Keep access points clear

This is just a polite request to all the people that find it necessary to:

1. stand in the middle of doorways while they are waiting for someone,
2. stand at the tube/train entrance while they fumble for their ticket/oyster card,
3. stop and talk at an entrance/exit,
4. park a buggy/shopping cart/piece of luggage near an entrance/exit, and
5. step off and stop by the end of an escalator to figure out what to do next,

to not do those things because they cause delays, are potentially dangerous, and are very annoying, particularly in the morning when people are in a rush to get to work.

Sleepy heads

Travelling makes me sleepy. Perhaps its the rocking of the vehicle, perhaps its the boredom. I don't think I'm alone. You can almost always find one person in the tube carriage that's dozing off. The two people sitting in front of me this afternoon did make me smile though.

They were a couple. The lady caught my eye as she had bright pink fingerless gloves on. It wasn't a particularly cold day and they were very bright pink wooly gloves. They were sitting next to each other and holding hands- they both held both of each other's hands- as they chatted to each other. It was quite sweet and I glanced at them a few times over my book during the journey because it was a cheerful thing to see. On one of these occasions I noticed they had stopped talking and had actually both fallen asleep with their heads stuck together, as if they had fallen asleep while leaning towards each other for a kiss, hands still locked. That was quite sweet, too. I continued reading and a short while later, noticed that they had woken up and were chatting again, hands still together. And a little after that they were asleep again- heads together, hands together.

They got off at Whitechapel; they did each release one of the other person's hand as they walked off the tube.

When in Rome

One of my friends once said that she is always on her best behaviour when she is abroad as she is aware that she is a representative of her country while she is visiting someone else's. She thought it may be tempting for the locals to think that any ill behaviour on her part may be typical of her people and she did not want that. I thought that was a bit over the top and that essentially being oneself is one way of letting other people find out about your own customs, as long as you don't try to impose those customs on other people. I have the freedom to express my opinion but don't expect them to be accepted all the time and have no intention of forcing them on anyone. A lot of the times conflicts arise, at home and abroad, when people do not respect the right of other people to their own customs and try to make someone else accept their way as the 'right' way.

Recently at the airport, on the way back from a ski trip in Italy, an incident occurred that made me think about this a bit more. We were in the queue at the check-in desk, waiting for our turn. The airport is small and there wasn't enough space to accomodate the long queues that had formed on that particular morning, most of them consisting of British skiiers returning home from a ski trip. This caused some confusion for people who wanted to join a queue as they couldn't really find the end of one for the crowd. And then the first argument happened.

A family of three tried to join our queue and found they couldn't stay at the end of the line for long as people needed to move round the airport and kept asking to be excused through. So the family moved to a point slightly away from the queue, rather more next to the queue than in it, and then the man in front of us (we were about half way up the queue for our counter) shouted at them, 'The end of the queue is over there, not where you are.' The older gentleman in the group replied in an Italian accent that he knew where the end of the queue was but they needed to move somewhere else to let people through. The man in front of us laughed drily and said he didn't believe him, he's Italian, isn't he? Why he's trying to jump the queue!

The young girl in the group replied, in English with a Birmingham accent, that he was being rude and that actually they were British. The man in front of us turned away from them as she continued to scream abuse at him, whilst the young man in the group tried to calm her down. Eventually they realised they had joined the wrong queue anyway and moved away. In front of us, people kept cutting across the queue as they were trying to get to their check-in desks. This annoyed the man in front of us as well and he kept making comments at people who were pushing through. These were all British and apologised for what they were doing but he accused them of not meaning the apology. At some point the man in front of us turned round and made a comment to the man behind us about being proud to be British whenever he goes abroad. The man behind us replied that it was almost enough to make him vote BNP.

Two other incidents between then and our boarding the plane all had a similar theme: the passengers were lucky, and proud, to be British because things were so much better at home.

The incidents left me thoughtful. Although I don't think that the people I met were representative of all Brits, my view was that these people were hypocrites. They made a conscious decision to visit a foreign country to enjoy the skiing on offer there and yet have no respect for the local people. Although the incident was really a rather big misunderstanding, the underlying message was that the Brits knew better than the locals. Why should the Italians conform to British standards? When in Rome, do as the Romans do. I cannot help but wonder if the imperialist attitude has not quite gone away even though the Empire does not exist any more. Maybe my friend was right after all and that it is prudent to be cautious about one's behaviour while abroad.

Chair lifts and skis

I love skiing. I even love the clomping about in ski boots and carrying skis- all that is actually contributing to the self-sufficiency of skiing, whatever little self-sufficiency most skiers have.

Skiing can be an efficient way to travel in the snow but for the most part it is possibly one of the strangest past-time: you take a lift up to the top of a mountain and then you ski down the mountain as quickly and in as stylish a manner as you can, and then you do it all over again. It is great exercise in great locations, where the air is fresh and the views fantastic, but it is perhaps not the greenest sport.

I often find chair-lifts stressful. You might find yourself sharing one with someone that has different ideas to what you want. Do you keep the wind shield up or down? What do I do if my ski poles are trapped in between my leg and the safety bar? Do you talk or not talk? When do you lift the bar up and prepare to get off? Where is s/he turning when s/he gets off the chair-lift? What about ski poles? Will s/he stab me by accident or plant the post on the ground so that I will trip over it when I try to ski off? Is there any danger of a pile up?

After all that you need the sense of freedom of skiing away down hill to make up for the chairlift experience.