Back from holiday

We were in Aberdeen and the Grampians -- "a strange choice of holiday destination", as it was put to me beforehand.

It's true one expects Aberdeen to be always grey and wet, but we were lucky -- it was so for only one day. The rest of the time we had warm sunshine. It is actually quite a pleasing city. We hired a car and explored castles in the surrounding countryside, which is delightful. The National Trust for Scotland may be in trouble over its accounts, but the people showing us some of its castles did an impressive job.

The journey from London to Aberdeen and back was courtesy of Messrs East Coast, whose ageing but nicely refurbished HST 125 performed faultlessly. To my surprise, the train was pretty much full between London and Dundee in both directions.

On the way back, a young woman getting on at Dundee and going to York found a seat marked "reserved from Newcastle". "Which comes first, Newcastle or York?" she asked another young woman in the next seat. "I have no idea", was the reply. These were both British (in fact I think English) people, clearly intelligent and middle-class. I never cease to be amazed at some people's ignorance of elementary general knowledge. Do schools teach anything at all nowadays?

Which reminds me, I had been moderately impressed with David Cameron so far -- not all his policies, obviously, but his evident general competence -- until he said on TV in America that Britain had been the USA's junior partner in the Battle of Britain. As any fule kno, the USA wasn't even in the war for another 18 months at that point.

The summer of 1940, when Britain's very survival was hanging by a thread and when it stood alone against tyranny, was always supposed to be a, if not the, defining moment of this country's modern identity. And here we have our prime minister, for heaven's sake, educated at Eton and Oxford, who apparently understands nothing about it at all. It would almost be funny, if it weren't so desperately sad.

Train of the day

This is the ICN, the Swiss tilting train. The boyf and I recently took a short break in Locarno, where we once went quite often but this was the first time for about 15 years. A delightful lakeside resort in the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland. We took an ICN from Basel to Bellinzola and it was 40 minutes quicker than the last time we did the journey.

South America take it away

visited 32 states (14.2%)
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Just back from Montevideo and Buenos Aires. My message to the world for today is this: If you can avoid travelling with Iberia, do so.

Countries I have visited

visited 31 states (13.7%)
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Updated to take account of Cyprus trip, though it is almost too small to be visible here.

Back from Cyprus

We have just spent a week in Cyprus, thus becoming briefly part of that singularly unprepossessing group, The British On Holiday Abroad.

Not too guilty about my carbon footprint, as this was the first time I've set foot on an aeroplane for almost two years. My policy is to fly only if surface transport is completely impractical. Getting to Cyprus by rail and boat would take about a week in each direction. 

In any case, I wouldn't want to get on a plane unless I absolutely had to. Air travel is tremendously stressful, wearying and uncomfortable. It must be the most uncivilised form of transport ever devised. It is also extraordinarily unreliable: we arrived seven hours late on the way there, and two hours late on the way back.

Purpose of visit: The boyf spent his childhood in Limassol, and wanted to show me where he grew up. Much has changed out of all recognition, but he managed to find still standing the house in which he lived up to 1958.

Limassol has been largely spoiled by tourist overdevelopment. Nicosia is more interesting: oddly, the tragic fact of its political division since 1974 has been a blessing in disguise, in one respect -- it has clearly enabled the historic centre to remain unspoiled.

It is very encouraging that political tensions have recently relaxed to the point where visitors can now cross easily into the Northern (Turkish) sector.  The two communities in Cyprus now have leaders who appear genuinely to want to make progress towards what has in theory long been the agreed solution, a bizonal, bicommunal federation. This is the obvious compromise between the single unitary state that the Greeks originally wanted, and two completely separate states, as once hoped for by the Turks.

But there are an awful lot of thorny and sensitive details to settle, and talking to people on the ground it is far from obvious that the optimism expressed in this Guardian piece by Mary Honeyball is really justified. Let us hope it is.

Meanwhile, good news and bad news on the environmental front.

The bad news is the complete dominance of the motorcar and the car-culture mentality. Everybody is assumed to possess one. Visitors have to hire one, or take taxis. Public transport is dreadful. (I think Cyprus might be the first country I have ever visited that has absolutely no railways at all.) Bus services range from sporadic to non-existent. Provision for pedestrians in Limassol is lamentable, except along the seafront. Where there are pavements, you usually find them completely blocked by parked cars.

The good news is that practically every house, in the south at least, has solar panels on the roof. It is a very sunny country, and they take advantage of this to heat their water.