Three Thousand Versts of Loneliness

A locomotive trundles out of Yaroslavsky Station, Moscow. This is the Trans Siberian and it’s bound for Vladivostok, more than 9,000 kilometres distant. It is a journey which will take more than 150 hours to complete. And now you can take the trip without a Russia Visa, without negotiating Komsomolskaya Square, its dubious cast of characters or its pervading smell of urea and without the risk of sharing your carriage with a pair of alcoholic migrant workers. Google have introduced the ‘virtual’ Trans Siberian , courtesy of Google maps and an awful lot of Youtube footage. Listen to Gogol’s Dead Souls, stare out the window and enjoy. But whatever happens, you’re not going to be able to get off at any of the stations and you‘ll have to visit your own kettle, rather than the communal samovar, for a cup of tea. My advice is definitely to jump to the interesting bits.

What’s the point of having a blog if you can’t have a good old fashioned ill informed rant about the frustrations of daily life? Don’t answer that. There are a number. I won’t let them deter me. Is there anything that makes modern Homo sapiens angrier than driving? Don’t answer that either. There are countless worthier reasons for rage. Still, I must let off some steam on the subject of one of Belfast’s major intersections, the new Broadway Roundabout. I live a few minutes walk from this leviathan of tarmacadam, which was only fully opened earlier this year, after many months of traffic chaos. Am I happy now that it’s operating? Absolutely not! The roundabout, purportedly fully functioning, works less efficiently than it did whenever it was festooned with cones and pock-marked with temporary traffic lights. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a wonderful piece of road design – at 9am on a Sunday morning. Without any traffic you’ll whiz unto the West Link with barely a delay. However, if...

Last week I travelled reasonably intensively on the Italian rail network, Trenitalia. From Wednesday to Saturday there was only one day when my girlfriend and I did not take a train. We suffered no delays to speak of. Our second class carriages were clean and comfortable and we covered fairly long distances both quickly and inexpensively. Contrast this experience to the misery of rail travel in Britain. Although I am not a particularly frequent user of the mainland rail network, nevertheless I have spent many hours waiting in stations for delayed services, staring forlornly at sidings where the train has come to an unaccountable and interminable halt, inhaling noxious air which seems to emanate directly from adjacent toilets. All of which comprises an unimpeachable service when it's set against Translink’s efforts to deliver public transport to long suffering travellers in Northern Ireland. Not that Italian trains are uniquely superior to those in Britain. Swiss trains, Ger...

Part of the rationale for constructing a third runway at Heathrow, an airport transparently unsuited to that type of expansion, is an ambition to enhance its reputation as an ‘international hub’. Several of these eerie, parallel worlds exist throughout Europe and include Amsterdam and Frankfurt. I spent a few hours in the latter during the summer, hopping between Lufthansa flights in order to get to and from Russia. It is a horrendous place to spend time, negotiating multiple security checks and eating plasticky German bratwurst. There is little sense that the visitor is on planet Earth, never mind in Germany. He spends a trance like hour or two in the chill of too efficient air conditioning, impatient to be spirited away to his ultimate destination. Such is the future which the government seeks to encourage at Heathrow. Outside the narrow confines of the aviation industry, ‘hub’ status yields limited benefits. It isn’t an especially difficult decision for the Conservatives to ...

I have no intention of blogging a series of retrospective posts as the year draws to a close. Nor will I be adding a modish “y” to the word like. “Likey” ! Why the hell do people do that? However the Guardian’s “most irritating person of the year” survey made me consider on whom exactly I have focussed the majority of my not inconsiderable ire during the last 12 months. I must admit that my opprobrium is an ocean in a state of constant flux, perpetually rising. Daily it expands to claim great fresh tracts of human behaviour. During a large part of this year I have been without a car and therefore my road rage has been substituted for pedestrian rage. Previously I may have been most exercised by the driving manners of those in vans, most often those in white vans, most often those in white Ford Transit vans. Or it may have been the drivers of four by fours who attracted the majority of my bile. Why do these people need their vast suburban tankers to transport children to school?...