If I went to buy a new bike I know I would end up with the cheapest in the shop again – a bike is not my highest priority and they all look the same, so why fork out £300+ when there is something for £70?  That is the false economy I would probably make, but with this scheme you get a bike, plus accessories, and pay over 18 months, before tax.  For a higher-rate taxpayer than can work out at less than £15 a month for a really good bike – and you can save that much in petrol just by not driving to work.

The scheme my company is running expires at the end of next week so I’ll have to make my mind up quickly.   On the one hand its a real bargain, saves the planet a little bit, and would be good for whatever is left of my cardio-vascular system.  On the other hand… its going to be hard work on those hills,  a slightly longer journey, the chance of getting to work all sweaty – unless I get mowed down by a truck on the way.

It might be an excuse to start using the iRiver again though…  the more I weigh up the pros and cons the better it sounds.

Lots of other people were not so lucky and there were loads of individual stories at my work and at Jayne’s of journeys that normally take less than 30 minutes stretching to a couple of hours. Unpleasant, but being stuck in a jam for an hour is still preferable to being in the car that crashed.

Lots of chaos for commuters of course, but I wonder if was any less chaotic in the offices of our local papers. They are both weeklies which hit the shops on Wednesday morning so their deadlines are normally something like mid-day on the Tuesday, and I am guessing that the front page is usually decided on and laid out well before then. But they both managed to get this on the front page, with the Observer having an inside story as well. Must have been a busy morning.

I wonder what their front pages were going to be?

I’m guessing the News were going to lead with the nightclub bouncer story. I don’t see how they were going to resist a story with a headline like “I had to pick my own ear up from the floor”. A real ‘Ronseal headline’ that one – it does exactly what it says on the tin.

I’m also guessing that the Observer were going to lead with their latest bit of Moffatt-bashing which got bumped to page 5. The other week they went to the MP’s house when she was quite seriously unwell, not only doorstepping her but then taking a photo of her looking like she felt to splash on the front page. Despicable behaviour really. At least they are not as culpable this week. They didn’t go out looking for trouble, they just waited for someone at the Ifield/West Green branch meeting to call them up and tell them what went on.

Not the first time that details of internal party matters relating to Ifield branch meetings have ended up in the local papers. Its the third time I can think of in the last few years. I hope someone in the Ifield party is proud of themselves.

Today I want to heap a little praise for a change. This year I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered that the fare increases had resulted in my season ticket price going down, and then came down with a bump when I forgot about the New Year bank holiday and got my next ticket a day early. There is a twist to the tail, and a happy ending.

Looking at my tickets properly I discovered that the ticket chap at Crawley station actually gave me a new ticket for the one week after the old one expired so I didn’t lose out at all. In spite of my best unconscious efforts to stitch myself up, they made sure I was OK.

It doesn’t quite make up for years of signal failures, leaves on the line, derailments, ticket inspectors waking me up, unexplained delays, crowded carriages, out-of-order toilets and the rest, but at least I shall be going out on a high. Unless they can arrange a spot of misery in the next week for old times’ sake.

I will also miss the chap who sells me my paper in the morning – how does he manage to be so cheerful at 6:45am?

It was only on South West Trains but since they provide all the services to Waterloo (except for Eurostar of course) it was very quiet at work today. Apparently the strike was because managers drove some trains during the last strike, allegedly breaking an agreement that they would only operate trains in exceptional circumstances. An SWT manager said that they consider a strike to be exceptional circumstances.

I wonder if any managers drove trains today? Would that make the whole thing into a self-perpetuating series of strikes?

Leaving aside the merits of the the argument, I found it all to be a real pain in the arse. I usually travel into work via London Bridge so my journey in was the same as normal, but I go home via Clapham Junction for reasons too boring to go into. Today SWT were running a very reduced service but none of their trains was stopping at Clapham Junction so my only choices were to go home via London Bridge or take a tube or bus to Victoria.

I decided to go via London Bridge but cocked up enormously at Waterloo East. 99% of trains going from Waterloo East stop at London Bridge, so I just jumped on the first train and only realised when it was pulling out that it was one of the 1%

I ended up in Kidbrooke. The only sensible thing to do in Kidbrooke is cross to the other platform and take the first train back to civilisation. On the way back into town we stopped at Lewisham and New Cross and I did feel quite nostalgic for the old place. I made a mental note to find some excuse to go back there for a visit.

Anyway, thanks to that detour I ended up in Crawley at 7:20pm, having left work at 5:15pm and the SWT drivers are going to have to do something spectacular to get my sympathy in future disputes.

The timing of the first strike action is devious: they will walk out at 1300. Whenever there is a rail strike you know that some trains will run, but you can never be sure which ones. If it starts in the morning and your line is affected you can’t get to work, but who wants to go to work when they cannot sure of being able to get home in time for the match? Or even at all? It gives those of us who have a job which can be done at home a brilliant excuse anyway.

One thing puzzles me though. A majority of railway workers get to work by train, often for very long journeys since they get free travel. If the signalmen all walk out at 1300, how will they get home? Having seen the enormous railway rule book I would not be at all surprised to find that there is a bit of small print compelling the company to pay for taxis to get them home if there is no train service, but if there did happen to be a service running their way would they be allowed to take it or would that count as crossing a picket line?

Obviously I have a bit of a clash of interests, being a member of a railway union myself (even though I do not work for a railway company) but also being a long-suffering commuter, however I think my sympathies in this dispute lie with the passengers. If the dates chosen for the action did not coincide so neatly with England games which the signalmen all want to watch I might be a bit more charitable.

This would be a good time to repeat a quote I read in today’s paper:

I am fully convinced of the futility of all that I do… The amount of labour that we put into getting simple things simply carried out is enormous…

That was from the famous Frank Pick, chief executive of the London Passenger Transport Board in 1936. I worked for London Underground for six years and I can report that nothing has changed.

The other day I saw somebody on the train who was standing behind someone else (it was a crowded train) and practically had his head on the other bloke’s shoulder in an attempt to read over it.

In all my years of commuting it is the single most blatant act of over-the-shoulder reading I have ever seen.  The man was totally focussed on this reading matter. Absorbed by it.

The really strange thing was that it was a novel.  Must have been a really good one to interest someone so much who had not read the previous pages and was unlikely to be able to read the end.

Mind you, we were stuck at Waterloo for so long it was beginning to look as though he would get to read the end.

BAA Gatwick argued strongly for its retention, and I can see their point of view. It is a good service to offer travellers – a direct train into London where it is impossible to get off at the wrong stop. As the train is non-stop you can relax and not worry about anyone quickly hopping off with your luggage at an intermediate stop. I heard all the arguments at meetings of the Gatwick Consultative Committee when I used to sit on it and I can’t disagree with any of them.

In isolation these arguments are compelling, but unfortunately the service can only be provided by taking away capacity from an already overcrowded route, and creating a bottle-neck at Gatwick station, where the platform capacity is reduced by a third because of the Gatwick Express.

It really is frustrating to stand at Clapham Junction during a 30-minute wait for a Crawley train and seeing two half-empty Gatwick Express trains fly through and a couple of 4-carriage Brighton trains which do not even have any standing room left on them pull up and even more passengers try to squeeze on.

I agree that, as a commuter, it is annoying when the train stops at Gatwick and fills up with tourists and their luggage and loud conversations, but that already happens now since the Gatwick Express is more expensive than the Southern trains. I avoided it by only taking trains which do not stop at the airport or ones to London Bridge which are strangely unattractive to overseas arrivals.

Another thing: two of the airports which are most often cited as main competitors to Heathrow and Gatwick are Roissy and Schipol. I have used them many times for business and pleasure, probably more than I have used Gatwick. I nearly always take the train into Paris or Amsterdam, even when on expenses. In both cases these were normal mainline train services, not some exclusive airport-city shuttle, and never had any trouble. Last year we took the train back to Schiphol in the early rush hour and it was fine.

I wonder if our own service to London from here and Brighton might be more like that if we did not have so many empty seats being pulled back and forth four times an hour each way. There are still ways the SRA, or its successor, could cock it all up but it could make life a lot better for regular users of Crawley station, and even more so for users of Three Bridges station.

While a dedicated service to Gatwick would be useful, nobody has ever said it is so valuable it would be worth building dedicated infrastructure for it, so until they do I will be happy if it stops taking mine. I really don’t think that the lack of a dedicated non-stop service will hold back growth at Gatwick and plunge the local economy into a black hole, but it might make life just that little bit easier for the thousands of commuters I travel with every day.

When I reached Crawley, J and I went shopping for a TV. We ended up getting quite a good deal on a TV which is reaching the end of its product run and therefore getting reduced in price. it still came to about double what I intended to spend but we couldn’t resist it. J liked the sheer size of the 36-inch screen and I liked that fact that it was a 100Hz flatscreen with component video inputs and capable of progressive scan from the DVD.

The work Internet connection is now fully operational, but with a little surprise: finally the company have implemented blocking of undesirable sites. Someone discovered this when he couldn’t access his web-based NTL email, so we spent a bit of time guessing which sites would be blocked. Obviously all the web mail sites we could think of, like Gmail, Hotmail and Blueyonder web mail were on the list, so was E-bay and Friends Re-united. Fortunately we can still get the BBC, Amazon, Play.com, multimap, Blogger.com and Misticriver.net. Phew.

The feedback was that they liked me, but didn’t think I had enough experience managing customers. I think they are wrong, but its probably my fault for not getting across the idea that 4 years as a local councillor meant dealing with my several thousand ‘customers’ every day. Ah well. They have some other jobs coming up which they think I might be better for, so we will have to wait and see.

It means I will have to continue using those bloody trains every day for a bit longer though.