Oh, Lord, Stuck in Hinckley Again

(with apologies to John Fogerty)

Right: Hinckley and environs

After a lovely Thursday evening out with Michael Perez, formerly virtual mate from NLP Connections, I spent Friday with Kate van Loon (also formerly virtual), the world's sparkliest master change-maker. I arrived back at my room to an email from the folks at Salad, asking me if I could come up to Hinckley the following day to assist on a two-day course. My immediate guess was that all the other candidates for assistant had been run over by busses, and I've gotta admit I was grateful for that.

There were no trains running early enough to get me there in time for the start of the morning session, but Elsted House had a room left for both nights, so two hours later I was on my way to St Pancras International, bound for darkest Leicestershire.

I do not claim that Hinckley is less than an absolutely charming place to be, nor could I; my knowledge begins with the rail station and ends with the Hinckley Island Hotel, a conference center inexplicably plunked down miles from the nearest traces of civilization. Somewhere in the middle is a very nice B&B, and a Texaco station where one can buy egg and cress sandwiches. Check back with me in August for the number of egg and cress sandwiches I've consumed in my room in Hinckley. You'll be amazed. I'm amazed that convenience stores run by Hindus don't carry a greater variety of vegetarian food, but maybe that's just me.

The course was brilliant, I met and re-met wonderful people, I got to direct the testimonial videos at the end, which reminded me of my old Public TV days, and unlike the previous weekend, I wasn't actually stuck somewhere trains weren't running, did not stand out in the cold for hours on end, missed no busses, and did not have to spend the night in a Best Western in Leicester. What more could one ask?

Now I'm taking a day off from trains and training, but tomorrow it's back on the rails. Yes, Hinckley beckons me again for a further eight days of getting my brain tinkered with. Ros, my landlady at Elsted House, wonders why I don't just move in.

I've considered it.

There's No Place Like... Hinckley?

Right: Ted comes with the room

Yes, dear ones, tonight's post is coming to you direct from Hinckley. Hinckley, Leicestershire, that is - former hosiery capital of England, gateway to Rugby and Nuneaton. I've landed here for my next round of NLP training with the nice folks at Salad, Ltd. I'm staying in Elsted House, a nice little B&B that furnishes each guest room with its own Teddy Bear. How English is that? Earlier a man walked by outside with a bulldog. I'm pretty sure they hired him to impress the Yank tourists. We're easy.

I've been here before, actually, for the British National Science Fiction Convention (Eastercon) a few years back, but then I only saw the rail station, the hotel, and the inside of a taxi. This trip I've already been up to the Texaco station for an Egg & Cress sandwich, and in Hinckley, my friends, it doesn't really get any better than that.

So now the window is dark, I'm sleepy, and I'm about to tuck myself between those cool white sheets, hug my furry roommate to my chest, and drift away. More tourism excitement as it happens. Don't touch that dial!

“Terminal” is one word for it…

Right: London Heathrow Terminal Five: the Great White Despair

It’s big, it’s beautiful in a super-mega-industrial sort of way, and it was supposed to be the answer to British Airways passenger prayers for wide-open spaces, shorter queuing times, and the latest in fully-automated baggage-handling. What it’s turned into, however, is a £4.3 billion homeless shelter, currently crowded with passengers sleeping on departure lounge benches and waiting on the tarmac in excess of four hours inside planes that never take off.

Twenty-eight thousand suitcases went walkabout when the baggage system crashed almost immediately after the terminal’s royal launch on 27 March, and at least five thousand of them have never returned home. And baggage continues to be a major issue (not that that’s exactly a news flash to BA). Because the system required almost no-one to operate it, there was almost no-one trained to take up the slack when things went south.

Hundreds of flights have been cancelled, and as of yesterday British Airways was out £85 million in compensation, including the cost of renting up every hotel room and room for rent they could get their hands on for stranded passengers. And there’s no end in sight.

As for me, I have both my suitcase and a roof over my head (albeit in Brentford for the time being), more than many recent London travellers can claim. On my way to Heathrow last week, thankfully to the shamefully outdated Terminal 4 where the baggage carousels actually have baggage on them, my fellow passengers and myself were offered travel vouchers for filling out complaint forms about malfunctioning onboard entertainment. I don’t expect to see my voucher anytime soon, especially if BA have automated their complaint system.

Isn’t it so?

New directions – good until 1 October 2008:

21 Charleville Road
London
W14 9JJ
UK

I left Seattle on Tuesday 1 April with my usual mixture of sadness and exhiliration and other more complex emotional ingredients. The proposed 2008 trip to London had become somewhat less nervewracking when I’d heard from Ana, my landlady from the Charleville Road house, that she’d rent me a room in her family home while I sorted out permanent digs. I hadn’t wanted to spend nearly £300 on a hotel for 5 days and hope I could round up a place to live in that time after shelling out another £80 in letting agent’s fees. And given the general snafu that is Heathrow Terminal 5 these days, hotel rooms are next to impossible to get anyhow, because the airlines are buying them up for the passengers they’ve stranded, sans luggage, sans destination, sans everything, to paraphrase Master Jaques (and Master Shakespeare). Flights cancelled today: 32. Pieces of luggage vanished into the aether since the baggage system crashed: 29,000 and counting. Heads will roll.

I got in a bit before noon (to Terminal 4, thankfully) on the 2nd after a perfectly nice flight, and spent a whole 30 seconds in Passport Control. That’s roughly 1/720th of the time it took last year just to be allowed entry into the country. Given that experience I had come prepared with emails from the training company, course schedules, and a return ticket printout. I needed none of it. Then my luggage miraculously appeared on the carousel within two minutes of exiting customs, and two minutes after that I was in a taxi headed for Brentford. “That’s how I want the rest of it to go,” I told myself – “Just like that: Effortless.”

When I got to the house in Boston Manor Ana told me that two days ago a tenant in the Charleville Road house gave notice unexpectedly, so I’ll have a permanent room there on the 13th for the duration. As Ana says, “Isn’t it so that you plan for something and it doesn’t happen like you plan it, but it happens better than you planned it?” I couldn’t agree more.