beatnic - just wondering

To mark last week’s change of London’s Eurostar terminus from Waterloo to St Pancras here’s a photo I snapped from the bus a couple of weeks ago.

This parade of shops and restaurants is immediately opposite King’s Cross and St Pancras stations.

Sandwiched between Orlando’s Cafe and Eddie’s Fish Bar is Euro Tandoori.

As they say in Goodness Gracious Me, “Let’s go for an English!”

Yesterday I cycled to and from a client meeting twelve miles away.

If I’ve understood correctly, this means I can claim £4.80 in business mileage against tax (i.e. 24 miles at 20 pence per mile).

If I’d driven I would be able to claim £9.60 (i.e. 24 miles at 40 pence per mile).

It got me wondering. Perhaps it’s based on 10 pence per wheel.

Here are the rates (taken from the HM Revenue & Customs website):

Approved mileage rates

From 2002/03	First 10,000 business miles in the tax year	Each business mile over 10,000 in the tax year
Cars and vans	40p	25p
Motor cycles	24p	24p
Bicycles	20p	20p

How about giving cyclists the same rate as car drivers?

I understand it costs more to run a car - I have on of those too. But if we really want people to do more exercise and reduce their carbon emissions surely we need to be offering better incentives.

Of course the great news is that if you cycle more than 10,000 miles in a year, the rate stays the same. Hooray!

In 2005 my Dad walked up Mount Kilimanjaro. Here’s a spectacular picture he took from the summit.

It’s difficult to get a true sense of scale. And having watched An Inconvenient Truth, it’s a moment in time that may never be recaptured.

The nutshell: buying rail tickets online still isn’t very joined up.

TTL: “Thank you for calling thetrainline.com how can I help?”

Me: “Hello, I accidentally managed to book myself two tickets using the website. Can you tell me how I can cancel one of them please?”

[brief exchange of reference numbers and identification information]

TTL: “Hello Mr Price. There will be a £10 charge for cancelling your ticket, because you booked two ticket.

Me: “But I only wanted one ticket, but the website let me buy two. There was no confirmation message or email, so I assumed the transaction hadn’t been completed. So I clicked the “Buy ticket” button again because it hadn’t worked the first time…”

TTL: “If you want to cancel one of your tickets there is a £10 charge.”

Me: “That’s not good enough.”

I’m not a frequent train traveller, and have rarely used online booking for my tickets, unlike flying where I can’t remember the last time I didn’t use a website to book.

That’s not to say I don’t use the online timetables to check journey details, it’s just the buying I leave to the last minute at the ticket office or self-service machines at the railway station.

So the other day I needed to check out journey details for a journey from a small station in Yorkshire to London returning a couple of days later. My incentive for checking was not only to know what my journey options were, but also the potential of an advance booking discount.

Imagine how stupid I felt when I managed to accidentally buy two tickets for myself because the website let me click the “Submit” button twice! I can’t believe a site as high-profile as thetrainline.com still hasn’t cracked this.

My train to Leeds left five minutes early from Long Preston station a couple of weeks ago.

I was lucky, I turned up ten minutes early, so had a five minute wait.

But it must have really annoyed the rail replacement service passengers who were delivered by bus two minutes later thinking they had three minutes to spare.

Thank goodness my family had seen me off on foot were able to let them know so the bus driver could whisk them off to meet the train at Skipton.

Long Preston station has no attendant and no clocks.

When I asked the guard what time we were supposed to have left Long Preston he freely admitted we’d left early. He told me how they get a lot of complaints for running behind time.

I said they’d get a lot more complaints if all the trains were early than if they were late.

…after a great family holiday to the Adriatic coast in northern Italy, including a boat trip to Burano (the island famous for its lace) and Venice

Sign on train today…

Just wondering… what constitutes using a mobile phone these days?

I read the news on mine today quite happily (and quietly). If I’d read it to someone else would I have been arrested?