Plans, plans and more plans

This blog is going to cover our trip to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (thanks to a reader for pointing out the correct appellation) in 2010.  Before getting to the plans let us deconstruct that country name:

• Britain: OK, although the Britons as a genetic identity probably died out a couple of millenia ago.
• Great: once, certainly.  Now is more dubious.
• Kingdom: Why isn't it a Queendom?
• United: The place contains England (OK that wants to stay); Northern Ireland (about half the population wants to stay, even though they have got a separate mention); Wales (got their own Parliament and see N Ireland); Scotland (see Wales); Isle of Man (happy to stay as long as they don't pay taxes) and the Channel Islands (last time I checked they are two States and they are only in it for Foreign Affairs and a cheap army - see Isle of man  but the Channellers probably would rather be French).

The big picture of planning was that the trip was to involve touring Gothic Cathedrals and birding sites.  The driver of the process was the cathedrals, following the success of a tour of this nature around L'Ile de France in about 1997.  There are pages about those attributes elsewhere as linked.  This left us three things to book:

1. Flights;
2. Accommodation; and
3. Rental Car.

There seemed to be no real difficulty with flights so I thought the first thing to do was the accommodation in the UK.
Accomodation
This was made relatively easy by Frances finding the Enjoy England website.  Indeed the only problem with the site was sorting out the plethora of places they had on offer.  We ended up selecting three places as looking rather good:

• Ingleby Manor (North Yorkshire);  
• The Coach House (Norfolk) and 
• Beanacre Barn (Somerset).  

Is it not astonishing that each of these places is not only part of an internet based travel booking system but has its own website.  If only the banking system was as good!

We changed our mind a couple of times about the order to visit them, with that shown being the 1st selection and the final one after the Barn couldn't take us for the second week.  I wondered about doing the West Country first but it turned out the Glastonbury Festival was on that week which seemed to make it likely that part of the UK is going to be full of punks and junkies.  Thus we ended up as shown.

All three property owners seemed most excellent in terms of being very responsive and helpful to us (and it might be noted from the end of the trip they continued those traits even after meeting me).  Getting the three places organised took us about a five days elapsed time with Martin putting in perhaps 2 hours contact time.

The only issue was generated by the banks.  It appears that to send money to an account in Europe it is necessary to use an International Bank Account Number (IBAN).  This seems to identify the bank, the branch and the account.  Thus get rid of all the other crap about names etc.  Not for WESTPAC. (I have put in the link in the hope that all readers of this page send that company some email advice!)

Having seen the array of stuff they seemed to require for an on-line transfer (most of which I didn't have, and the one bit I did have contradicted info on the Westpac site) I decided to go for a serviced transfer. That got kiboshed because the teller needed the address of the Bank in England.  So I sent an email to the owners seeking this info.

Then I got an email from another property which looked as though it should work - even though the IBAN contradicted the WESTPAC advice - because it told me they were dealing with the Royal Bank of Scotland.  On doing this online it emerged that all that was really needed was enough detail to identify which of an array of bank names were to be used.  It seems that WESTPAC deal with Royal Bank of Scotland under a range of situations and they all have different SWIFT codes.  The only one that looked sensible referred to transfers so I picked that and it generated a SWIFT code.  There was no need to know the address at all.

So, back to situation 1.  The problem was that the info from the owners didn't include the name of the bank.  The appearance of the letters MIDL suggested 'Midland Bank' but that was taken over by HSBC some years ago.  So I googled GB69MIDL and up popped 4 webpages.  One of them, the membership page for the European Museum indicated the Bank name was none other than HSBC.  So I included that and again got a list of possible bank names: most of these looked fronts for the Corleone Family or the source of letters advising me that I had won a squillion dollars in a lottery I had never entered; however buried in the middle of it was "HSBC all British Branches" which looked to fit the bill.

What a palaver for something so simple.  The offending mob of idiots got a nice email pointing out the problems with the system.

A linguistic aside: in the old days 'bank-robber' referred to someone who robbed banks.  These days it is probably used as much to identify the banks as a subset of robbers!

AIRFARES

In early research I had found that Emirates was back being a cheap airline and one of those that flew directly into Manchester (a key driver of this process being to avoid Heathrow).  I very quickly found flights that matched our requirements and set about booking the flgihts.

Suddenly I found myself back at the WESTPACsite filling in something from Mastercard Secure "to ensure my security".  Having mentioned the s-word you can probably see that this is not going to be happy.  Sure enough the screen clears and I am told to contact my Emirates Office.  GRRRRRR!

So I ring Emirates and it turns out that the problem was that I hadn't registered with Mastercard Secure before starting the process.  Never having heard of this service before it was hardly surprising I hadn't registered with them.  The good thing about this was that the young lady taking the booking requested nice seats etc for us. 

Back to westpac, on the phone, with a whole lotta short, Anglo Saxon, words in my mind.  Their starting point was that only some companies use the Mastercard secure 'service' so it isn't really part of their system.  (ie it is Emirates fault.)  To get me registered, to prevent a recurrence of this lunacy, we search the WESTPAC site for Verified by VISA!!  I pointed out to the young lady - a different one, but also nice - that I used a Mastercard she said "Yes, but if you search for that you won't get to the right place."  The short, Anglo Saxon words got almost past my teeth!  After 17 minutes we had finished the exercise: as I commented to the young lady, I hope someone was recording the call so that they realised how appalling the system is.

Car rental

We decided this didn't have to be done for a while, so it wasn't.

Google Earth images

As we have been planning away I have been recording the places we want to visit on a Google Earth file in the hope that I'll be able to transfer it to my netbook and refer to it while away.  This post is to provide the ultimate back up of the images.

Things that can stuff plans

Ash clouds

We decided that we would avoid Heathrow Airport as though it had developed mutated, extra-virulent, bubonic plague.  Everyone we have spoken to reckons this is good strategy.  So we are flying in to Manchester (it is also close to North Yorkshire).

Stone the sanguinary corvids!  Today ( 15 April 2010) flights into the UK are basically cancelled left right and centre due to volcanic ash from bloody Iceland.  Just under 50% of flights into Manchester - and a much higher percentage of those earlier in the day - get cancelled  First the cod wars; then their banking crisis and now they shovel ash into the way of tourists flying into the UK!

I hope this is well resolved by mid June!  The latest stuff  (10 May) seems to be that a fair chunk of Western Europe (France Spain Portugal, Ireland ) have shut down their airspace because of a new cloud.   Oh well, 6 weeks to go.  By May 17 Manchester Airport was stuffed (hopefully for a brief while).

Thailand does military rule!
To add to the entertainment the Red Shirts and the military in Thailand seem to be getting rather antsy.  From a selfish point of view one hopes they keep the action away from the airport.  From many other points of view one hopes they actually take a good hard look at themselves and realise that what is going on is crap.  But they're all politicians so that sentence is extremely naive.

Wireless Internet access

We acquired a netbook last year so that I cold record things while we were in Peru.  It did a pretty good job, but of course nowhere in Amazonas had electricity worth speaking of, let alone wireless internet!  A problem appeared to arise that it couldn't connect to our home wireless connection,  giving weird LINUX error messages about 'receiving offers' and 'persistent databases'.

After spending a lot of time in e-contact with a very helpful LINUX guru and phoning an ex-ABS contact I was still a bit in the dark.  Thus I invoked IT Rule 1: flail about at random enough and you will eventually fix the problem.  It emerged that somehow a password had been deleted.  I replaced it and Bingo!  I have now tested it at the National Library and it all looks good!

As at least 2 of our hosts offer wireless access that will be a great outcome.

Navigation
We won't bother with a fancy in-car GPS jobbie.  I reckon it would take us 3 weeks to learn how to program it!  My version of Linux doesn't as yet link to Google Earth but we have printed off some directions from Google Maps to get us between the main accommodation places (and to/from Manchester Airport).

Other things needed

As well as the big ticket items there were other things we needed to do:

• Join a birding organisation
• Join the National Trust of Australia
• Get a road Atlas
• Get the Good Beer Guide!!! 
• Sort out mobile phone coverage;
• Sort out crrency arrangements

Each of these will be covered below.

Join a birding organisation.

My initial thought was the British Trust for Ornithology: I can't remember why I thought this, but on contacting a British birder of very good repute he rapidly advised to join the RSPB instead.  It was obvious from their website that the cost of membership would be way less than the Reserve entry fees (and car parking fees) that we would otherwise incur.  Duly signed up.

They have sent us a nice little welcome package including a book of their top Reserves.   They enter the list of good guys.

Join the National Trust of Australia

 Frances found out some time ago that they have reciprocal rights with the UK NT but charge about 1/4 the annual fee an this should get us, gratis, into all sorts of stately piles in the UK.  If, of course, we should come across stately piles we wish to enter!

Unfortunately the ACT Branch of the NTA seem to have learnt their marketing strategy from some dodgy Merchant Bank.  In addition to the advertised $95 subscription - roughly double that of the RSPB - they were going to slug us a $35 joining fee.  This makes it no more expensive to join the UK NT! 

Get a Road Atlas

The deal seems to be publications of the Automobile Association.  For reasons I cannot comprehend it is about half price to get them through Amazon than the AA.  Whatever, done.  The book has duly arrived and looks rather good.  It even has the village I grew up in (Mayland) shown and n the right place - in the past the village was either not shown at all (the usual situation or positioned) at the primary school about 2km from the main cluster of huts.

Get the Good Beer Guide

To anyone that reckons this should be a big ticket item I will only say "I know where you are coming from" but then add that I hope the UK has advanced as has the USA where good beer is available everywhere in large and interesting amounts.  (It is always good to hope.)  To assuage the tender sensibilities of beer fanciers I will ask you to note that I have created a Pommie Beer page in this blog.  It will be rather empty until we get there since British beer is damn expensive in Australia.

At first glance it appears that the Good Beer guide is like the AA Road Atlas: it seems to be cheaper to buy through Amazon than from CAMRA!  Which is nuts.  On second glance I have actually ordered the 2009 edition which cost Stg 1p (plus Stg7 postage) through Amazon rather than the 2010 edition through CAMRA (Stg15 plus Stg7 postage).  As I said, this is nuts!

On studying the tome  the reason for cheapness appears to be that it is a used copy!  I came to this conclusion on noticing a few pencil comments against a couple of items.  This then explained why several hundred brews had been highlighted.  I counted 89  highlighted brews from the breweries beginning with 'W' (assuming this is a more less representative sample that means well over 2,000 marked in total). My conseqent questions are if the previous owner tried all of these,

1. how come the book was in such good order?and 
2. was the owners liver in equally good shape?

Mobile phone coverage

Both Frances and I have VIRGIN mobile phones which offer roaming in the UK.  However, they also seem to offer a subsidy (approximately covering the entire cost of the project) to Richard Branson's space shuttle program in the charges to each call.  The sensible way to go seemed to be to buy a pommie SIM card as soon as we can.  The other alternative - relying on UK Telecom phone boxes - is obviously ridiculous, both from our expectations of:

• the likely charges; and 
• the probability of finding one that works anywhere that we are likely to be going.  

One of these is high and the other low: guess which is what.

This topic appeared to advance a bit when Frances got an email from the Visit Britain folks spruiking a Global SIM card for which you paid Stg43 and got Stg25 of airtime.  Unfortunately they didn't give any info about the call charges other than an assertion that their charges were "up to 75% less than standard mobile charges".   This is sort of like "Trust us, we're from a Telecom company!". I suspect that

• this company learnt their trade flogging "genuine Swizs watches" off a barrow in the Strand; and
• was founded by C M O T Dibbler from the Discworld.

We will see how the plot develops when (or if) I find out what their charges are.

Surprisingly I have not got  a response from Visit UK so I explored the vendors website.  It is full of that which you find after a herd of bovines have passed through a paddock, which does of course confirm the views expressed in the previous paragraph.  Their rates for calls within the UK are 37P per minute, whereas Virgin UK are 20P per minute!  The only problem is to find a VIRGIN store - to my astonishment they don't have one in Manchester airport!

In fact Virgin shops turned out to be very hard to find.  However on our first day of touristing I spotted a Vodaphone shop in York and as their rates were similar to Virgin I acquired a SIM card from them.  The next issue was that my phone was still locked to Virgin Australia, but fortunately there are many shops in the UK that specialise in unlocking mobile phones! 

Currency arrangements

We have in the past shown great skill in stuffing up conversions between currencies, in that we have moved money from one to another in such a way that we got the worst rate in both directions.  However at the time of writing this the Australian dollar was doing rather well against Sterling so we thought we'd get some £ Sterling while it was cheap. 

Obviously we didn't want to schlep around large amounts of folding stuff - we may pass close to Bradford (for example).  From reading the consumer information - I should probably get an award for slogging through the 50 pages of PDF this involved - about our Mastercards it appeared that Westpac also had a space shuttle subsidisation program with each transaction attracting charges like a candle in rain forest attracts bugs (not forgetting the arbitrage which is never going to be in our favour).  However our financial adviser mentioned an ANZ Travel card as a good thing.  Indeed it did so appear on reading another 50 pages of PDF: other than the fact that ANZ get to have our money, earning interest for them while we aren't spending it, the charges are quite minimal (although there is a nasty little 1.1% of each reload, so we worked out what we thought we might spent and put it all in the initial transaction). 

Bazza Mackenzie was nearly right.

This is a variant on my 'brickbats and bouquets" pages of my main blog.  With this blog I intend to give bouquets as and when they arise so this is going to be pretty much a kvetch page.

Background

Bazza Mackenzie is a cartoon character invented by Barry Humphries.  I am not sure he invented a two word phrase implying that most people from the UK are illegitimate but certainly used it a lot.  This post is devoted to those we find who deserve the appellation.

The UK Passport Office.

I believe they are now known as the Identity and Passport Office .  Whatever.  I had my UK passport effectively cancelled when I emigrated to ensure that I did my two years before leaving the country.  I found I could get an Australian one a year later, which saved me about $500 on a plane fare back to the UK, and have never revitalised my British one.   I have thought about it several times but on each occasion the rules and rubbish have been such that I have abandoned the project at early stages.

Low points in their past performances have been

• the introduction of charges to make a phone call to the establishment here; 
• moving the office out to the airport; and
• charging an arm and a leg.

Additional nadir inducing efforts are:

• anyone with an old passport (and my expired 37 years ago)  is treated as though they have never had a passport at all and thus have to produce a whole nunch of documents; and
• you have to be interviewed (presumably to check that you don't have any bad habits such as lying about WMDs); and
• the interview is done at a Post Office Shop.

Again I save myself time and about $200 by sticking with my Australian passport.

Mr Plod and friends

It will not be a surprise that this element is not about the friendly police person depicted by the nice Ms Blyton, nor the old codger from Dock Green who started Saturday evening on BBC in the 1960s.  This is about the current crop who seem to share personalities with Toby Meres frm Callan.

It appears from what I have read in the media (who never lie - stuff is on the internet so it must be true) that the UK has the highest level of video surveillance of anywhere in the world.  This seems to be exemplified by the presence - according to my AA Atlas - of 4,000 fixed speed cameras.   I feel a recording task coming on: how many speed cameras did we see today?

This task was made difficult by the appearance every few miles of a sign about speed cameras.  All this meant was that the forces of repression might use an annoyance in the area, not that they had one positioned waiting for our pleasure.  Judging by the number of people that zipped past us the devices were rare.  I think we saw 1 cop running  mobile unit during our trip.

In fact the only place we saw a lot of cops was the Norfolk Show.  Of course, there was absolutely no reason for them to be there at all: a better behaved crowd would be hard to imagine.

A taxonomy of pains in the back acre

While thinking about this trip I suddenly recalled a English folk(ish) song "Jobsworth".  This is devoted to low order public officials who do nothing but stp other people from doing things.  The refrain includes (repeatedly "Jobs worth, jobs worth, it's more than my job's worth".  This has led to a challenge on the trip to actually get someone to say "It's more than my job's worth."

Of more relevance to the heading of this section is that there are at least three types of interfering nuisances:

1. Mr Plod  (sworn in and, occasionally, sworn at);
2. Jobsworths (not sworn in but very often sworn at);
3. Private security guards (not sworn in and not sworn at, unless you have a very good relationship with a dentist).

I suspect there will ample opportunity to look at all three major types and possibly further develop the classification.

The Loony left

The following comes from the Australian newspaper (which would never ever tell a porky: it is owned by News Limited and if you can't trust them who can you trust?).  However, I have just noticed that this was published on 1/4/2010: come in sucker?

• A BRITISH grandmother has been heavily fined and electronically tagged for selling a goldfish to a child, triggering criticism of over-zealous use of animal protection laws.
• Pet shop owner Joan Higgins, 66, was fined £1000 ($1640) also given a dusk-to-dawn curfew for selling an animal to a person under the age of 16, but her 47-year-old son Mark - also ordered to do community service - slammed the ruling as a farce.
• The pair were prosecuted after the local council sent a 14-year-old boy to buy a goldfish in a "sting" operation following reports that their shop, Majors Pets, had sold a gerbil to a teenager with learning difficulties.
• The shopkeepers sold the fish without asking his age or how the fish would be cared for, prosecutors said.

 I foresee some interesting times ahead.  Perhaps I need a page for bizarre media stuff observed while over there?

British Birdtrack

Since I believe strongly that having had the privilege of seeing birds the information gained should be use for conservation purposes, and the British Trust for Ornithology had a stand at the RNS advertising their birdtrack website I decided to give it a go.  This was despite some communication with a British Bird Atlas person who convinced me that the whole exercise was unduly complicated.  (A reference from Sean Dooley in "Anoraks to Zitting Cisticola" seems appropriate: he defines ornithologists as people who call stamp collecting 'philately' and themselves "onanists".)

The first thing I found was this load of lawyerly garbage: "The BTO has published some health and safety information for volunteer fieldworkers. Please take a few minutes to read this leaflet which can be
found here: http://www.bto.org/survey/h&s_notes.htm  Following these simple The BTO has published some health and safety information for volunteer fieldworkers. Please take a few minutes to read this leaflet which can be found here: http://www.bto.org/survey/h&s_notes.htm Following these simple guidelines will help to ensure that your birdwatching activities are both safe and enjoyable."  One can feel the enjoyment draining away as one reads!

Then I found that everything was set up for repeated records by people who know the area well.  I tried to put in some data for an area of North Norfolk and found that I had to attest that it was all in an area shown in a Google earth image.  I didn't have a clue if it was all in that area, and I certainly wasn't going to repeat this exercise for the 15 or so other areas for which I had data. Pass, on helping them.

General stuff

This page is odds and sods which I think are interesting but can't work out where else to put them.

This page has some interesting insights into English society.  Having gone to University in Kent and worked (aka slaved) in Sussex just before I saw the light I suspect the author is a bit too focussed on the area around London rather than the rustic denizens of the area.  But then it is possible that things have changed a bit in the last 39 years!

Election issues

Of course we will be visiting the country fairly soon after their 2010 election.  Dare one say the first of their elections in 2010?  At the time of typing this (11 may 2010) no-one seems to have a clue what the heck is going on! As usual Private Eye seems to have been on the look out for cock-ups!  I can see that I will be buying a few souvenir copies of 'The Eye' if it is sold in the hinterland!

By 13 May everything seems to have calmed down with the Conservatives  and Lib-Dems now firmly declared as "new-best-friends-forever'.

Plus ca change seems to apply.  In the last couple of days (early June) a Lib-Dem minister has quit due to him paying his male partner for a flat and then claiming this as an expense.  His replacement has also turned out to have had dodgy financial dealings!

Cost of living

One of the most vivid memories of my migration to Australia in 1970 was how cheap everything was.  Many things in Australia were same number on the ticket but it was $ per kilo rather than Stg per lb (in effect things were 4x the price n the UK,
 
The two particular products I will be looking at will be real ale and petrol.  I have got a fair amount of info about the price of petrol In Australia and will be investigating the price of beers in some detail.  I expect to complete a page about prices of beer and petrol.

Oil spill
There has been obviously much in the media about the size of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.  One website has come up with an innovative way of presenting this in ways that people not familiar with the Gulf region can comprehend.  In essence they had mapped the boundary of the slick and developed a small application (in Google maps methinks) to move it to another location.  The following image shows it moved to a map centred in Westminster UK.

During our visit;

I didn't really get into the print media while we were in the UK.  I purchased a Daily Mail the day after England departed the World Cup ( covered in a daily post).

At one point bought a copy of The Times to find out what the thinking Pom is considering these days.  In brief the thinking Pom either:

• is thinking about celebs and their (or anyone else's) chest size; or
• has vanished from the face of the Earth; or
• now reads The Independent!  In that regard I note that Aldaily has stiffed the Times but continues to carry the Independent.

I would not dream of suggesting that this has anything to do with the Thunderer joining the Murdoch stable.

The electronic media were initially obsessed with the Russian Spy saga (especially Anna Chapman for some reason  note bullet 1 above).  They, and the print media, then reduced coverage of that story and became obsessed with the unfortunate Raoul Moat.

All of this must have poetry to the ears of the Government as it completely overshadowed discussion of the Lib-Dems issues in dealing with a trivial little issue such as a complete overhaul of the British voting system (they are trying to emulate Australia but I fear will end up achieving Italy with several hundred candidates for dogcatcher, let alone MP).

Background to Birding

I have had a number of Field Guides to European Birds for many years.  Unfortunately I feel obligated to minimise the amount of stuff to schlep for this trip so I am planning to use "The Hamlyn Guide to Birds in Britain and Europe" Brunn et al .  This is primarily because it was printed in 1989 (after a revised text in Swedish in 1986) whereas my other favourite "The Birds of Britain and Europe" Heinzel et al dates from 1974!

So I should be able to identify the birds subject to the limits of my competence.  Where are the little blighters?  I am hoping that joining the RSPB will assist me to find them (as well as saving a number of $ on entry fees and car parking.  My basic planning source will be "Birdwatching in Britain A site by site guide"  Redman and Harrap.  Reference will also be made to "Wild Britain" by Douglas Botting.

Although this isn't going to be a twitching trip (apart from anything else I am too idle for that) I thought it would be good to sort out what birds I have previously seen in the UK and which I have not.  My first thought was that my Birdinfo software would have a good list for the UK: not so it was only 146 species rather than 530+ on the official list from the British Trust for Ornithology.   So I am creating my own using the BTO list as a base (fiddled with according to my memory of which birds I have seen in the UK).   It is interesting that even though the BTO shows 'International names' for some species they are not always the names I am familiar with.  For example they:

• list 'Baltimore Oriole ' which has been  known in the US as the Northern Oriole for many years (unless talking about the baseball team);
• translate the UK Great Northern Diver as the 'Great Northern Loon' while the usual name in North America - where they are far more common - is Common Loon.  (In this case the BTO appellation is somewhat egregiously wrong since the more Northern loon is the Arctic Loon.)

Oh well I guess I'll just stop kvetching and update my own list myself.