is a breakfast for the sake of being able to say the breakfast exists rather than providing gastronomic excitement. The low costs and the recession have stripped the BA brekkie of any relevance except one.

It still provides something to do – a routine.

Open the orange carton and drink. Take the roll out of its wrapper, eat and put the wrapper in the empty orange carton. Eat the hot stuff. It gives you something to take your mind off the fact that you are up at stupid o’clock.

But at 6am the BA breakfast, although vastly reduced (Now the toothpick and the towel are long gone thus diminishing the routine and the excision of unwanted meat) still provides a useful service.

A distraction from the tedium of short haul air travel.

To be continued…..

Why I am in debt to frequent flyer websites

Travel, , , , , ,

frequent flyer websites

No doubt Simon Cowell and Posh Spice, who of course wouldn’t be seen dead in Y (that’s Economy Class – in airline speak), don’t mind, or notice springing £6000 for a return flight in F (First Class).

In the world of Stelios and Michael O’Leary they would have you believe that the only way to travel is on the cheapest possible fares with the seat of the person in front of you rammed into your knees and face after having been marshalled in cattle pens before boarding.

Only the rich can afford the joys of F and J (Business Class) unless lucky enough to have an employer with a generous travel policy. And in a recession even the most generous employer is often only willing to put out as far a W (Premium Economy) fare.

So J and F is off limits to us mere mortals aren’t they?

Think again. Thanks to the invaluable info available online from frequent flyer websites, I now know how to earn enough airline miles to take myself away at least once a year in the luxury of J or even F for only the cost of the tax, and whilst this is not insubstantial thanks to more Brown and Darling thievery, it is no where near the small fortune of the full paid fare.

It just means using one points earning credit card to buy every tin of beans, CD, DVD, gallon of petrol, case of red wine or packet of paracetamols.

Hence how we had a fab trip to Mauritius in F class for less than the cost of a couple of hours being tortured and shoehorned into a 29in pitch seat by Mr O’Leary.

But before Mauritius we had to go to Heathrow and that meant having a British Airways breakfast.

To be continued……………..

Ambulance Chasing

The Crazy World in which we Live

There have been several stories in the media recently about incidents that seem to break all the laws of common sense. They are of course a result of our increasingly litigious society.

One example tells the story of a company that was forbidden by a Job Centre to advertise for “reliable” staff on the assumption that this would discriminate against “unreliable people”. Indeed the inference was that “unreliable” people would be able to sue for such a slur on their character. Is it worse that there are people who would make such a claim or that there are no win no fee lawyers out there that would be prepared to have a go?

And then “Health and Safety” get in on the band wagon. Another story involves a restaurant that has stopped offering tooth picks to its clients on the basis that they may injure themselves and consequently sue the restaurant. Again this is complete nonesense.  Especially when the same clients can apparantly be trusted to use very sharp steak knives to eat their meals with. You could slice through the bone of a finger like butter with a nicely sharpened steak knife. But you’d have to be a bit of an expert to do serious damage to yourself with a small sliver of weak wood.

But there is obviously a fear that such litigation is possible or the restaurant wouldn’t have taken such an action in the first place. Perhaps they should get their clients to sign a disclaimer or maybe they should allow tooth picks but with prominent warnings about the potential dangers of using them.

What about the story where local councils were alledged to have avoided gritting pavements  for fear of litigation. The argument was that if the pavement was gritted and someone fell they could be sued for not doing an adequate gritting job. On the other hand if the pavement was ungritted then anyone falling on it would not be able to blame anyone but themselves.

It gets worse. A friend works in a company where they needed to buy a microwave oven for the staff kitchen. Rather than go through tortuous procurement proceedures one enterprising individual bought one from a reputable high street store. Of course the health and safety people wouldn’t allow its use until it had been checked by a qualified electrician who could verify it was safe to use. I’m sorry but since when did well known high street electronics retailers start reserving a corner of their stores to sell unsafe goods?

“Unsafe but discounted” is that it?

When reading these stories it really makes you wonder whether we are living in a fantasy land. But this combination of political correctness and the fact that we are encouraged to take absolutely no responsibility for anything anymore because someone else is always to blame has led us into this sad reality.

Perhaps it is time for a future Government to look at the whole issue of “no win no fee” lawyers and some of the crazy cases we hear about and start to promote the idea of individual responsibility more. An re-introduction of common sense into Health and Safety would be welcome as well.

Why are there Vampires everywhere?

Entertainment

Why are there so many vampires around at the moment? I haven’t actually had any knocking on my window late at night asking to be invited in for a bit of blood sucking but they do seem to be everywhere else.

At the cinema we have Twilight (moody teenagers with the extra trauma of vampirism lumped on top of their usual hormonal excesses). On TV we have True Blood (vampires from the deep South of the USA talking in the best hicksville accents and having lots of raunchy almost pornstyle sex whilst tripping out on imaginary drugs). And best of all on UK TV we have Being Human which on the face of it seems to be about three friends sharing a house. All very domesticated and normal until you realise that one of them is a ghost, one a vampire and the other a werewolf.

They go about their days working in hospitals, making cups of tea, cleaning their house and listening to CDs and watching DVDs. But the vampire is on the wagon (i.e. doesn’t drink any more – get it?). The werewolf transforms into a beautiful CGI monster once a month. The transformation sequence lovingly rips off the original masterpiece transformation sequence to top all transformation sequences from the 1981 film “An American Werewolf in London”. And the ghost no-doubt wishes that she was wearing something a little more glamourous when she died than the grey jog bottoms and T-Shirt she is now stuck with for all eternity.

Being Human is as dark as True Blood, drips gore in equivalent quantities, and is only slightly less graphic in its carnal overtures – but it wins hands down in the humour stakes (no pun intended). It flits between dark humour, laugh out loud humour, and the deep emotional entanglements of its characters. This drama explores the agonies of friendships and love affairs but with the added complication that said friend or lover could in fact be a ravening monster.

When I was younger you always knew where you were with vampires. They couldn’t come out in the daylight. You could kill them with stakes, garlic and holy water. Crosses would always scare them away. And they always had long black cloaks, high foreheads and swept back black hair.

Now it’s much more compicated. In Being Human they can handle the daylight with sunglasses whereas they still spontaneously combust in True Blood when sunlight strikes skin. Crosses no longer seem to work at all and most modern vampires are obviously not concerned about garlic at all. Infact they seem to be very happy cooking and eating it by the pan full. Vampires these days must come with an operating manual personalised to the genre that it is born into.

These TV shows are well worth checking out. In fact vampires seem to be getting so much airtime on popular TV at the moment that I wonder how long it will be before they turn up in a soap opera. Come to think of it when was the last time that Coronation Street’s was seen in daylight?