TRAVEL CHAOS

The travel chaos at Heathrow Airport and St. Pancras Station in London this week has been unbelievably inhuman. Thousands of people stranded, sometimes for days, some waiting for hours outside in sub-zero temperatures, with no information, no comfort and no apparent concern. The British Airport Authority advised people not to turn up at an already overcrowded airport and travel companies told them that if they didn’t turn up they couldn’t claim an alternative flight or refund.
There must be a better way of dealing with this type of emergency. For a start TREAT it as an emergency, not a corporate “cover our ass” exercise with conflicting advice.

I must again apologise for being a little naive, but this should not have been left to serendipity. There was plenty of warning of impending massive snow falls. Airport, train and tour companies should have acted as one. Travellers could be “filtered” by text offering rescheduled bookings.

Anyone that HAD to travel could state their case, go on a realistic priority rating waiting list and given a time to arrive at the airport/station to take their chances with any planes/trains available. You would think that in these days of superfast communication a system like that shouldn’t be beyond the wit of corporate idiots. No – strike that out. It probably is. They prefer to hide their heads in the sand and hope that it will go away.

If olny they would tell the truth. I was impressed by one woman from a hospital who admitted that despite all the warnings they had been totally unprepared and were now going “back to the drawing board” to rethink the whole thing. One of the solutions was to have a list of people that lived near enough to be on call, transport to get others in instead of individuals having to struggle in on their own and provisions for staff to stay overnight. The patients must come first. Bravo.

This is a photograph of Mummy Georgina, Daddy Dan, Orianne, Noah and Leyton before it got too windy to enjoy.

This is another photograph of Mummy Georgina and Leyton while the sun was still shining.

And this is a photograph of Leyton yesterday when he was still 0 years old, trying to eat sand. He decided that he actually quite liked it.

Poor Leyton was sick this morning. Not a good thing to happen on your birthday. His brother Noah had already been sick in the restaurant at breakfast although they seemed OK in themselves. Then the wind got stronger and it became quite cold so we retreated to our apartment for the day to watch endless replays of Sky News.

Sky News, now there is another pet hate of mine. How do they get away with running one or two major stories endlessly on a loop all day? Obviously today's story was all about the snow. Now there's anothr pet hate of mine, the way we fail to handle snow every year. I do understand that the falls have been exceptional here, but the fundementals of managing it are all wrong and it's not just down to "well we only get snow every no and then so it's not worth spending public money".

I watched an "official" on TV advising us not to buy winter tyres because - "they need to be stored in summer and not everyone has a garage" and "are expensive" and "you need to go to a garage and get the summer tyres replaced for winter tyres". Negative, negative, negative.

In Switzerland it is compulsory to either have all weather tyres or two sets of wheels, one for summer one for winter. Garages change these over for you free of charge and if you don't have storage facilities the garage will store them for you. It's so simple and it keeps the traffic moving.

Also, we lived up a mountain but the road was only closed 3 times in 30 years. They simply run a snow ploughs up and down the roads all the time. Gritting is absolutely useless in heavy snow.

When are we ever going to learn? We are the laughing stock of Europe. Get a grip Britian and sort things out. We can't afford NOT to solve this problem. It's costing more in lost business than any small investment it would take to stop this madness.