The smart way to get from AKL to WLG

I hate public transport. It is what other people should do. My recent three weeks in London being a commuter have only reinforced this position. Overpowered motor cars are the way to go and bugger the expense and the planet.

However one has to go through life with a measure of pragmatism and when just over a year ago my employment changed a tad and I had to work two days a week 400 miles from Obald acres even I had to accept that using the twin turbo charged V6 diesel was not going to work. Bus and train (and ferry I would think) are out of the question and so I found myself looking at a weekly airline commute.

I like aeroplanes and I like airports so we must put some strategies in place so that this affection does not turn into hatred. If I am to be a regular plane user I have to do it right and over the last year I have honed the recipe to perfection.

How to fly from Auckland to Wellington and back - cooking time about three hours

Ingredients:

One aeroplane Airbus A320 preferred, Boeing 737-300 acceptable

Internet connection

Air New Zealand Airpoints membership

Tutto cabin bag

iPhone

One motor car Jaguar is the best brand here.

Lounge Membership Initially Koru Club required, as you progress this is no longer necessary and vaporises

Taxi card These can be found in the terms of employment; if not then complain

Large vat of Jetstar repellant

Spare vat of Jetstar repellant You can't be too careful

Method:

Make sure that bookings are made well in advance by whoever does this for you. This is to ensure that the next step has a good chance of success. Under no circumstances perform step one yourself as you will stuff it up; this is dangerous work best left to the experts. Next check that the itinerary has no mention of Jetstar. Anywhere. The slightest hint of Jetstar anywhere in this recipe will mean that the whole thing will not work. You will end up in the airport where you start from, you will miss meetings, you will be angry and you will have to buy coffee with money.

Next use your internet connection and Airpoints Membership and mix well together. Find your flight bookings and select your seat. This only works well if you have followed the instructions in the first step to the letter and in particular have paid attention to the timings. If your booking wallah leaves it too late you will end up in 13B. This ruins the whole dish. There are only about eight seats on the plane that will work. Any seat with a number greater than 2 is not acceptable. 1D is probably the best seat on the plane but 1F is good. 1A, 1B and 1C have their own special charm on the A320 (more of this later) but do not exist on the 737-300. 2A and 2C are good here; 1E and 2B are also acceptable.

Whilst you are still connected to the interweb you need to book the car parking for the Jaguar. Air New Zealand parking is the way to go and don't bother with the facilty at the Terminal; the Freight Place/shuttle bus is fine and half the price.

Pack your bag. I was put onto the Tutto cabin bag by a colleague and have only had mine for three weeks. Bloody marvelous but with the downside that you have to send your daughter to New York to get one and I will not deny that this puts the price up a tad. Used to have a Delsey prior to the new acquisition which I thought was good but the Tutto makes it look and perform like a steamer trunk.

Leave home. Now this may seem obvious but there is more to it than meets the eye. I live on the other side of Auckland from the Airport and therefore the Auckland traffic can ruin the dish. The answer is to leave absurdly early and get to 3 Freight PLace before the rest of Auckland have tumbled what you are up to. Time arrival at 3 Freight Place for just after 0600 so that the shuttle gets you to the Domestic Terminal after Roy, the oddly named female Koru Lounge barista, has started work.

Now take the iPhone you have prepared earlier. This you do by downloading the Air New Zealand App mPass and loading all your flights up.There is a caveat here as the most recent version of the App doesn't work as it doesn't generate the barcodes you will be needing in a moment. Try and get the first version. Walk up to the Koru Lounge, swipe the iPhone barcode on the barcode swiper bizzo and you are ushered in to the next most important part of this recipe after avoiding Jetstar at all costs.

The Koru Lounge is the key to all this. No milling round with the great unwashed queueing up for McDonalds for you. No its three black doris plums and a bowel of yogurt, a cup or two of double shot long black and as much free wifi as you can eat. Even the necessity of paying for Koru Club membership disappears after a while as you inexorably gain enough Airpoints to gain Gold and then Gold Elite status. Sit there with a healthy breakfast (or one designed to send you to an early coronary grave if you so desire) and read the paper, do some work, watch the world go by or write your blog. I love Koru Lounges and have now been to every one in New Zealand and they deserve and will get a post to themselves.

Flight time and you use what is left of the previously prepared iPhone to get a boarding pass; ensure you do this in the first wave of boarders. If you don't the overhead locker above rows 1 and 2 will be full and the Tutto will have to go in the next locker back - a dreadful inconvenience as I'm sure you'll agree. If you have seat 1A, 1B or 1C on the A320 there is an extra treat in store. There are no video screens in front of these seats (meaning you unfortunately miss the inflight Trivia Quiz) and so you can't watch the Richard Simmons aerobics. For safety reasons (see last post) you have to have the the safety spiel so a hostie sits in front of you and does a private show (not that, you with open sewers for minds) for just the three of you. This is even more amusing if you can persuade her to do the dance - they all know it off by heart. All you have to do now is sit back and go to Wellington.

At the other end if you are not first off the plane you are not paying attention. Use the taxi card and go to work; fresh as a daisy and in a ripper of a good mood. Coming back is much the same but remember to get your loyalty card at AirNew Zealand parking punched with the little aeroplane cut out so that they will wash your Jaguar for you for nothing every nine weeks.

Remember the key points; the Koru Lounge and no Jetstar. Got it? NO Jetstar. Nothing, nix, nada, zero, not a trace, not a mention. It is a poisonous company that has every bit earned its evil reputation and will leave you where you don't want to be, grumpy, late for everything and scarred for life. Ignore this piece of advice at your peril.

There is no reason not to travel like this - all you need is a little planning. I have got to the state where public transport moulded to my liking is a real pleasure. You still won't catch me on a bus though - they don't have 600nm of torque at 1500rpm

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North of some border or other

I don't think I've been to Scotland for about thirty years. I think I tried to go there with Mrs O for a scenic tour prior to our leaving for the Far East but found the entire country missing in action. This would have been in the Fiat X-19 era and there was a cloud base at about 500ft and that was all we saw for a week. Cloud.

At least of couple of days in the middle of a cloud would be preferable to remaining in what is fast becoming my least favourite place on the planet. Down to the London City Airport. I didn't know there even was one. Caters for planes up to about thirty seaters and is really quite good. All the usual shoes and belt off nonsense (and this to go to that well known prime strategic target, Dundee) but I have got past worrying about that. It ain't going to go away until the rest of the world tells the Obama Messiah to piss off and if you try and get shirty with the wielders of the Semtex sniffer sticks life just gets worse. Just smile and wave.

The trip north had a governance I still cannot work out. The ticket was Air France, the in flight magazine was from City Jet and the flight attendant of the required ambivalent sexual orientation was kitted out in ScotAir livery. Presumably all three were clipping the ticket along the way to ensure the fare was of a suitably eye watering magnitude. Froggy peanuts with the Froggy OJ as you fly over Wolverhampton; this is Britain Jim but not as we know it.

I reckon Scotland is OK. There for two days and never saw the sun once. Scotland at the end of October; had it been any other way I would have asked for my money back. Never saw a single funny bank note, had no trouble holding long, complex technical conversations with proper Scotsmen speaking proper Scotsmen talk and I didn't have to eat haggis. All good. Had a couple of very agreeable train rides from Dundee to Edinburgh and back encompassing two of the more famous rail bridges in Britain. There wasn't anybody painting the Forth Bridge so that's one myth down the dunny and it was a bit spooky looking to the side of the Tay Bridge to see the pilings of the bridge that fell into the drink with a train on it in eighteen fifty something still in place. There really are a disproportionate number of gingas in Scotland. Edinburgh has more pubs than I would have thought it possible to fit into one city. It would appear that the reputation of the Scots as having the diet from hell is justified. Chip shops for Africa and I saw more than one eatery advertising fried Mars bars. Not only do they sell them, they advertise the fact. I must confess that I was tempted along the same lines that one is tempted just for a moment to put your hand on a cooking element just to make sure it is hot. I wonder if you can eat a fried Mars bar at lunchtime (is there a right time of day to eat them?) and still be alive to tell the tale in the evening.

All this agreeable greyness has to end and one must return to the centre of Hell for the weekend to prepare for week two. This would b a trip to the airport, then. Dundee airport is an excellent illustration of where the Obama Messiah's nonsense has taken the rest of the world on the air travel security front. The airport would get half a dozen thirty seater planes through it a day, tops. The effort we flew back to London had eleven punters on it. We got one member of airport security staff each. A set up identical to Heathrow Terminal 3 complete with hi-viz jockstraps and socks for all, scanners the size of small trucks and the belts and shoes off crap. To be fair they did it with a much greater level of user friendliness than you get in most airports but they didn't need to do it at all. The thirteen year old Unaccompanied Minor reading Black Beauty and listening to Robbie Williams on her iPod is just the sort of passenger the free world has to be protected from.

This bit pains me enormously. I got from Dundee airport to a cup of tea in a South West London kitchen in a tad over three hours. I am supposed to hate public transport. A useless idea that stops me getting from A to B in an Aston Martin. However even I admit I couldn't do that in a DB9.

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Rush Hour

I was born in London and spent the first twenty two years of my life in the south west suburbs of same or actually living in the middle. I loved it. I thought London was the centre of the universe and wogs started at Dover. But why would you even go as far as Dover; everything you needed or could possibly want was in London. Through the rose coloured lenses of the retrospectoscope the worst person you could ever meet was Arthur Daly and the few foreigners in the place were either conductors on buses, ran curry shops or visited from the exotic West Indies to show us how absurdly and effortlessly good they were at cricket. They would, of course, drop off a box of bananas at Henry Cooper's greengrocers shop on the way to the Oval to score a ton before lunch in the process of giving Surrey a right good seeing to.

Dad went to work 'in town' using his season ticket on the Southern Railway from Motspur Park. Although I didn't know it at the time, this was commuting. I have never commuted in my life and, after the last couple of days doing a spot of it in order to go to work 'in town', hereby resolve I never will.

Commuting should be classified as cruel and unnatural punishment right up there with the Iron Maiden and waterboarding. It is almost unbelievably unpleasant. For starters it occurs in London and its south west suburbs. Those elysian fields of my youth have been transformed into the lands on the far bank of the Styx. Either that or my perception of same has changed. I strongly suspect it is a combination of the two. You cannot spend thirty years living in much more pleasant places than the location of your birth and remained unchanged but, that notwithstanding, I am sure London is now a totally uninhabitable dump. Visiting there is bad enough (OK the shopping is better than the Albany MagaCentre) but living there? Forget it.

Where to start? People is a good place to start - and, probably, end. There are just plain too many of them. Why is this? Thirty years of wholesale bonking has not produced the absurd number of people now swarming all over the capital. Keeping one's ears even a little in non painted on mode you will soon discern that most of the denizens of London started their existence from beyond the aforementioned Dover. Spotting Arthur Daly or his progeny would be no mean feat. London has been taken over by foreigners. What do they all do? Well, they are not bus conductors as that species went the way of the moa many years ago. London has not been overtaken by biblical plagues of Test cricketers either. Sure, they run curry shops, and kebab stands and Thai restaurants and corner shops and those roadside stalls in Oxford Street selling unadulterated crap and have bought out Henry Cooper on the greengrocer front. But mostly, if the TV news is to be believed, they spend the day stabbing each other. There is a lot of stabbing in London; not very nice.

OK, there are too many people and most are of the foreign persuasion, what else? Coming here at the end of October and early November paints a suitably wet and grey backdrop to make the infrastructure look at its worst. Even in the 1970's you wouldn't really need a car in central London as the public transport service was pretty bloody good. In the middle this was mainly the Tube (never have been one for buses since they got rid of the conductors with those aluminium ticket machines containing micro loo rolls) which I used and quite liked. Whether you wanted to take a car into Central London or not now doesn't really matter as effectively you can't. Regulations and volume stopped all that nonsense years ago. It would cost you the GDP of a small country to take the Veyron down the Marylebone Road and then you couldn't stop as parking it would cost you the National Debt of your neighboring state. You are forced onto public transport.

Do this, as I did for the last two days, at 0745 and, look ma, I'm a commuter. The Tube now looks as old as it is. The walls of the labyrinthine subterranean walkways connecting the Bakerloo to the Central to the Northern look every bit the eighty years or so old they are. That is if you can see them past the gaggle of Lithuanian knifeists jostling up to you on all sides. You are thrust into this hell hole through automatic gates guarded by wearers of the universal Hi Vis jacket using your Oyster along with millions of your fellow lemmings. It is hideous. Down the ancient escalators into the bowels of the earth to await a seventy year old train into which you wedge your self with a carriage full of Moroccans who almost certainly have carving knives secreted about their person. Bloody announcements to not leave your bags unattended or your knives will be taken away to be blown up and reminders that CCTV is operational in all carriages. The entire carriage is either watching reruns of Eastenders on the iPod Touch or reading the Metro freebie newspaper; or both. Let me out of this hell.

Well, they do at Great Portland Street. And it is raining. And there is a bitter Nor'easter and I want to go home. But I have five hours of meetings and these take place in a basement room with no bloody windows. I really want to go home. At least the meeting was fruitful, I suppose. Get through the day's work, and make no mistake that is what it was, and back into the wind and rain for the evening commute.

More of the same. Mind the Gap, Latvian footpads and Angry Birds whilst incarcerated in a piece of nineteenth century technology for an hour. And then there is a two mile walk in the rain as the sun sinks over a slate grey horizon. This is not living but nearly ten million people would argue otherwise.

I'm flying to Dundee this evening with Air France which is a bit of a worry - wogs start at Dover, remember. I am reliably informed that Dundee is in Scotland so the next missive will be from a totally different place. If they don't accept English bank notes I will be severely pissed off.

It can't be worse than bloody London surely.

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Pointless

The Gold Coast; its pointless.

Sitting in the Koru Lounge in Brisbane at 0657 awaiting the tin budgie to take me back to Godzone. 0657 you would think would just about be the start of the day but in Queensland they don't have about a fortnight of daylight saving so the sun has been up since about 4 am. Why? Not a clue; well I know why the sun came up, that's what it does, but I have no idea why they want it peeking over the horizon so bloody early in the day. Wasn't it something about the curtains fading? And then it's dark by 6.30 in the evening. Bonkers.

Anyway my travails in Queensland took me to the Gold Coast for the day yesterday. Took the Hertzmobile and cunningly avoided the Toll Roads down to Surfers Paradise and Broadbeach. This not because I'm a tight wad but because paying a toll from a rental car is just too bloody hard. No toll booths and the only methods are by using a 0800 number or some arcane website. Far too difficult for a simple artisan; go by the goat track through central Brisbane instead. After that getting to the Gold Coast is easy peasy.

But why would you bother? My business was in Broadbeach but I dutifully made the side trip to Surfers just to get the full Gold Coast experience. I have never seen such a collection of nonsense. Hundreds (literally) of crappy high rise apartments fronting an admittedly good surf beach. Coffee shops and bars for Africa. Even more hairdressers and surf shops. Even more real estate agents trying to flog the unwary any number of identical crappy apartments. And presumably even more tattoo parlours. I felt positively unique in walking around with un-inked skin. Perfectly acceptable members of both chromosomal make up groups seemed unable to go anywhere without showing how they have wrecked their appearance for life by displaying a revolting array of body 'art' peeking (leaping more like) from beneath the board shorts and vest. Yuck, yuck, yuck.

I was in Blackpool in the UK about a year ago and Surfers Paradise is exactly the same. Granted I would swap the Pacific for the Irish Sea but the concept behind both conglomerations is identical. Find an acceptable piece of coastline and then ruin it over decades with the town planning from hell just to turn a buck. Very sad.

The Gold Coast is pointless and I won't be going back unless I have to. I certainly won't go there spending any of my own money. Hundreds of thousands do though. They have my sympathy.

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Well, what's all this then?

First post on this blog for about six months. The first scribblings are dated 2006. A year of a post every other day, a bit less the next year, even less to follow that and then it all stopped in April this year.

I have written before that I don't need a reason for this. I write here when I feel like it for my own amusement. I am the sort of a cove whose interests vary as time go along. Blogging was getting boring. It all started as a commentary on New Zealand's apology for a leading newspaper. This was a thinly veiled excuse to provide a vehicle for me to vent my spleen on the then sitting Labour Government. I don't do hatred - it is bad for my mental well being - but Clark and Cullen are the nearest I get to hating anything. They are truly the nauseating embodiment of a philosophy I cannot abide. A philosophy built on envy, lack of principal and, in those two wastrels, a lust for power at any price. Fighting for equal rights for the ordinary New Zealander? Yeah right; I did not come down with the last shower of rain - and it is raining now. As is typical of despotic powerful leaders they departed leaving absolutely nothing to fill the void. You don't encourage a strong succession stream; construct a vacuum behind you. There is nothing in a vacuum, especially a threat to one's power, as the Goof and Co. amply illustrate. That very simple principle is in the first lecture of Despot 101. But I'm in a good mood and they are long gone; no point in getting myself nasally dislocated for no reason.

I also stopped penning bits and pieces as I had (still have) a change in employment circumstances which make it prudent for me to be a little circumspect as to what I put into the public domain. I am not a scaredy cat but, to extend the feline analogy, I see no point in pulling the tiger's whiskers. So there will be nothing from me about the entirely delightful demise of that useless wretch, Chris Carter. Oops, there I go I've called him a useless wretch. I can't get into too much strife telling the truth, can I? I see I called him as a waste of space in 2006; what a prescient beast I am. No comment from here on the shameful way in which the only reason to watch Breakfast TV in a Wellington hotel once a week was given the bum's rush. No comment here lambasting those who see offence in telling the truth. No, none of that.

This blog will undergo a phoenix like, and maybe ephemeral, rise from the ashes for about a month - for starters. Reason? I'm off on me travels again and the most pleasure I've got from this blog over the years has been chronicling my overseas trips. These have usually been fairly short forays to septic land to attend conferences. It has amused to jot down musings concerning America (which I think I dislike) and the denizens of big airports and aeroplanes (both of which I like enormously).

Tomorrow at seriously dark o'clock (0320) I will drive the Jag out of Obald Acres to catch the tin budgie to Brisbane. To follow will be the best part of a month away from home with the most western port of call being Dublin. I am giving the land of Uncle Sam the swerve and most of the time will be in the UK. This whole extravaganza is not a jaunt, I can assure you, but definitely in the putting food on the table department. I travel with some very cool transcription software for the iPhone and MacBook Pro a myriad of reports to write. I travel with what passes as a brain in sponge mode during the daylight hours and analytical mode after dark and in those seemingly unending hours spent in a pressurised tube over unpronounceable parts of the globe.

I travel with a sense of foreboding at the magnitude of the piece of work in front of me. There are a few bright spots on the horizon. The tingling anticipation as to which sectors my upgrade request will be fulfilled. Wet'n'Wild on the Gold Coast (if they haven't got one I want my money back), watching the AB's dick England on a mate's telly in Cirencester. But mainly I am a little apprehensive as to whether I can make a good fist of the huge task that lies before me.

A few minutes a few times a week taking the piss out of fat ladies, stupid regulations, too many people, security cameras, Uncle Tm Cobly and all won't go amiss.

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Butterworth

On the last leg home now and I’m very glad to be so doing. Been away for three and a half weeks and that is quite enough holiday. I’ve heaps to do at home. There’s all that grass to be cut enabling me to help wreck the planet burning gallons of diesel. And four stroke. And two stroke. Bliss. I’ve got to learn how to mill using a lathe. There’s Snow Leopard to get trained and I even am not facing the prospect of work on Monday with dread. Looking forward to it is not really quite on the money, but it is close.

Am I looking forward to returning to the Land of the Long White We Don’t Quite Get It Right? Hell, yes. I hear that Sue Bradford has been burnt at the stake in my absence as befits one of her ilk, so what possible reason could there be for not going home. I also see that the now not so new gummint had a rush of commonsense and got rid of the sub-clause in the new cell phone regulations that precluded using your iPhone in the car as an iPod or turn-by-turn navigation aid, so it is getting better all the time.

My conclusions after a couple of weeks in the UK was that it qualified for about five out of ten, so what of Malaysia? Scores much higher I think. They have blisteringly fast broadband for openers.

If SIngapore is Asia for beginners then Butterworth, Malaysia, is the real deal. This is not the land of the Lexus or gold chromed Mercedes. This is the working man’s Asia. He gets around in a pair of 50c jandals, a Honda 50cc motorbike bought from Boon Siew if he’s sold enough noodles that week or a Proton Wira if he is relay on the up. This is the Asia that never stops because everyone is working so bloody hard as they have to. To stop is to starve because there is no bloody benefit to fall back on. You stop working if you are seriously old and who looks after you then? The State? Of course not. Your children do just as you looked after them when they couldn't do it for themselves.

This is the Asia of superb food. Food that is as cheap as chips but never is chips. Sure there are McDonald's, BurgerKing and KFC and other rubbish but why would you eat such crap when you can buy a plate of char koay teow for NZ$1.20? Why gorge yourself on a Party Bucket of fried oestrogen riddled chook when you can splash out on more Black Pepper Crab than you can eat for NZ$5? I would be perfectly happy eating asian food from standard Malaysian restaurants, coffee shops or food centres for the rest of my days.

And these roadside vendors wouldn’t pass a single OSH type regulation you put one in front of them. I reckon half of them wouldn’t be able to read any OSH type regulation you put in front of them. Does this matter? Do droves of their their customers get sick because they haven’t been to a food safety class? Do they buggery. Are there mass outbreaks of diarrhoea and vomiting in the kampongs because they wash their ten year old plastic plates in a bowl of cold water containing no detergent at the side of the road? I don’t think so. Does their custom drop away because their service is in general atrocious by the standards of western restaurants? Do people stay away in droves because the stalls have no Maitre D and the waiters are barefoot and wear threadbare T shirts? I’ll let you work it out for yourselves.

Just dining in a Malaysian foodstall gives you more than a hint as to why all the safety bollocks and regulations in general that surround so much of our life in the ‘civilised’ West is just so wrong. Make up a whole load of useless regulations and then employ armies of brainless state Jobsworths to police them and you are asking to have the whole lot ignored. Sensible pragmatic people, like Mr Ordinary Denizen of Butterworth, does just that. Sheeple the likes of who inhabit Britain, New Zealand and other developed countries seem to regard it as a mark of their progress that they follow all this stuff to the letter.

If Mr Butterworth wants to build an extension on his house, he does. He doesn’t bother with resource consent or permission from any council, he just employs some builder type bloke and gets on with it. Builder type bloke will not be certified in anything (let alone building stuff). The extension will likely look disgusting and appear as if it was designed by a nine year old with a Lego set (because it probably was) but it mainly won’t fall down. The extra electricity it needs that has been nicked from his neighbour with a pair of jumper leads will flow as well as the official stuff - mostly. During the construction of said building works no worker will wear either a safety helmet or a bloody fluoro jacket (I haven’t seen one of these horrors for nearly a week). All chippies will likely be shod in a pair of jandals and there will be no safety notices on the wire fences around the construction site; fences that won’t be there anyway because they are a useless bureaucratic nonsense. And no one will die. If the house owner is dissatisfied with the work carried out he doesn’t go to a ‘Board’ to lodge a complaint. He just doesn’t pay the builder bloke. Or thumps him. Or both. A much better way of sorting things out.

There are other bits of the West that Mr Butterworth is just ignoring. In their attempt to ape the big countries (spare me) there are gummint run campaigns extolling the virtues of being green and reducing your ‘carbon footprint’. Now just think about this. This a place where they are trying to stop supermarkets giving out plastic bags to save the environment and over the road the local motosikal repairman is pouring his waste oil into the storm drains. This is the country that has probably razed more natural forest in order to plant palm oil than any other country on the planet.

And they are trying to do the safety thing. Recently a law was passed insisting that back seat passengers in a car must wear seat belts. Same country where half the old Bedford trucks on the road have no doors - or seat belts. I think you are supposed to wear a helmet when riding a motorcycle. Some do, some don’t. No one seems to care. And I don’t think it is quite written into the motorcycling bit of the Statute Book that you are allowed to have three or four people on said form of motorized transport.

If you have laws you must police them. Pretty basic stuff. All Police cars have stickers on the back saying in four languages ‘Don’t Bribe Me’. But Mr Pragmatic of Butterworth has a way around this as well; as usual he ignorers it. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not coming out in favour of wholesale bribery and corruption (and I’m aware of some pretty staggering stuff that occurred in this part of the world not that long ago - the protagonist came to a very sticky and permanent end)) but a pragmatic $10 at the side of the road does it for me when the alternative is $170 and thirty demerit points. I’d even go for a stern talking to.

The West never used to be like like the crap society I saw in Britain ten days ago. It wasn’t like that even when I left thirty years ago. Please don’t let real Asia go down the same path. Their way works. It may not be ‘right’ according to our sanitized view of what is right but millions think it is OK. I find it gratifying that there are still people in the world who don’t run off to a complaints tribunal if their builder stuffs up; they just kick the snot out of him.

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United Kingdom? No thanks

Well we are now well out of Britain and sitting in the steaming heat of Penang. To be precise I’m sitting in air conditioning with the added boost of a ceiling fan until I can get the relative humidity down below 80%. The heat I can stand but the humidity is really the killer. I can’t imagine how I lived in this part of the world for so many years. But more of South East Asia later. I’ve had time to have a think about the longest continual time I’ve spent in London since finally leaving there in 1982.

I could no more go back to live in the United Kingdom than live on Venus. There are now sixty one million people in Britain and I reckon about half of them are on the M6 on a Friday afternoon. There eight lanes of motorway around Manchester and they still have gridlock for no apparent reason other than there are too many bloody cars on the road. And we won’t even start on the world’s largest car park the M25. We were planning avoiding this transport armageddon whilst still two hundred miles from it on our trip back to London. The fact that there are too many cars on Britain’s roads is, of course, a reflection that there are too many bloody people there full stop. And there seems no way of stopping it. Any citizen of the latest unheard of country to join the European Union apparently has the right of residence and every other right he can think of in the UK and the country is just flooded with people. There are just too many of them.

We’ve had a preliminary go at the damned surveillance cameras but after a couple of weeks they really started to get up my nose. I really don’t need this

Or his mate not twenty feet away:

every where I go.

Theses two were taken as I waited on Winchester station for the 10.07 to Waterloo. WInchester, as we are all aware is vying with Afghanistan as the world centre of terrorist training and general bearded and turbanned badness. Once the 10.07 arrives we settle into our seat and start reading the Metro, the free newspaper that is left on newspaper stands on every railway station in the environs of London until the five minutes it takes to read it has passed and it is dumped on a train seat. The paper is rubbish but the price is right. Glance up from the Metro and what do we see in the middle of the carriage roof?

Our old friend the camera placed for ‘my safety’.

Get off at Clapham Junction to change trains and we have this:

More information about cameras and a not so subtle reminder as to why they are there. We never turn ‘em off and if we find anything on the footage we can beat you with we bloody well will. Above the camera notice you will see, conveniently placed in the same location so as I don’t have to waste a picture snapping it, another thing that the UK has caught big time. I thought New Zealand had a bad attack of Safety Natzism. But we haven’t finished with cameras yet. I get to my destination, all presumably recorded on a hard drive some where, and I get into New Malden High Street and although I intended intended walking the mile or so home, I couldn’t help but glance at the bus stop on my way past.

They have gone past filming the citizenry doing nothing in a covert manner, they are now proud of it and are shouting about their exploits from the roof tops. I’ll be bound there’s a nerdy sort of a bloke sitting in an underground bunker fuming behind his Coke bottle glasses that the coverage of London buses with his cameras has only reached 80%. A pox on the lot of them, I really don’t want to live with all that sort of crap all around me.

The nice government looking after you at every turn. New Zealand had nine years of Helengrad to foist the state upon us. The UK has had twelve years of Blair and his successor Gordon Brown (who is about as popular as a cup of cold sick - and that is with his own supporters) to bend the British people to its similar ways. They appear to have escaped the lesbian and gay undertones we made a specialty du maison, but the result of the overall process is there for all to see.

All the pictures in this post were taken over the course of just a couple of hours whilst traveling from Winchester to New Malden, a couple of harmless and unremarkable towns in Southern England. If I had been more conscientious (?anal) and spent a couple of weeks taking pictures of intrusions of the State into the great unwashed’s lives I could have filled my hard disk and bored the pants off all. I hope I’ve given a flavour of the surveillance and we shall now move onto the central obsession with damned safety.

We’ve already seen the notice on Clapham Junction station advising us that if we don’t want to get bowled by 160 tonnes of suburban train (and remember there is the occasional unfortunate soul who does want to do this) you should stand away from the edge of the platform. No shit, Sherlock. They have even painted a yellow line on the platform to indicate to the slow learners where the edge might be.

I was unable to see a sign that asked people to be careful when walking in a straight line on the flat but the sign above was on a perfectly ordinary set of stairs leading away from the very dangerous platform we have just left. For God’s sake who needs a bloody sign advising caution on every set of stairs; these stairs of course have a yellow line painted on the edge of each tread to aid the dullards who can’t find the edge of anything. Stop it. I know how to use a set of stairs and they are not dangerous. Stairs have been around for centuries and they are not up there with the black death as a cause of whole civilizations coming to a sticky end. They are stairs and that is about it.

Safety has Britain in its grip. In just the sixteen days that I was in the UK Boy Scouts were banned from carrying pocket knives. Whittling is now a lost art and joins adventure playgrounds as a harmless pursuit that is closed off to the youth of Britain. There was also a bit of legislation passed that requires everyone who takes kids that aren’t their own anywhere in their car on a regular basis to have a police check. I am entirely serious. If you are on the roster to take the under-11s to soccer on a Saturday you are now assumed to be a kiddy fiddler until Plod has run through what ever he runs through and gives you an official sustificate to say that you are not. They estimate that this will affect upwards of 1.6 million people and the machinery to enforce it is already in place. Get that, already in place - before the law was introduced. Good communist stuff that. Speaking of which there are schemes where you can get financial reward for dobbing in your neighbours/relatives for something. I forget what the something was but it might have been carrying knives. They seem obsessed with the notion that everyone under the age of thirty wanders the streets with a switchblade secreted about their person.

The whole surveillance/safety/information thing appears to me to be a continuum. Each bit merges seamlessly into the next and it all appears to be leading to a state control of everything. They certainly are big on grabbing your money, if you have any, to finance all this. There are lots of people paying a top rate of tax of 50 pence in the pound (and a lot who should be who aren’t, if they have any sense) and a party at its Annual Conference (the Liberal Democrats I think) proposed, in all seriousness, a ‘Mansion Tax’ on those who have the temerity to live in houses worth over a million quid. I can assure you that a mill doesn’t buy you much, certainly not in London, and a ‘Mansion’ would hardly describe a lot of the dross that would set you back a million big ones.

I don’t know whether Britain’s seemingly total acceptance of anthropogenic global warming crap is a left wing media trick as you could hardly call The Sun a left wing rag and half the country have that as their only source of printed news input. However in the whole time I was there I heard nothing or nobody telling the real story. Nowhere was there anyone walking around pointing out that the emperor was stark naked. I suppose I didn’t listen to any talkback radio (I was on me hols for enjoument not to torture myself) or read any relevant UK blogs but it just seems a done deal that Bugatti Veyrons are the source of all men’s woes. Everything in the supermarkets is touted as ‘reducing your carbon footprint’ or if you buy this pound of sprouts you are ‘doing your bit to save the planet’. It is nauseating in the extreme. But the Great British Unwashed seems as happy with this bullshit as he is with having his every movement recorded on a hard disk somewhere.

Hand in glove with saving the world whilst doing the weekly grocery shopping you are assured on every aisle that what you are about to purchase comes from ‘sustainable’ sources and is ‘ethically produced’. Sustainable presumably means that if you plant the field with the same seeds again next year you will get more spuds. Ethically produced has me beat. The workers making your sneakers at US$1 a fortnight aren’t spoken to in a stern voice or looked at in a disrespectful manner? Bollocks the whole lot of it.

Of course there are bits of the UK that are still delightful. One of my mates lives in a chocolate box lid village in Hampshire that hasn't changed in centuries. Ticks all the boxes. Next door neighbour has a thatched roof (you wouldn’t want one of those though as the insurance premiums are astronomical being as they are so dangerous - high fire risk, you see), there is a village pub (very nice indeed), a church with a graveyard just crying for someone to sit in and compose an eulogy and a village store where you can buy smoked trout caught in the local river. I wonder if living in such an idyll would completely compensate for having to drive out into the overcrowded, overtaxed, surveillance ridden, safety nuts and ethically produced real world. I suspect it wouldn’t.

No, the Britain of today is a vastly different place to the Britain I left nearly thirty years ago. This is, of course, not unexpected. But I reckon the change is 99% bad and they can keep it. I’ll use the UK as place to go on golf tours with the best mates a bloke could have.

A final image from the trip from Winchester to New Malden just a week ago.

It is Autumn in the UK and leaves fall from the trees. Not too complicated, I trust? The fruits also fall from the horse chestnuts. Conkers. This is taken not ten feet from a bus stop that is outside a boys school. What is remarkable about this? The remarkable thing is that they are still there, lying on the ground. When I was a boy they wouldn’t even get to the ground. You threw sticks up into the tree to knock them down. And here in the age of the video game conkers are lying around outside a boys school unloved and unwanted. I saw many fine specimens that would make sixers easy, even without resorting to the oven or vinegar.

Britain is a sorry place when conkers go ungathered.

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British Golf Clubs

I’m really not sure about all this.

I’m a member of one of the better Auckland golf clubs. I go there to play golf (funny that) and that is about it. I drive to the club in my golf attire, change my shoes into golf shoes at the boot of my car, pick up my clubs, collect a card from the pro’s shop and saunter onto the first tee after a bit of a warm up and five minutes on the practice green to try and gauge the pace of the greens for the day. After the round I occasionally stop for a quick drink still wearing my golf apparel if I’m thirsty, but generally I hand in my scorecard and, well, drive home. I think most members of my club do much the same and most NZ clubs are run along similar lines. The level of social hierarchy surrounding a NZ golf club is approaching zero.

Not so in my brief acquaintance with the British arm of the family. I have recently spent some time in three golf clubs in the UK and they can be divided into two tiers; the ordinary and the Royal – literally. Both are totally unlike anything I am used to and I’m not sure I really like either.

We’ll start with the proletariat of British golf clubs. But I’m not sure even this is the case as I think I am referring to the middle class of golf clubs. The proles are surely the municipal courses - the Perivales of the world. This is the clubhouse at the Blackpool North Shore Golf Club.

Looks 1930’s to me. But it is what happens inside that is a bit strange. There are codes of practice for pretty much everything. Dress codes are the most obvious. When I arrived in the UK for the golfing extravaganza I was immediately asked by one of my fellow golfists if I had a jacket and tie in my luggage. Now why would I? I’ve travelled half way around the world to play golf and not ponce around in a bloody tie. However this was seen to be such a grave error in my packing technique that I was lent a jacket and tie and, even worse, I had to use them - repeatedly. The dress codes in these places is arcane at best. Smart casual in the upstairs bar including shorts and socks of any length that are white but only before 8.00pm. Why? What is wrong with a pair of smart checked socks? Well quite a lot as they look awful but is that sufficient reason to refuse a beer. And what happens at 8.00pm that suddenly makes a naked and revealed knee an appalling site? At 8.00pm the infamous jacket and tie are one’s only passport to a bag of crisps let alone a meal or libation.

Another very odd characteristic of the middle of the road golf club is that a few of the members seem to lose their names. We were sitting in the dining room clad in our damned after 8.00pm attire when a woman walked through the room. From a distance I would put her as a Dorothy, a Jean or perhaps a Susan. There was a bloke sitting at a table eating his dinner who was almost certainly a Doug. The bloke obviously knew the woman so he greeted her with a cheery ‘Good evening, Lady Captain’. What the hell is that bollocks all about? She’s got a name for Pete’s sake. You don’t call your mates Mr Blindside Flanker or Miss Pastry Cook do you?

I really don’t think I would enjoy my golf if I had to walk of the eighteenth green into all that nonsense. It really is so unnecessary. A few standards are, of course, essential. We don’t want golfers lounging around in Speedos swilling super strength lager and picking their noses, but ‘Good evening, Lady Captain’ - give me a break.

We move onto Royalty and here I expected a new level of bullshit. I was not disappointed but in a way I found it all more acceptable.

Good Edwardian brick - it is not going to fall down tomorrow. As visitors we had to change in the Visitors Locker Room so as not to mingle with the members in their swipe card protected inner sanctum. This after having gained access to the foyer of the club through a set of revolving doors for heavens sake. Have you tried walking through a set of revolving doors carrying a set of golf clubs? But I suppose if you are a member of a golf club with a Royal warrant you don’t carry your own clubs into the Club or anywhere else for that matter.

The dress code stuff is pretty much the same except that you don’t get out of the locker room at all clad in a pair of shorts. Longs and ordinary shoes with the Cutter & Buck polo shirt if you want a pint of shandy and a bag of dry roasted nuts.

The clubhouse has many other things that are really jolly nice. Heaps of seriously classy memorabilia - Bob Charles’ sand wedge, Seve’s 9 iron, Tom Lehman’s driver (persimmon surprisingly) - and a very good snooker room. Lunch is not a sandwich but haddock and chips and mushy peas (well we are in Lancashire). The jolly good snooker room was not good enough, however, to raise my level of play above abysmal.

Lytham also had the Dormey House which is a rather upmarket dormitory where we stayed for two nights.

Really like being at public school. There was the House Master (Dormey manager) dishing out keys and although we had single rooms there were shared bathrooms. But on the upside they had some of the best showers in the Northern hemisphere. And they had free Wifi. I like an outfit that is not so stuck in the past it is prepared to embrace the real world circa 2009.

I went to Royal Lytham & St Annes wanting to hate the place having been primed by the middle class pretenders. I can’t stand all this totally unnecessary artificial dressing up of something with things that don’t matter. However, paradoxically, I infinitely preferred the full Monty to the half way stuff.

But the bottom line is that in front of both those options I think I’ll stick with changing my shoes in the car park, using the golf course to play golf on and then having my shower and lunch at home.

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