When booking a recent two hour return train journey I spotted that I could take 1st class on the return leg for only £5 extra. I thought I’d give it a go to see if it is any better than standard class.

The standard class outward journey

If you are taking a Virgin Train from a London mainline station like Euston and are in standard class, one of the first things you’ll notice is that you have quite a long walk to your carriage.

The 1st class carriages are nearest to the building entrance. The standard class carriages are at the other end so you might need a minute or two of walking to reach them.

Above is what the seating looks like. There are four seats across in standard class. The train itself is quite narrow so there isn’t a lot of space.

Don’t bother bringing luggage with you, especially at busy times, there’s hardly any space. The luggage rack above the seat is a joke. The space starts off fairly small in the middle of the carriage, and gets smaller and smaller as you get to the ends of the carriage. At the ends of the carriage you’d be lucky to get your coat in there.

There are some luggage spaces in the carriage, but competition for this space can be fierce. If you’ve ever been in standard class before Christmas you’ll know that bringing anything bigger than what you can fit on the floor in front of you, or on your lap is a bad idea.

At quieter times you won’t have problems, but it is sometimes hard to know whether it will be quiet or busy.

If you book on the Virgin Trains website you’ll get an automatic seat reservation. There is a display above each seat which says whether it is reserved or not. If you are lucky then you’ll find your seat unoccupied. If not you’ll have to ask a grumpy looking passenger to move on.

In standard class you’ll find a carriage where you can buy drinks, snacks and magazines. The shop closes about half an hour before reaching the final destination (they seem to need a lot of time to check the stock and count the takings).

There is also usually a quiet carriage in standard class where you are not supposed to use your phone, or play music at audible volume. People still do though, and I’ve never seen a ticket inspector do anything about it.

The 1st class return journey

First class is a bit more spacious. There are only three seats across in 1st class. Other than the extra space there isn’t much different about the interior of the carriage.

During the weekdays they’ll serve you a complimentary meal if you are travelling at the right time.

At the weekend you’ll have to make do with a complimentary tea, drink, and snack. I got a bottle of fizzy water, and a pack of two cookies.

In 1st class there is free WiFi. It is also available in standard class but you’ll have to pay for it there. As with most public WiFi the connection is unencrypted so be careful what you look at, as other (bad!) people could intercept your internet traffic if they wanted. Stick to standard website browsing, and only enter login details, or send sensitive information if you are using an encrypted (HTTPS/SSL) website. Ideally you should use VPN software to keep your sent or received traffic confidential.

On arriving back in London my carriage was very near to the station exit so I got out fast, whereas those in standard class had to walk much further along the platform.

Normally 1st class is much more expensive than standard class so I’d say it isn’t worth it, but if you can get a 1st class ticket for just a few pounds more than your standard class ticket then it is worth a go.

I’ve used Interflora in the past when I’ve needed to get flowers for various people. As a result of this I ended up on Interflora’s postal mailing list. Every so often I would get mailing in the post advertising their services. Especially around the times of flower giving events such as Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day.

I’m not a bit fan of getting junk mail so I thought I’d send a quick message to them to ask them to stop it. I used the Interflora Contact page to send them my request. This I did on the 1st August 2009.

As always when contacting a company I make a record of it just in case I need to make a further complaint later on. I record the details on my telephone call logging spreadsheet. Despite the name it works well for recording details of emails, and letters that I send as well.

Despite my request, later in the year I received another junk mailing from Interflora, this one saying ‘Trust Interflora to deliver a smile this Christmas’. Their junk mail didn’t put a smile on my face!

On the 29th January 2010 I sent them a second complaint through their contact page. This time I got a message back from one of their customer service people apologising for the inconvenience caused.

Now after two complaints they are bound to have removed me from their mailing list. Right?

Wrong. Come February 2010 I received another one suggesting I send someone flowers for their birthday. And in March 2010 I got another one reminding me about Mother’s Day.

So it is now 4th March 2010 and I have sent them my third complaint. Will I finally be removed from their mailing list? I’m not hopeful, and I’ll update this post if I get any more unwanted Interflora post.

If you go on a short holiday then it should be pretty easy to manage your holiday money. It isn’t too hard to track how quickly your foreign currency is running out when you are only abroad for a week or two.

If you are going on holiday for a number of months then it becomes a bit harder. When I recently went on holiday for three months I thought being able to record my available currency in the form of a burn down chart would be a useful thing to do.

I ended up creating an excel spreadsheet which when filled in gave me three lines on a graph.

1. The first straight line (pink) goes down from the total amount of foreign currency on the first day of my holiday to 0 on the last day of my currency. This line shows where my currency reserves should be on average each day in order to spend all the money I took with me.
2. The second line (blue) is the actual amount of foreign currency that I have left. A few times a week I would count up how much money I had left, and enter the data into the Excel spreadsheet. This would then update the second line. If this line is above the straight line then I’m under spending (on average), if the line is above the straight line then I’m over spending. The concept of under or over spending is of course ‘on average’. There may be good reasons why your spending during your holiday might be unevenly spread.
3. The third line (yellow) is plotted against the axis on the right of the chart. This shows how much currency I have left per day on average.

Using the holiday currency burn down spread sheet

To make it easier to see how to use the spread sheet I have put a load of example data in the yellow cells. When you understand it you will have to remove the example data and enter your real data. Don’t delete anything in the red cells as these cells contain the formulas which will make it all work.

I have put comments in cells A2, B2, H2, I2 and I3 explaining what you need to put into these cells to get the spread sheet setup for your own holiday.

Then all you need to do is update it every few days and you’ll be able to see how fast your holiday money is burning down.

Download the holiday money spreadsheet from here (12kb).

Once again the Royal Mail have failed to deliver. Well – that’s not strictly true. They did deliver – but just look at what I got.

How on earth did they manage to deliver a letter with this much damage? It is crumpled and ripped, with part of the envelope missing. There is a big hole in the envelope at the bottom left. And if you look at the letter from the back, you can see that the whole top of the letter is open.

Here are some other Royal Mail FAILs that I regularly encounter. You may be familiar this list yourself.

• Post being lost and never arriving at my address.
• Post for my address being delivered to another address (there may be a link between the first one and this one!).
• Letters for other addresses being delivered to my address.
• Items of post that clearly say ‘Do not bend’, being folded to make them fit through the letter box.
• ’Sorry you were out’ cards being left without being properly filled in making it hard to collect the item at the depot.

When these kinds of problem happen so regularly it is no wonder that people are looking for ways to avoid using the post if it is not necessary.

Royal Mail have some information about the claims process for damaged post on their website.