Slow Travel

Top ten train tunes for a Traincation...

2010-02-27T12:57:00.003Z

I'm currently in sunny, snow-kissed St Moritz in Switzerland, hanging with the overtly moneyed clientele of this admittedly beautiful ski and spa resort. I've just been for a walk across the frozen lake below where they hold horse races, the world's only Polo tournament (yes, it's that sort of town) played on snow and rather bizarrely an annual cricket match on ice. Is it just me or are they perhaps slightly desperate to prove that yes you can do all these things on ice...amazing! Thankfully there's no D-list celebrities attempting to dance on the frosty surface so that's one slight relief...

In town I realised I was too late for the day's bobsleighing action on the famed Cresta Run, they apparently start very early in the morning at 8am so my leisurely stroll into town around 10.30 meant I missed the whole lot. So early breakfast for me tomorrow as there is something rather alluring and strangely fascinating about wanting to hurl yourself down an ice chute on a canteen tray with ice skates underneath (sorry, toboggan).

Anyway, having run the gauntlet of extreme up market shopping opportunities, Cartier, Versace, Rolex etc and weaved my way amongst the milling idle rich, old, ugly grey men and flamboyantly coiffed ladies with leathery botoxed faces and tiny ratty mutts on leads or tucked under their arms like expensive hand-bags-to-be (well post-expiration taxidermy is not a bad way to end up, and so practical too!) I am now off for a full body massage to ease away the 'pains' of the day...maybe I'm getting too into this whole malarkey?

So, in an idle few minutes before going to get rubbed down I compiled this list of my Top Ten train songs to accompany the 'Traincation' that I'm currently on. I'm not wholly wedded to the name, last year's 'staycation' felt a bit try-hard and I've had my own mixed success trying to encourage the uptake of 'frucool' (which some wag on the Guardian said was as bad as 'chillax' and would only be used by 'twunts!), but traincations could well be the travel phenomenon of 2010 so who am I to argue! Besides they are BRILLIANT and having been doing them since 2003 when I gave up flying on holiday I obviously agree with the sentiment!

Ok, enough already, here's the list and now to go and get hit by a very friendly steam-roller, sorry masseuse...

1. “Engine 54” The Ethiopians
2. "Big Rock Candy Mountain" by The Highwaymen
3. "Chattanooga Choo Choo" by Cab Calloway
4. “Box car blues” Boxcar Willie
5. “Train to Skaville” The Ethiopians
6. "I Heard That Lonesome Whistle Blow" by Johnny Cash
7. "Last Train to Clarksville" by Four Tops
8. "Long Train Runnin'" by The Doobie Brothers
9. “Midnight Special” by Creedence Clearwater Revival
10. “Stop that train” Bob Marley & the Wailers

London Sustainable Development Commission

2010-02-23T15:11:00.003Z

I am delighted to announce that I have been made a London Sustainable Development Commissioner. The Commission was established in 2002 to advise the Mayor of London on making London an exemplary sustainable world city and is made up of individual experts from the economic, social, environmental and London governance sectors.

As a Commissioner I'll be giving my time voluntarily, promoting sustainable development, embedding sustainability into London wide strategies, and helping make sustainability a meaningful and understandable concept for all Londoners.

Bring it on.

Chinese Outlook Magazine article...

2010-02-22T11:03:00.009Z

I've just written a contribution to the Chinese lifestyle magazine Outlook, one of the leading creative publications in the country. They even created the natty avatar of me to the left (which some have said makes me look like a psycho, serial killer hitch-hiker - thanks!). The overall piece looks at low carbon travel and I've written about our trip, some of the top destinations we visited on our circumnavigation as well as providing some tips on how to travel slowly. Not being fluent in Mandarin I am unable to vouch for the specific content of the article below...but the other 'tips' they provide seem to include how to make a bolus to catch a pigeon and how to fashion a pair of underpants from a shopping bag! Essential stuff I am sure you'll agree!

Around the World in 80...

2010-02-04T17:48:00.003Z

...documentaries! For some erstwhile backpackers they might actually learn more about global culture and challenges by watching this compelling list of 80 films. The run-down includes some brilliant movies, such as The Buena Vista Social Club, and makes for a suitably cinematic world tour (without of course going anywhere near a plane!).

Sexy airships!

2010-02-03T11:45:00.003Z

Here's something to cheer you up during grim, grey February...an amazing airship concept! Having previously been fortunate enough to get airborne in an airship over London, which I wrote about here...plus took some great aerial images of the city which you can see here, I am definitely a big fan!

These babies will be high-end luxurious kite-shaped wonders that will get you across the Atlantic in a leisurely 36 hours or so, cruising at around 90mph. Classy definitely, accessible maybe, inspiring certainly! Full article on the Daily Mail website here (one of my favourite reads obviously!)

Most common forms of plane crash...

2010-01-21T17:53:00.004Z

Now I'm not one for scare-mongering but there's always a dire fascination with what can go wrong with planes in the air. I met an aviation engineer once in Orkney a few years ago who cheerfully pointed out that there were 'some things that can go wrong with a plane for which there's no warning signal or alarm for the pilot...because there's nothing they can do about them'! Nice. So, for the aviation paranoid out there, courtesy of the gang at the Travel Insurance Blog (shameless plug!) here's a handy guide of what tends to go pear-shaped on planes...so fasten your seat-belts people and watch out for my personal favourite 'over-aggressive piloting' (It's not Top Gun you know). Interestingly they don't mention Malcolm Gladwells' 'Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes'...now that's REALLY scary. Enjoy!

Slow travel catching on...

2010-01-16T12:19:00.003Z

I got a lovely email from Barnali this morning who is also doing a brilliant long distance overland trip (with some freighter travel thrown in for good measure!). It's always fantastic to be in contact with other 'grounded' travellers, although I can't say I don't get pangs of jealousy as their blogs trigger such happy memories of our trip!

You can check out Barnali and Anirvan's adventures on their blog www.yearofnoflying.com.

Wild ego trip...

2010-01-07T18:28:00.001Z

Probably one of the cleverest viral videos I've ever seen...

How to buy cheap UK train tickets...

2010-01-07T11:49:00.003Z

If like most of us you are constantly bamboozled by the complexity of the UK train ticketing system which seems to operate 'ambush' tactics, penalising late booking, offering wildly differing prices for the same journey from different companies or websites and only making some fares available for miniscule windows of time at 3am on the first Wednesday of the month.

Well, in much the same way that www.seat61.com shed light on how to travel by train abroad, this natty new site helps to mystify the arcane process of booking a reasonably priced train ticket in the UK. Which can only be good news!

From how to get tickets for a £1, to the sneaky tactic of split-ticketing (getting a cheaper fare by booking two singles for the two legs of your journey rather than one overall ticket - I know, daft isn't it?!) the site should prove invaluable for getting a fair fare from the rail companies! Well done to the authors...it goes some way to addressing the 'rip=off' concerns of customers, eloquently illustrated by this protest poster I saw in Oaxacca, Mexico - rough translation 'The Bus company Octopus has stolen my money!'

Top 10 grim things people do on planes...

2010-01-05T09:29:00.002Z

Now I know people also do all manner of despicable and distasteful things on other modes of public transport but this little list of the top ten gross things people do on planes amused me...

Of course they omitted the most heinous of all which is obviously to 'try and blow them up' (marginally more offensive then tending to questionable foot hygiene I think you'll agree)

Video killed the cheap flight?

2009-10-23T16:13:00.004+01:00

Well, not yet anyway...I wrote a rather fun piece for the Guardian the other week in regard to the irresponsibility of encouraging business folk to fly more on the questionable basis that it might generate better new business conversion. Two campaigns by FlyBe and BA in particular riled me. I even wrote to the agency responsible for the FlyBe ads...and their managing director informed me that 'like the legal profession, we don't see it as our role to question our clients, but simply to do the best job for them that we possibly can'

Fine, I said in reply, but as a friend pointed out the other day if you want to tackle prostitution you don't harass the whores you arrest the punters! Need less to say that was the end of that particular email exchange!

Here's the Guardian piece or you can read it on the Guardian site here.

You could be forgiven for thinking the aviation industry was giving out mixed messages about climate change. Last week they announced that they would halve emissions by 2050, but as the targets rely on offsetting, the plan was described as a "huge get-out". Meanwhile, the industry is still planning to expand which would wipe out any planned efficiency savings anyway.

Then British Airways appeared to undo all their good work this week with a new luxury service and a business-class service called Face to Face. UK short-haul specialists FlyBe have also launched their Business is better face to face to wage war on the upsurge in videoconferencing in the name of saving the planet.

FlyBe spouts a host of dubious data on the importance of "in the flesh" meetings for building better business relationships and winning new clients and contracts.

They say, for example, that face to face meetings will turn 40% of potential customers into customers, compared with only 16% without face to face contact. But they fail to mention that this figure comes from an non-peer reviewed US study sponsored by two industry groups, the US Travel Association and the Destination and Travel Foundation. The latter's website says it exists to "bolster the destination marketing profession and travel industry".

What about the numbers though? Well the 40% figure comes from an online survey of 500 US business travellers and it doesn't specify what they were comparing face to face meetings with — sending an email perhaps? In any case, it begs the question how many customers you could rake in via videoconferencing while you are stuck at Heathrow check-in and squashed next to the fat bloke in row 56 of cattle class half way over the Atlantic.

And that's the point. Both campaigns ignore the fact that videoconferencing has come of age. Gone are the days of stuttering, pixellated images, out-of-synch audio and visuals — like a badly dubbed foreign film, and unreliable connections. Hyperspeed broadband and new technologies like HP's Halo and Skyroom allow such effectively intimate, eye to eye, literally across-the-table communications between participants it's hard to see what other advantages actually being physically in the same room might bring (what do you want to do? Smell your client?).

The airlines have also had some highprofile support from climate contrarians such as Boris Johnson, who recently popped over to New York in business class courtesy of BA to promote business travel. Though this might have been a clever strategy by BA to get back in the mayor's good books after refusing to upgrade him on a flight to Beijing for the Olympics last year, forcing poor old BoJo to fly cattle-class. And this is all before considering the disproportionate carbon impact that business class seats on planes have, as BA's latest luxury transatlantic service demonstrates.

The BA and FlyBe campaigns both deploy scare-mongering by playing on struggling businesses' anxiety during a world recession: that either their clients won't take them seriously, or their competitors will outflank them unless they rock up in person to a pitch or meeting. I wonder whether this is really the case. My personal experience would suggest otherwise.

I have "spoken" at conferences in the US by using the cost of my flight and hotel to pay for making a film of my speech and then doing Q&A via teleconference. I've also pitched for and won contracts in both Montreal, Canada and Inverness in Scotland via video-conference and on all these occasions the very fact I didn't fly not only reinforced my company's own environmental commitment and responsibility but also impressed the client and arguably gave us a competitive advantage.

Wider use of videoconferencing could generate truly dramatic carbon and financial savings, generating a robust business case for change. It's good for employee wellbeing too, putting an end to those red-eye/sleazyjet trips away from home, loved ones and the team back at base. I think intelligent, strategic use of videoconferencing over business travel full stop is an increasingly sensible and enlightened option, but over business aviation it is a no-brainer.

The FlyBe campaign aims to collect and collate people's stories of "video-conferencing disasters" and good news stories about why flying to that supposedly crucial meeting won new business.

I'd love to hear your experiences of positive video-conferencing benefits, or tales of when not making that dubious business trip by plane turned out to be a blessing in disguise!

By any means necessary...

2009-10-21T16:17:00.003+01:00

...is all travel inherently interesting? Do personal experiences translate into entertainment for others? Can we titillate with our tales of adventure? Or is it just all self-indulgent, ego-centric nonsense? These are the types of questions I'm asking myself on a daily basis as I wrestle with turning this blog, my columns and diaries into a book. I've taken three weeks of work to get a rough draft together so am constantly haunted by being an uninteresting/pompous/self-obsessed idiot at every turn!

But then...I read Sam Wollaston in the Guardian's TV review of that most vacuous of travellers Charley Boorman's latest trip (the clue is in the name) and I felt a lot better. Now Sam is not normally one to put the boot in, but the following is almost Brookeresque in it's pointedness...

Enjoy! (or you can read the article on the Guardian website here)

I'm a bit cross. I'm going on holiday next month, to Sulawesi, which is an island in Indonesia. It featured in a programme called Blood, Sweat and Takeaways a while back, about a bunch of horrid young Brits who were sent to work in a third-world tuna processing plant, and I thought it looked nice. Plus it's a lovely shape on the map; it looks as if it's moving, like an octopus swimming in the ocean – a four legged octopus. A quadrupus? A cat? Actually it could be a cat, from behind, with its tail waving in the air. Take a look on the Google.

Anyway, my holiday's now totally been ruined before it's even started, by Charley Boorman: Sydney to Tokyo by Any Means (BBC2, Sunday). He spends nearly all this episode on, guess where, Sulabloodywesi. You know, he's that grinning idiot with the teeth and the bulging eyes, who used to be Ewan McGregor's sidekick and then somehow got his own gig. Having a famous mate, and a famous dad (John, the film director), that seems to have been what got him the job. Unless it's for his insightful observations on the road . . .

– Charley on riding a motorbike through Sulawesi: "Here I am on a motorbike, and it's beautiful, beautiful countryside, just stunning."

– Charley on boatbuilding: "Beautiful, I like it, that's amazing."

– Charley on a Toyota Land Cruiser: "Beautiful, just beautiful."

– Charley on riding a motorbike through Sulawesi, part 2: "It's beautiful, just riding along the coastline, up and down the mountains, and all sorts of different places. It's – very, very, very beautiful here."

– Charley on the view: "Look at that, incredible, it's just so beautiful here."

– Charley on the weather: "The weather's just so beautiful here."

– Charley on riding a motorbike through Sulawesi, part 3: "We'll just ride and ride and ride, and it's going to be beautiful."

They may as well have sent Bernard Matthews. I'm glad you're having a lovely holiday Charley, and I admire your enthusiasm, but I don't really understand why this is on television. You need to tell me interesting stuff, entertain me, or amuse me. Or do something extraordinary. And I'm not sure this is extraordinary – your team of fixers calling ahead to arrange for you to borrow beautiful Harley-Davidsons and Toyota Land Cruisers. Or, when that doesn't happen, taking the bus or a plane like everyone else. It's all so very uninteresting. Obviously I'm really just cross because now I have to travel in Charley's footsteps.

Be the change...

2009-09-02T11:47:00.003+01:00

...anxious about climate change? Ready to act? Pull those fingers from your posterior and get onboard with THE campaign that's set to revolutionise and poularise climate action! We're all in this together, and it's only working together that we can tackle the challenge...so, come on, what are you waiting for, the first 10% is the easy bit!

Sign up here

10:10 and counting...

2009-08-28T14:10:00.002+01:00

So the Climate Camp is occupying Blackheath in London, I'm about to hop on my bicycle to cruise the streets as part of Critical Mass and on Tuesday the major '10:10' campaign launches - to cut carbon emissions by 10% in 2010 - courtesy of my mates at the Age of Stupid.

Be there outside Tate Modern from 4pm to show your support and get onboard, as well as claiming your unique 10:10 charm made from a recycled plane!

Watch the video...

747 to 1010 in 34 seconds from Age of Stupid on Vimeo.

Air miles? No thanks!

2009-08-27T17:23:00.005+01:00

I've been venting some spleen on the Guardian Ethical Living blog again with a post about the increasingly odd ways you can now earn air miles - up to 750 for your old mobile phone for instance...and suggesting alternative things you might do with your old handset...including entering the World Mobile Phone Throwing Championships which are held, of course in the home of Nokia, Finland - Fineland!

Check out the blog here.

Rough Guide...

2009-07-29T19:00:00.004+01:00

Well blow me down with a pair of bellows we've also just had a mention in the new Rough Guides publication 'Clean Breaks - 500 New ways to see the world'. Co-written by my old mate Richard Hammond (author of the 'Green Traveller' blog and website) the books all about alternative ways to travel that might make a bit of a difference to you and the world, from quirky modes of getting around (well...that's us!) to trips which really engage with and benefit local people.

It all sounds like a splendid read and you can even get 20% off if you enter the magic password 'ROUGH' at the checkout in the Rough Guides online bookshop here. Although you may have to wait until the thing is actually published in August (patience is a virtue and all that). Anyway, here's a sneaky preview of the page (yes, one whole page!) that www.lowcarbontravel.com appears on...(you may need a magnifying glass to read the text so I've copied it below the pic)

"THE NO-FLYERS. In 2007, Ed Gillespie and his girlfriend Fiona King took a sabbatical and headed off on a round-the-world trip. But rather than select the seven airports their plane tickets would let them stop at, they declined to fl y and went instead by as many other forms of transport as they could, from coaches through Eastern Europe to camels in the Mongolian desert. Along the way they were battered by a severe storm in the Bay of Biscay, drank with fellow travellers on the Trans-Siberian Express, rode mopeds through the hills of Vietnam and watched whales from the deck of a cargo boat while passing the Great Barrier Reef. To read about Ed and Fiona’s trip, as well as the travel blogs Ed’s written since coming home, go to www.lowcarbontravel.com"

Gong!

2009-07-22T14:22:00.004+01:00

You'll note from the slightly gaudy insert to the right of this page that this blog has won a gong (well, the dizzy heights of 7th, (yes 7th!) place in the Tripbase Blog Awards 2009.

The awards were apparently initiated to acknowledge travel blogging excellence and recognize the role bloggers play in today's travel market (and do some useful PR for Tripbase of course)

I snuck in just behind Mark Lynas' blog, and a few places ahead of our Futerra housemates Sandbag...no inter-house rivalry here then!

The judging panel consisted of a team of experts who scoured the Internet for the very best travel blogs. The blogs were then short-listed via a rigorous selection process, taking in factors such as information, writing style, design, etc.

A total of 400 blogs were acknowledged for excellence. The full list of winners and finalists can be found on the Tripbase website.

"We were surprised by the number of green travel blogs out there - a sign that people are becoming more eco-conscious when they travel," said CEO and co-Founder, Reuven Levitt. "From travelogues to region-specific content, practical guides and niche topics, the standard was consistently high. We hope these awards will help people find their ideal travel blog and, ultimately, the vacation experience that's perfect for them!"

And if it doesn't involve getting on a plane that's even better!

; )

Trains vs Planes!

2009-06-03T18:08:00.003+01:00

It probably wouldn't be a surprise to anyone that I tend to prefer tootling along in a train to twanging myself around by plane. The laidback pleasure of a good trans-continental trundle is infinitely preferable to a sweaty-palmed bunny-hop courtesy of Michael O'Leary. Yet it's a constant source of severe irritation, like itching powder on your gusset, that the pricing difference between planes and trains is so cock-eyed.

It is absolutely ludicrous that it's possible to fly across the UK far, far cheaper than it is to hop on a train. Why is this? Well, there's no doubt trains are over-priced, especially if you have to travel last minute...something ticketing regimes actively seek to punish, it's so so naughty. I was shocked to discover that on the continent most countries have flat ticket fares that don't fluctuate in price like an epileptic metronome depending on how far in advance you buy them. No! You pay the same whether you book ten years or ten minutes ahead. British ambush pricing be damned!

But this aside, the main reason flights are cheaper than train journeys is all the subsidy that airlines receive, for 'regeneration' of regional airports, incentives to attract them to offer new routes, the lack of aviation fuel tax to name but a few...and it is these benefits that allow them to undercut trains.

If we levelled the playing field, as they have done in Spain, by offering cheap, reliable and fast train alternatives to flying between places like Madrid and Barcelona then passengers vote with their feet...and get on the rails (as 400,000 did last year as quoted in this article). Unfortunately this needs Government intervention, either to hypothecate a tax on short haul aviation to subsidise rail travel or just to simply remove the perverse subsidies that benefit far more carbon intensive air travel.

Anyway, before I rant my arse off here's a great campaign to sign up to from the Campaign for Better Transport and a fun little video that shows how unfair this all is...

Fishy damnation...

2009-06-02T16:51:00.002+01:00

Some readers of this blog may remember my trip to the infamous Tokyo fish market a year or two ago, which given my background and original training as a marine biologist was nothing short of deeply shocking and somewhat mind-boggling. I blogged about it here in a post called "Fishy hangover cures and eternal damnation"

I was reminded of my encounter with the frozen tuna in the context of the film 'End of the Line' inspired by UK environment journalist Charles Clover's excellent and terrifying book of the same name. It's out in cinema's next week and looks to be yet another sobering reminder of the impact of so many rapacious hungry human mouths on the planet. It would be a true tragedy if we were to destroy beasts as magnificent as the bluefin tuna, just so we can put them on our plates...

Go and see the film, think twice about which seafood you eat and to whet your creative appetite and sate your piscivirous one watch the film's trailer below...

Comment is free...

2009-04-25T09:49:00.003+01:00

I wrote a piece for the Guardian's 'Comment is Free' page yesterday in my role as a Patron of the 'Slow Down London Festival' which I have mentioned previously here. If your last quiet moment to yourself was a bowel movement maybe you too ought to think about slowing down?! Here's what I wrote...

Ever found yourself tutting with dramatically impatient exasperation when the tube countdown display says "Next train four minutes"? Caught yourself grinding your teeth in fury at the snail-like walking pace of the elderly lady tottering along the pavement in front of you? Overheard yourself saying to mates "I haven't stopped/had a minute to spare/even been able to think about it I've been so busy, busy busy"? If your last quiet moment to yourself was a bowel movement, maybe a change of lifestyle pace may not be such a bad idea?

We live in an age where we're increasingly paranoid about being offline, practically twittering our partner's sexual performance "live" to an unsuspecting world. We hurtle from bed to desk to bar and bed again, wolfing sarnies on the hoof, conducting our social lives by text and bemoaning every perceived wasted minute spent waiting for someone or something that has temporarily distracted us from our relentless pursuit of … what? A meaning derived primarily from the fact we haven't an instant to even question the meaning of it all? A sense of fulfilment fuelled by frantic freneticism? An insecurity that idleness equals unimportance? We don't just have no time to stop and stare, we have no time to stop full stop.

Slow down London. Is it a festival or a well-intentioned suggestion? Well, it's both. Over the next 10 days or so, a sensuous smorgasbord of seductively slow events and activities seeks to explore the rewards we might reap from decelerating our wham, bam, thank you ma'am existence a little. Whether it's taking a leisurely stroll through familiar streets at a different pace to reveal new perspectives, sinking your teeth into something succulent and seasonal or enjoying a philosophical excursion into the nature of time and how we value it, we all have something to potentially gain from taking our foot off the pedal.

A life without reflection is like eating a meal without tasting it. Goals might be achieved, stomachs are filled but the opportunity to savour is sadly squandered. This is the way my old family dog used to consume its dinner. A mongrel beagle from the RSPCA, the poor beast had obviously been fed erratically so every morsel put in front of it was not so much eaten as inhaled almost instantly. The craven canine never learned how to enjoy a meal properly so desperate was it to seize the opportunity to eat.

If we are not careful we will end up living our lives the same way. Charging around in a perpetual state of multi-tasking madness we can all too easily miss the moments that really matter. Perhaps it's the winking on of the mental lightbulb with a cunningly creative idea during a stolen chunk of quiet contemplation? Reconnecting with the real fundamentals of family and friends, love and laughter, looking after each other and the world around us? Or remembering why being busy can be a good thing by balancing it with a bit of languid bumbling?

Whatever works for you I suspect slowing down a tad may well make us all a bit happier, sexier, less stressed, better company and possibly even a modicum wiser. The really perverse irony is if we're in too much of a rush to even give it a try.

Back one year...

2009-04-04T15:15:00.003+01:00

Hard to believe but we have been home for over a year now though the memories still burn like warm fires in the soul to hearten us in any dark and difficult moments. There's also a strange circularity to the feel of London protests in the spring. Last week's G20 shenanigans have proved a reminder of the Tibet protests this time last year, as I wrote on the blog.

12 months on I'm working on the book about the trip, toiling away feverishly at Futerra and still updating this blog with other slow travels...so a huge ongoing thank you to everyone who reads me! I've had over 35,000 unique visitors to this site to date and hopefully this can continue to grow as interest in slow travel increases.

In praise of cargo ships!

2009-03-27T12:25:00.003Z

The Guardian Leader this morning gives a tribute to Britain's history as a sea-faring nation and the value that marine shipping still brings to the UK. I couldn't agree more! As a huge fan of cargo ship travel (as evidenced by my various musings on the subject here)

I've cut and pasted the full text of the Leader below, or you can read it in situ on the Guardian site here.

A glimpse of the sea that surrounds us is no more than an hour or so away, wherever you are on this island. Our language is littered with the flotsam of a nautical legacy. But as the cranes and warehouses near the centres of coastal cities gave way to riverside apartments, the nation's awareness of its dependence on the sea ebbed away like the tide. Britain no longer really thinks of itself as a maritime nation. But it still is. Downstream, and largely out of sight, at ports such as Tilbury, huge container ships and cargo vessels load exports and unload imports, day and night. These leviathans of the deep deliver enormous economies of scale - 10p to ship a bottle of whisky to Japan and 70p to ship a DVD player back the other way; shipping is also the greenest way to do it, when the alternative is flying. As North Sea fuel supplies run down, great tankers of oil and gas from the Middle East are becoming vital to keeping the lights on - last week the first tanker arrived at Milford Haven's huge new liquefied gas terminal. The recession is hitting the shipping industry hard, like everything else. But worldwide a million seafarers ply their trade across the oceans to deliver five billion tons of trade; and the British fleet has grown markedly since the government introduced a new tax regime in 2000, and is now the 9th largest in the world. Nautical colleges are getting busier too. With London still the maritime capital for insurance and the marketplace for joining up cargoes with ships, the sea is still a good little earner for Britain.

Slow Down London!

2009-03-17T17:49:00.004Z

I'll be joining the Financial Times' journalist Harry Eyres (author of the 'Slow Lane' column) in conversation on the South Bank on April 29th as part of the Slow Down London festival. Tickets for this evening session that will explore the joys, challenges and arguable necessity of slower travel in our climate changing world are available via this link. (Or you can just read all about it on here!)

New Ryanair Safety Card...

2009-03-01T18:54:00.001Z

Following this announcement by Ryanair about charging for toilet use I got sent the mocked up safety card below. But it's the Daily Mash's take on this that really cracked me up!

Age of Stupid...

2009-02-24T10:28:00.002Z

Probably the scariest most inspiring film you'll ever see...