This week has been a series of disasters in terms of travel…..

Driving Side Mirror

Wednesday evening: drivers side mirror in car removed due to some complete idiot driving at 90mph along a country road and deciding to overtake at an inappropriate moment. Swerved to avoid, but car wing mirror hit and torn to pieces.

Next day car taken into dealer to get quote – £500 and £33 labour – has to be the cheapest labour charge ever in a car dealer (and £500 seems reasonable for a power driven heated mirror). Insurance company called and told some nonsense about having to take to their authorised repair people in Cambridge. Disaster- someone in Cambridge with a screwdriver is equivalent to an act of terrorism on the machine they are working. I once told the service manager at the Cambridge Lexus Dealer that the job they had done replacing the radio in the car could have been done better by “a Glasgow Heroin addict desperate for a fix”.

Friday morning: car taken into Cambridge service centre Friday morning. Fed the usual Cambridge bullshit about being really busy and that they might not be able to look at the car until Tuesday morning. Mmh, not a particularly difficult task to look at the car, spot the fact the mirror had been damaged and make a quick call for parts.

In the meantime, nice spacious BMW replaced by Ford Ka (totally filthy as I’m sure the member of the clearasil brigade who was supposed to clean the rental car on Friday had been out drinking Thursday night and hadn’t bothered to turn up to work Friday !

Train Chaos

Saturday afternoon train into London. Well, actually it wasn’t a train journey instead a very uncomfortable bus ride to Royston (replacement bus service) and then the train to London. It never fails to amaze me why the UK is so backward when it comes to this sort of thing. Instead of scheduling work in the evenings, they choose to inconvenience people by shutting down the train service at weekends.

On the train back a set of language students following the latest craze of listening to music on their mobile ‘phone speaker. I really hope this feature is removed in future generations of ‘phones.