I have in my pocket a train ticket.  “Yes, well so what?” I hear you say.  Well I only mention it because this one has “DB” written on it in large red letters which means that it’s German and it was printed by the Deutsche Bahn railway company.  It also has “ICE” written on it which means that it’s a ticket for the Inter-City Express.   I’m reliably informed this means that the train should be quiet, efficient, and rather fast.  Well we shall see.

I’m currently in Leipzig where I have been working for the last couple of days and this particular train is bound for Frankfurt, where I shall hopefully change and get on another one for Brussels, and then change again for Antwerp.

Admittedly a train may not immediately seem like the best way to get from Eastern Germany to Western Belgium, but given that the equivalent flight would cost around eight times the price it seemed like a sensible decision.  Besides, I’m always flying when travelling on business and it gets boring after a while, whereas I’ve never used the train before and so it’ll be a new experience for me.  This particular train is one of the tilting trains; the “ICE-T” variant.

So far I’ve been pleasantly surprised.  The train is modern and well equipped, the seats are comfortable, we left precisely on time at 09:15, and the very nice lady in my section of the train bought me a mug of tea at my seat shortly after departure.  So all that remains is to see whether the standards remain this high for the rest of the journey.

10:11 – Weimar – Our first stop.  I’ve so far not seen any evidence of the rumoured phenomenal speed out of this thing, but in fairness we’ve not yet made our way out of the urban areas.

10:30 – Erfurt – A nice place, surrounded by beautiful countryside and well kept farm-land.   The carriage is getting busier now, but everyone is still quiet and considerate.  Frankly, the British have much to learn about public transport.

10:43 – Gotha – Worrying; according to the timetable that was left on my table, we now appear to be running late.   How can this be?   I’m in Germany, and surely this constitutes a lack of efficiency.  I’m confused; maybe I’ve misunderstood something.

10:58 – Eisenach – The view from the window is now starting to get seriously pretty.  I can see old hill-top forts, winding rivers, picturesque little villages, and it’s generally all rather pleasant.

11:51 – Fulda – Yep, there’s no denying it; we are definitely running late.  I’m not sure what to make of this because from my experience it is so un-German that I’m nervously beginning to wonder how the locals are going to take it.  Some of the people in the seats near me are starting to check their watches quite frequently so I know it’s not just my imagination. I’ve never seen a German revolt before but I suspect that I may witness one before the day is out.

12:41 – Frankfurt (Main) Station – Errr… we’ve arrived precisely on time.  This is obviously superb and I’m delighted, but I simply don’t know how it has happened. We were definitely running late, absolutely without question, but DB have apparently pulled a little white German rabbit out of their metaphorical hat.   I can only assume that at the front of the train our driver must have glanced down at his watch, panicked, exclaimed something along the lines of “ziss vill not do!”, then taken hold of one of his precisely-engineered controls and turned the wick up a bit.  Well no matter what happened, I’m impressed.  Why on earth can’t we do this sort of thing in England?

12:55 – The DB business lounge – Peace, comfort, a drink, a sandwich, a tree, no bill.  Nice.

13:29 – Seat 41 aboard my second train; the ICE 14 to Brussels – It just gets better and better.  This train is newer than the last one, if that’s actually possible.  There is much more space, it’s quieter than before (which again is something that I’d have previously considered implausible), and of course it left precisely on time.

13:55 – Somewhere blurred – WAAAAAH!!  Warp speed Mr. Sulu!  OK, this thing can shift.   We’re travelling parallel with an autobahn and there are Porsches on it which appear to be moving rather slowly.   Now I’ve previously driven on an autobahn and I know just how fast people drive.  The on-board speed sign shows 270 km/h in this photo, but I saw it go up to 299 km/h during the journey.  This train is seriously quick!

14:45 – Koln – I think that half of Europe has just boarded the train.  Why is Koln so popular, I wonder?  Or are they perhaps all just trying to get out?  Either way the peace has been shattered by rucksack-carrying student types, which is a pity.

15:16 – Aachen – We’re still going well but now it’s raining.  Not that it matters when one is inside, of course, but it spoils the view somewhat.  I bought a car from Aachen once, which was fun too.

15:44 – Liege – Umm, well I don’t want be be unfair to the place but Liege doesn’t really look very interesting.   It probably doesn’t benefit from the fact that it’s grey, wet, and horrible outside.  I’m probably wrong and I’m probably doing the place a huge injustice.   Sorry Liege, but you really would benefit from sprucing your station up a bit.

16:26 – Brussels Nord – Right then, I’ve come to a conclusion.  German ICE trains are absolutely marvellous, and I shall definitely use them again if the opportunity arises.  The service is superb, the facilities are excellent, and if you don’t mind your journey taking a bit longer then it’s considerably more comfortable than flying.  It’s also quite a bit more civilised; for example nobody has asked to see my passport and not once has a security official made any attempt to find out how much metal I might have about my person.  Furthermore I have not been separated from my luggage at any point, and my belt and shoes have stayed fastened around my anatomy in the accepted fashion at all times.  Well done Germany, you get today’s travel prize.

16:37 – Somewhere between Brussels and Antwerp – Ah… Sorry Belgium, you DON’T get today’s travel prize.

I am now sitting aboard one of your trains and it kind of reminds me of driving a Vauxhall Vectra.   Why?  Well because if we look at the situation logically then we find that both of the aforementioned vehicles are perfectly functional forms of transport that do their job in an adequate fashion.   But that’s about as far as it goes – adequate.   I’m struggling to be kind when I use that word because I’m looking around at the scratchy plastic, and at some styling that makes me suspect that it was done by a Romanian pig farmer wielding a club hammer.  I’m just overwhelmed by disappointment! If you compare it to the German experience then frankly it’s a bit dull.  Just like the Vauxhall Vectra.

17:15 – Antwerp – Hooray, we’ve arrived!  A disappointing final leg of an otherwise utterly superb journey.  However credit where credit is due; Antwerp station is actually rather impressive, and the architecture in the original part of the station is stunning.

If you want to travel across Europe and you are not in a huge rush – take the train!

This is a bit of an odd subject, but I have just witnessed the most fascinating display of human behaviour. My local supermarket, of which I am very fond because it is so close to my home, has decided to rearrange all of the shelves and place items in different locations around the store.

This change is evidently causing shoppers one or two ‘issues’, and at first I must admit that I found the new layout to be somewhat tiresome. Food shopping is something that I suppose none of us really want to do, but it is one of the necessary evils of life. So there I was, trying to hunt down the last few items on my list, and I began to form the opinion that it should be made illegal for supermarkets to change their layout without first applying for the retail equivalent of planning permission. I’d not considered something that ludicrous before, but the more I thought about it the more it seemed like a good idea. Just think about it for a minute – supermarkets could be made to register their wish to change their shelving layout, the proposal could be advertised, and then shoppers would have a reasonable period of time to submit their objections to the plans, or at the very least study the new layout in cartographic form so that they would know where to find things. I personally think that it would be a much better system than the one I have just witnessed; namely a few hundred people each armed with an overloaded trolley, moving around the store in a fashion approximating that of Brownian motion, with utterly confused looks upon their faces and progressively making themselves more and more angry. The manager must have been receiving rather a lot of complaints because the staff were issuing regular public address announcements, offering their apologies for the confusion and inconvenience.

At one stage I was beginning to get irritated by the changes, but then fortunately I was rescued by an unexpected bout of schadenfreude. I noticed that wherever I looked I could see people getting extremely upset indeed that they couldn’t find things, and the realisation hit me that the adverse public reaction to something so trivial was really quite pathetic. What made the situation even funnier was that as I started to listen to the various conversations around me, I could hear people uttering in panic-stricken tones sentences such as “Oh, why can’t I find the sugar?!?”. Glancing down into my own trolley I noted that I had already found the sugar, which only served to heighten the pleasure of the situation.

However what I couldn’t work out was why people were looking in my direction, pausing, and then suddenly a sense of relief would drift across their faces and a wry smile would immediately replace it. It baffled me for quite some time but it wasn’t until the checkout queue that I realised what was going on. I had completely forgotten that I was wearing a new T-shirt which is based upon the motivational message devised by the British government at the beginning of World War II. The slogan was never actually published or released at the time, but it has since been adopted as a brand …

It’s been an odd day.  It started (not unusually) in an airport departure lounge whilst waiting for my flight.  I have friends who mock me for this, telling me that I’m complacent about my regular business travel.  I can of course understand why they think that, because I was pretty excited about it all when I first started doing this job.  But as all regular business travellers will appreciate, it’s really not all that it’s cracked up to be.

Anyway, that’s not the point for today, and a few hours later I found myself in Germany.  Specifically, I found myself in a very pleasant little town called Ahrensburg.  If you don’t know where it is then I can tell you that it’s near Hamburg, in North Germany.  Very North Germany in fact – if you went much further North you’d be in Denmark.  I’ve not been here before but when I looked at the pictures on the hotel’s web page a few weeks ago it looked like quite a picturesque little place so I bought my camera along with me.  Photography is a bit of a long lost hobby for me; I’ve only just recently taken it up again after a rather long break and I’m just starting to re-discover some of my old skills.  It’s been fun actually, and I’d forgotten what all the fuss was about.  I don’t usually make a habit of taking a camera with me when I travel (especially on business) but perhaps I shall review that policy in future.  When I arrived here I was a bit disappointed because it didn’t seem to be all that special; so I checked in to the hotel, went up to my room, opened the laptop, and started doing some work.  I have a busy schedule coming up and there is a lot of learning that I have to do before I have to deliver some complex presentations to some fairly large audiences.  But my diligence got thrown to the wolves when I suddenly learnt that one of my fellow presenters would be absent from some of our planned future events.  This has resulted in me having to take responsibility for a lot more work at very short notice.   I wasn’t terribly amused about it if truth be told, and I suffered a bit of a primitive human “sod it” response upon hearing the news.   It was the break I needed though, so I downed tools, picked up the camera, and decided to go for a walk.  Oh and wasn’t that the correct decision? Ahrensburg is absolutely beautiful!

In the end I spent about an hour wandering around, and I have taken many photographs.  There is an old castle here which is magnificent, a lovely old wooden bridge on the edge of the beautifully peaceful woodland area, and the countryside surrounding the town is really very nice indeed.  But it was during my self-guided local tour of the area that I suddenly found myself in an unexpectedly awkward situation.  It probably sounds a bit daft, but I happened upon a war memorial.

It was a particularly splendid war memorial as it happens, and one that was set in a very pretty and tranquil part of the town.  Now I’ve seen lots of war memorials in my life, and although I hope that they will never lose their significance, frankly they’ve all started to look a bit “same old”.  But this one was different, and perhaps it was just because of today’s date, but as I stood there on my own I was hit by an overwhelmingly guilty voice in my head which repeatedly said “we caused that”.  I am not attempting to comment upon the causes and reasons for the war, but my point is simply that I found myself standing in front of a monument that represented the deaths of an awful lot of people which were caused by the actions of my fellow countrymen.

It has been quite a few hours since I was there now, but it has left me wondering… was that an unreasonable emotion to experience under the circumstances?  After all, the memorial was much the same as all of the others that I have seen, and it was placed there to make people think about the mistakes of the past.  Admittedly I’ve not seen all that many memorials which are carved in German and bear the military emblems of another country’s armed forces, but I still didn’t imagine that I’d feel quite so uncomfortable about the whole thing.

It was an odd experience, and I spent the next few hours feeling really rather self-conscious about being an Englishman visiting Germany on the anniversary of such a significant event.  Even more oddly, I didn’t see any signs of the locals treating today like it was anything special.  In the UK you’d have to be blind to miss the various banners and posters produced by the Royal British Legion as part of their yearly Poppy Appeal campaign, but here I saw nothing.  Of course I recognise that there is clearly going to be a very different perspective on that particular bit of history, but I was expecting to see something which at least noted the event.  Could it be that the whole thing is quietly ignored in Germany?  Frankly I didn’t feel that it was appropriate to ask anyone about it.

Over dinner tonight I’ve finally come to the conclusion that I probably shouldn’t need to feel guilty about it, but it has hammered home one important message which I thought I’d share.  We (the so-called allied countries) weren’t the only ones to suffer abhorrent losses during those years, and I think that sometimes we all forget that.  It got me thinking, and it is something that I am going to try to keep in mind when I next see an Afghanistan-related news story on the television.  Because really, honestly, as a species I’m not entirely convinced that we’re actually learning from our mistakes.

Well now hasn’t today been a voyage of discovery?!  I have just learnt of the existence of a completely new punctuation mark; it’s called the suspension point.

No, it’s not one of those.  That’s an entirely different sort of suspension point.  The one I am talking about is a linguistic one.  “So what is it?” I hear you ask – well I’ll explain it now.  Here goes …

Did you see it?  Yes, that was it!  No no, back there!  Just after the word “goes”.  Those three little full stops.  Yes apparently that’s called a suspension point, and frankly I find that quite interesting because I have been using them (wrongly as it happens) for longer than I care to remember.

The reason for me writing this drivel is that I have just been scorned by my good friend Plutus.  You know, the one who enraged me previously when he taunted me about the elusive 50p coin?  Yes, that one.  Anyway, it turns out that unbeknownst to me he is a reader of this site, and today he left a comment in response to my rant about the Apostrophe Abuse.  I thought it was quite a good rant, and you simply won’t believe how many times I checked it to ensure that I’d not made any grammatical errors.  To do such a thing in a grammatical rant would have been unforgivable, but despite my best efforts it transpires that I actually made a complete monkey’s breakfast of my suspension point.  Now I thought that when people used a series of full stops it was just a random collection of them, used to imply a pause.  The “slang” of punctuation, if you will.  But no, I have done my research and dammit he’s right.

Personally I am taking a little bit of comfort from the thought that Plutus could now be sitting at home wondering whether he has made himself look like the worst kind of snobby language-obsessed arse.  Or at the very least I sincerely hope that’s the case.  Incidentally, if you’d like to read some of his drivel then you can do so here.

Quite honestly though I really am rather cross about this whole affair, because it turns out that (a) he is right, and (b) I was close.  I had used four full stops rather than three, and that’s really not too bad in the grand scheme of things.  I take his point though; the use of more than ten full stops really is unforgivable and admittedly it has always struck me as looking highly sloppy.  But on this particular occasion I am pleading innocence because I didn’t even know that there was a linguistic / grammatical convention about such things.  Sadly I do now, and it therefore means that I shall lie awake tonight wondering in how many places I have previously made the same mistake.  Of course to most of the population this will be a matter of completely inconsequential pedanticism, but to me this is a big deal.  Why?  Well because I’ve written quite a few articles in my time and therefore there’s a very good chance that I’ve made the same mistake in an awful lot of places.

Bugger.

Two hundred and seventy four pounds? Good grief, that’s just obscene!

What am I talking about? I’m talking about how much money Orange want to provide me with a shiny new iPhone 3GS – that’s what. Now I shall not deny it – I am indeed a bit of an Apple fan-boy and therefore I went weak at the knees when Orange started to offer the new iPhone. But prices like these are just silly. £274 is simply not a reasonable amount of money to pay for a new mobile phone, even if it is the coolest gadget on the face of the planet to be manufactured in living memory.

What particularly wounds me is that I’m told that I spend quite a lot on mobile phones. Usually when I walk into the shop to upgrade, the sales staff suck air through their teeth when I point out my latest choice of technological pornography and they utter the words “oooh, that’ll be very expensive”. Then they tap a few keys on their computer, view my account details, their eyes widen, and they say “oh, I see you spend quite a lot with us Sir, so your upgrade will be free today”. “Thank you” I think to myself, “that’s much better”.

So how on earth can Orange expect me to pay over two hundred pounds this time around? Well I wont, so there. Sorry Orange, you’ll have to do better. I have a price in mind, and it certainly doesn’t contain three digits. Well, not unless you include the pence anyway.

iPhone? iThink not.

Its amazing that peoples ability to use simple thing’s like punctuation mark’s is not better.  Its also really annoying when corporation’s cant get it right either.

Now then…. many of you will by now be internally screaming.  Some of you may even have suffered an uncontrollable verbal outburst at the true horror of what I’ve just done.  I should perhaps make it completely clear at this point that my first paragraph was written deliberately, and it pained me dearly to do so.  If you have managed to read this far and you have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about, then hang your head in shame but do please keep reading.

I’m talking about this….

Most of you will recognise it as an apostrophe, which is a marvellous little feature of the English language and when used correctly can save time, space, and generally allow a sentence to flow an awful lot better.  But the simple fact is that there is far too much abuse of this little punctuation mark in the world.  I have been doing my absolute best to correct it whenever I can, but one has to be very careful when correcting others if one doesn’t wish to end up looking like an arse.  It shouldn’t be the case, because after all it’s merely the act of preserving the English language so that it doesn’t get abused any further.  Now perhaps this makes me a language snob, but I just cannot ignore the fact that there are plenty of people in the world who believe that the basic principles of our language can be cast aside for the sake of social acceptance.  Well, I’m afraid that I’m not one of them.  Innit.

To make matters worse, I see far too many incorrect signs and posters which have been produced by multi-million pound corporations.  How on earth can this be allowed to happen?  Do they not have marketing departments whose job it is to check such things?  It’s a slippery slope – the BBC will probably be doing it next, and at that stage I may have to emigrate on general principle.

So imagine my joy when I found that some clever soul has managed to tackle the subject of apostrophe abuse in a graphical and fun way, by producing a website to educate the masses.  Here is the link, and I am only too pleased to share it with you.

Ahhh, those clever Germans.  Or in this case perhaps it’s “those clever Swedes”.  Here is an absolutely brilliant example of how to make a chore more fun, so that people will actually want to do it.  Mary Poppins would doubtless have approved.  Plus, they’ve done it in a techy way, so it gets my vote.

The more attentive amongst you may have noticed that entries to this site have been a bit scarce lately.  The super keen-eyed will also have noticed that the layout of this site has changed completely.  The reason for both of these changes is actually the same; it all went horribly wrong!

I had previously been using the Apple iWeb application which was supplied with my Mac, and in fairness it is was all very easy to use and made life very simple.  Sadly, and for reasons that I still can’t explain, it suddenly stopped working.  The error messages that I got from iWeb were not even funny, to say nothing of unhelpful, and it’s the one and only true calamity that I have ever had during my period of Mac ownership.  I remember feeling genuinely shocked and dissapointed, and I described the experience to friends as being “not very Apple”.  I called their support hotline and a very helpful Apple person did his absolute best to remotely coax iWeb back to life.  It wasn’t a half-hearted effort either, because he really did seem to know what he was doing.  I’m a techie, and some of the manual file edits that he guided me though were scaring the life out of me.  But in the end it was all declared a complete failure, and seeing as it was an inexplicable one I decided that it should not be repeated.

I thought about giving the whole thing up as a bad job, but in the end I opted for a slightly less drastic alternative.  So you are now reading “It’s not a blog – Rev 2″, all powered by a very clever open source widget called “WordPress”.  The installation for the beginner can be a bit daunting because it requires some knowledge of how to set up SQL databases, but the instructions are good and there are plenty of people on YouTube who have made tutorials.  And here is the result, and it’s bloomin’ wonderful!  For me the most impressive bit is that it’s all “up in the cloud” rather than being on a my home machine, and now that it’s up and running I can write endless amounts of drivel from anywhere in the world provided that I have an internet connection.  And frankly that’s a good thing, because in my job I quite often find myself in very odd parts of the world with absolutely nothing better to do than to write complete drivel.  (Those of you who travel on company business will doubtless understand!)

So if you’re looking for a way to write drivel to the masses, I can highly recommend WordPress.  You can find it at http://wordpress.org/ and it’s completely free.