Author Archives: Julie Hunt

Svalbard 2015: snow scooters

I’ve always called these things snowmobiles but apparently on Svalbard they’re snow scooters.

That’s what I did today. Body clock completely confused by the neverending darkness, I didn’t wake up until 9.20 this morning and still wasn’t entirely awake by the time Alex picked me up to take me for a ride on the scooters.

We were given special padded boots, overalls, balaclavas, helmets and finally big mittens (no real need to take your own big warm clothes; if you’re doing anything outside, they’ll provide it all) and we were shown how to use the scooters, on a huge one they’d somehow got not just inside the building but upstairs. At least, I thought it was huge, but Alex said these are the small ones. It’s bigger than the one I drove in Iceland, I’m sure.

We had a scooter each – none of this business of two people to a scooter, one drives out and one drives back. We all drove all the way. We had to cross the road twice but that was ok – very little traffic in Longyearbyen – and then off we went across a knobbly rocky field while I made “I don’t like it!” noises as we bumped and skidded and the engines kangarooed because they weren’t warmed up yet. The handlebars had heating and we could fiddle with that if we wanted but there was really no need -if the gloves could protect us from the snowstorm, they could protect us from chilly rubber handles.

We stopped not far away from town -Alex had spotted a small herd of wild reindeer nibbling on the sparse grass, reindeer who felt it was worth taking the chance that we might kill them over using their energy supplies to run away from the food. We kept our distance – didn’t want to scare them away from the food but we got quite close considering they’re wild reindeer living on an island where everything from the climate to the environment to the wildlife is trying to kill them. Unlike Jakob yesterday, Alex has seen polar bears and this is the area they tend to be seen in, but he thought it was unlikely there would be any. The population of bears on Svalbard has tripled in the last few years, research says they’re very well-fed around here and they’re venturing into human areas more and more often. They’re often followed by Arctic foxes, so if you see little fox footprints, there might well be a bear nearby. The foxes like to eat the bears’ leftovers and there are apparently lots of foxes – about five separate populations. There’s the one that hangs out by the sea with the bears, the one that follows the reindeer, the urban ones that no one is confessing to feeding and I forget the other two – all Arctic foxes but using five different strategies to get food.

Stop two was at the Iron Beds. Every local guide has their own story about why there are two iron bed frames abandoned in the middle of the valley. Alex’s version, which he claims to be the boring truth, is that they were renovating a hut further up the valley and bringing stuff back on the dog sled when they discovered that the river was higher than usual so they simply abandoned everything in their quest to get home without drowning. The Iron Beds are now a landmark and they’re also a race – when the snow comes, who can be the first person to get out to them?

Our last stop was next to a pingo, a sort of bubble of a mountain formed over thousands of years when an air bubble trapped in the ice gets forced up and out by ice expansion. I have no idea how this work. I know the pingo was the bed of the river but how could the ice bubble be underneath the ground? We stopped for coffee or hot blackcurrant (much less dehydrating than coffee and much more sugary – very popular in winter with the snow scooterers) and I tried to take some photos of the scenery. It’s hard because you can see plenty. Yes, it’s dark but the snow is very white and your eyes adapt to the tiniest bit of light from the sky but the camera’s not seeing it at all. I was glad the scooters had headlights but you can get off and amble around with no lights whatsoever and it’s fine. It’s dark. That doesn’t mean it’s pitch black, even miles from civilisation. We were supposedly travelling about 35km. I assume that’s half there, half back but I’ll find out how far I was from town when I get home to a computer that can cope with my GPS tracker. I guess we must have been about ten miles from home, which is actually quite a long way to ride even on a big chunky snow scooter. It does get easier and less scary after a while – it gets smoother if you can get some speed up and it’s a lot easier when it’s flat and smooth. We drove in convoy with me in the middle because I happened to jump on scooter number two back in town.

Having made a few stops on the way out, we drove the entire way back in one go. My hand kept getting cramp from holding the throttle and if the wind went the wrong way, it went under my visor and froze my face but other than that, no, it actually wasn’t particularly cold driving along at 30-35kph.

At least, that’s what I thought. Until I got home and discovered that everything other than hands, feet and face was stone cold and needed to be put on the heated bathroom floor for a couple of hours to defrost. All the same, I had begun to wonder if Svalbard is better in summer when it’s all covered in sunshine and wild flowers and I’ve concluded that it’s not. You can’t go dogsledding, you can’t ride snow scooters and you can’t… well, I don’t know what else there is to do. I don’t think there’s much skiing or snowboarding here, not least because you’re risking polar bears if you leave town (although they’re making the polar bears sound less of a problem than they sounded when I was doing the reading before I came here). I suppose kayaking on the fjords opens up in summer, boat trips etc.

No idea what my plans are for tomorrow. I’d like to go looking for the Northern Lights before I leave but it’s been so cloudy it hasn’t been possible. Of course, clouds mean lovely fluffy snowflakes falling from the sky and that’s very nice too,

Svalbard 2015: Dogsledding

After I wrote yesterday’s blog, I ate lots of bread and cheese because it had been a long day with very little food (breakfast at 6.30am and then nothing until I arrived in Longyearbyen at nearly 3pm) and when I was all full, I knew I really had to go back out into the cold and have a look at the town (the city? The village).

I know from photos and Google maps and the like that it’s a small town situated in quite a narrow valley between the mountains. I can see the mountains – white snow glows even in the dark. I assume either it’s reflecting the light pollution from Longyearbyen (it generates a surprising amount of light pollution for such a small place but as it spends nearly four months in total darkness, of course it should be allowed as many lights as it wants) – either that or astronomical twilight is slightly lighter than I thought.

No, it isn’t as dark as I expected. Well, it is but – it’s hard to explain. You can’t deny the great black sky overhead and yet it’s lighter than I anticipated. Town lighting, reflective snow, the fact that you could probably see a hint of pink or orange or baby blue in the sky at noon if it wasn’t cloudy, I don’t know. I know it’s not as oppressively, miserably dark as it’s made out to be, not in town.

It appears to be laid out with all the tourist stuff straight down the middle, with a mostly-pedestrianised street. My hotel, evidently the newest in town, is at the top of the “high street”, there are a few pubs and bars, a couple more hotels and an astonishing amount of shops. Perhaps understandably, it has an extremely high ratio of outdoors shops, higher even than Kendal. I suppose people come unprepared. At the moment I feel like I’m ok for warm stuff but I haven’t been out of the shelter of town yet so we’ll see.

I’ve also found the supermarket (it’s not a supermarket! It’s a department store/junk shop/warehouse with a supermarket attached), the post office, the pharmacy and the bookshop. I saw a large white furry animal which turned out to be a largish dog but it seems my reaction to spotting ursus maritimus is to go “… is that a polar bear? It can’t be” rather than “RUN IT’S A POLAR BEAR! RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!”

Having more or less reached the end of the high street, I slithered down the hill towards the next set of shops and the “sports centre” which didn’t look so much like a sports centre as a gun shop. There’s something quite American about this place – gun shops, requirements to carry and use rifles, shops declaring they sell ammo and all the other shops with big signs on the doors that say NO GUNS IN HERE. I’ve never been anywhere where I’ve had to worry about whether there are rifles being carried around the supermarket.

That next set of shops is on the vehicle road, more or less parallel to the high street and at this time of year, it’s impossible to tell where the road ends and the pavement starts, so I tend to leap back into the thicker snow when I see a car coming, just to make sure I’m out of its way. And on the subject of how dark or not it is here, I saw one car that hadn’t noticed it didn’t have its lights on. Other cars noticed and enlightened it but that’s what it’s like here. You don’t actually need your lights on to be able to drive around.

I spotted a car park and a path that would lead me back to the high street so I attempted it, slipped on the ice and fell in the most awkward and ridiculous way. I knew it was going to happen but first I had no control whatsoever over mad flailing. Gravity was going to have me in the end but first it was going to play with me for a bit.

When I got back, armed with apple & mango juice, chocolate and a carton of chocolate milk (the windowsill makes a good fridge or if you open the window, a good freezer), I thought I would have a bath. Because it’s there. The trouble is that the light in the bathroom doesn’t have a switch, it has a motion sensor and if you fall asleep in the bath, the light goes out.

The only problem I have so far with the perpetual darkness is not having a clue what the time is. I woke up in the middle of the night, convinced it was morning and discovered it wasn’t yet 3am. The trouble is that 3am doesn’t look any different to real morning. Other than that, I’m still enjoying the novelty of the dark and the teeny-tiny nuances of darkness, like the slight sheen of lighter blue in the sky at noon.

This afternoon was the dogsledding. I’ve never done it before and I really liked the idea of it. We were taken to the lower kennels, about 12km from Longyearbyen, sent into the changing rooms to put on some specially padded boots and a huge overall (so huge because it has to go over your clothes, which are already huge. I was already wearing four layers, the outer two of which are enormous and then this tent-thing over the top) and then we were introduced to the sled, told all about the brake – everything is about the brake – and then we could either stand and wait or we could help Jakob harness the dogs. Guess which option I chose?

The dogs were all very excited, all yapping and howling and playfighting and all desperate to get out and since we were beginners and all a little nervous, he chose the quietest dogs, showed me how to fold the harness (I just couldn’t get the hang of this) and then how to put it over the dog’s head and put its legs through the straps. He supervised dog one, I managed dog two more or less on my own and dog three clearly knew exactly how this worked and lifted her own paws before I even tried to put her legs through the straps.

Gaia had specially requested to ride with the guide, so that left me with Sarah and apparently I was marginally less nervous about driving first than Sarah was. There are two problems with driving first. 1) The dogs are very excited and they go extra-fast at first and 2) there’s a big patch of very rocky ground where the brake won’t do anything. It was terrifying! I knew which bit of the sled I had to hold onto but it was awkward trying to hold it, keep one foot on the sled and the other on the brake and eventually I just wrapped my arms around the entire back of the sled with both feet on the brake. It didn’t make any noticeable difference. Also, you have an anchor and that was on the right side of the sled. But I wanted my left foot on the sled and my right foot on the brake and that meant I couldn’t reach it.

We ran a little and then we paused, after only about thirty seconds for Jakob to distribute headtorches, which he’d forgotten to do before we left. For some reason, we put the anchor down but I couldn’t get it up and stowed before we took off again, so there it was trailing along behind us. Sarah, afraid of getting her hands cut off by the sled, managed to pull it up by the rope and hang it safely on its hook and for a second, we celebrated having weighed anchor while running. But then we hit the rocks.

The sled got caught. The dogs were pulling and pulling and it just wasn’t moving so Sarah hopped off to try and free it. You see where this is going. We didn’t. The second it was free, the dogs took off, leaving her behind and there was absolutely nothing I could do to stop them. We rattled and bumped over the rocks, I was nearly jolted off and I was screaming and shrieking like a mad person – the dogs were out of control, the ground was terrible and I’d lost my passenger! Fortunately, Jakob stopped eventually and my dogs knew that meant it was time for them to stop and poor Sarah came trudging along in the snow.

Once we were past the rocks it got better. Not comfortable, exactly, never comfortable. It was never entirely flat and smooth and I was certain I was going to fall off, I was making scared noises and swearing occasionally and Sarah was making terrified noises. At one point we crossed some large footprints – maybe a human in big padded boots like ours, maybe on snowshoes… maybe a bear. But there wasn’t time to think about the possibility of meeting a polar bear, I was too busy hanging on for dear life. Forget steering, there was no steering. No need to steer, our dogs just followed Jakob’s dogs, although I think they would have liked to overtake.

Gradually, as I got used to it, I let the brake out a little. Or at least, I put one foot back on the sled and controlled the brake with the other. It was a bit like driving a car except that there wasn’t necessarily much response from our canine engine if I put the brake down. I don’t say I got any more comfortable with it – it was still stressful and scary and my hat was sliding down over my eyes and for a lot of it, I couldn’t see any further ahead than Sarah’s feet, and my headtorch kept slipping down to illuminate nothing more than the top of Sarah’s head. It would have been nice to see where we were going but it wasn’t really necessary because I wasn’t guiding or controlling the dogs at all.

Finally Gaia begged to turn back. Sarah and I didn’t mind in the least. We’d already been muttering for five or ten minutes “how much further are we going? When are we going back?” and were most relieved, especially when we learnt that Jakob had planned to take us another three miles.

We swapped places. It was a lot more comfortable on the sled but Sarah had had the entire journey to realise that driving was a bit scary and she knew the rocks were coming and was a bit terrified of that – so much so that Jakob offered to call a colleague with a snow scooter to come and drive for us. I think if it had got that far, I’d have taken the wheel again but it didn’t. Sarah got on fine – the swearing came out when we hit the rocks but actually, the rocky patch is much shorter than we’d realised at first. Because the sled sometimes leans when it gets uneven, I leaned in the other direction – it didn’t tell the dogs to turn, it just stopped us overturning (it probably didn’t. We probably weren’t in any danger of that) and then the lights of home were upon us.

I held the lead dogs while Jakob put his dogs away and then we took it in turns to stand on the brake while the others took photos and of course, I also played with the dogs. I put the fiendish lead dog away (we had one beautiful blue-eyed sweetheart and one little fiend who was forever pulling and biting the chain and trying to jump on me) and then we opted to stay out while Jakob put the sleds away and I got to play with Fenris, the hugest fluffiest dog there, who likes to much on arms and things when he’s upright but fortunately rolls over onto his back for tummy rubs the moment anyone touches him. Jakob said he can be bitey – of course he can! His name’s Fenris. (If you don’t know your Norse myths, Fenrir or the Fenris-wolf was one of Loki’s monstrous children, an enormous wolf who was prophesied to kill Odin at Ragnarok. The other gods, seeing that Fenrir would be trouble, tried to contain him and in the end, he bit off the right hand of Tyr, god of war. This dog is named after the original hand-biting-off hellhound.) But he was a lovely fluffy soppy dog and I did enjoy playing with him while the sled was put away.

The next stop was at the upper kennels. We were done with sledding and now we were to meet some of the puppies. There are around twenty-five of them. Most of them now are big enough to put on a chain – this was new to them today and they cried and howled but they’ll get used to it and then they’ll go in with the bigger puppies and get used to that and when they’re around six months old, they’ll go to the main kennels and learn to run with the more experienced dogs.

But there were two small litters up there – a family of black and white Greenlandic dogs in their cage, who climbed up the wire and looked at us and a family of pure white baby polar bear puppies who were loose. They’re allowed out during the day to play and then put away in the evening and play they did. They jump over your legs and if you sit down to play with them, they all pile onto you and then they scrap with each other and roll around in the snow and I could quite happily have stolen the lot.

We went into the Russian cabin, which is a traditionally built log cabin full of interesting bits and pieces, to have hot chocolate. I was already toasty – my warm layers on their own were warm enough, I had a huge overall over it, I’d been out sledding and now there were puppies! – but I dran my hot chocolate and Jakob talked.

He’s from the Czech Republic, he’s lived all over the world, he learnt mushing at the Snow Hotel in Kirkenes (on the Norway-Russia border) and at the moment he’s in Svalbard because he likes the ice and snow and the dark. In fact, no one at Greendogs is Norwegian. Even at the Polar Institute back in Longyearbyen, 60% of the staff are not Norwegian and everything’s taught in English. No, he’s never actually seen a polar bear. They don’t come to this valley – except the one that raided another set of kennels two years ago, ate all their dogfood and had to airlifted to the other end of the archipelago because he wouldn’t take the hint that they didn’t want a polar bear there. This is apparently the way to deal with troublesome bears – there are planes and helicopters coming in all the time to deliver tourists and supplies and they keep an eye out for bears. Any that get too close to Longyearbyen get darted and then removed to another part of the island, which is good because I thought they just shot any marauding bears.

When we’d finished and said goodbye to the puppies, we came back down to the lower kennels and Jakob fed the dogs (and cuddled some particular favourites) while we got out of our enormous overalls and boots and then we were delivered back to town. I think a bath is in order.

Svalbard 2015: Oslo to Longyearbyen

I got the bus back to Oslo airport without catastrophe, attempted to check in out of habit, having completely forgotten I already possessed both boarding card and bag label until the machine tried to charge me for a second bag – quite reasonably, since I was indeed trying to add a bag because it hadn’t yet dawned on me that the system knew I already had a bag, went through security (got caught this time; I didn’t take the Kindle out because it didn’t occur to me that I needed to) and then settled down to kill the best part of two hours in the domestic wing of Oslo Gardermoen. I watched the Stavanger plane get emptied, restocked, refuelled, loaded etc (was a bit horrified to see the food delivery man deliver a snack directly to the pilots by means of a stick through their window – the pilots’ windows aren’t all sealed! One of them just lifts out!) and then went looking for my own gate. I’d suspected we were stopping somewhere on the way to Longyearbyen and I was right – Tromsø. In fact, to all intents and purposes, this was the Oslo to Tromsø service and when we arrived (very beautiful place, all snowy mountain rising out of blue fjord; looks like CGI) we had to get off the plane, go into the terminal, walk through a passport-protected gate and then get back on because although Svalbard belongs to Norway, apparently it doesn’t in some way and it’s not part of the Schengen agreement.

The plane had been full on the way up from Oslo but now it was quieter, funnily enough. I spent most of the flight entertaining myself by watching the sun disappear behind the horizon, making a spectacular band of orange and yellow above the cloud. I saw stars! There were a couple of twinkling little silver stars visible above the sunset at quarter past one in the afternoon. I’ve never seen actual stars at lunchtime before.

As we came in over Longyearbyen, I began to think that perhaps it wasn’t going to be as dark as I’d expected. Today it is, yes, because it’s cloudy but above the cloud is a relatively bright sky and the mountains are very clearly visible above the town.

We touched down at Svalbard Lufthavn Longyear at around 2pm. The sun had long since set – more than twenty-two days ago, in fact, and it’s not going to rise again until February 16th next year. The plane didn’t stop nose-in as they usually do – it approached the terminal and then swung round sideways so we could scurry across the ice to the door and before we were even off the plane, they were already deicing the wings.

I did have a small catastrophe before I’d even set food on Svalbard soil. I’d succeeded in getting to and from my hotel, I’d caught two flights, I hadn’t got lost in Tromsø, it was all going suspiciously well. I left my camera on the plane. I was still on the steps when I realised I didn’t remember putting it anywhere after taking photos out the window and once I’d hastily searched my bag, I approached the first official-looking person I could see. A small thing like a camera on a plane isn’t a big deal in Longyearbyen. She radioed a colleague to have a look for it when she brought the two small kids she was escorting and the camera was delivered (through security, which is in the same hall as baggage reclaim) long before the luggage arrived. That’s excellent service, and she even told me there has been Northern Lights activity for the last few days, so I’ll probably see them (cloud permitting, of course).

I’d been a little worried about the last step of the adventure – getting from the airport to the hotel but that was fine. There was a bus waiting outside and everyone dumped their luggage in the hold and boarded, so I copied everyone else and sure enough, when we were all on, the driver came down with his ticket machine to collect money. We drove the four miles along the seafront, into the town and he called out the important stops as we went so I knew exactly where to jump off. However, I do notice that buildings around here seem to try to hide the main door – that was hidden around the side.

I have a nice big room, with a huge window, wood panelling, a massive picture over my bed of a mountain and the remains of a hut (when I say massive, I mean it’s a wall feature, rather than a picture on the wall) and most importantly, I have a bath! It all seems very pleasant and cosy.

Last of all, in case anyone doesn’t know where I actually am, here’s a handy map:

 

Svalbard 2015: to Oslo

Act 1, Scene 1 – London Heathrow Airport, Terminal Two Departures, Section D

A ridiculous creature in ridiculous boots two and a half sizes too big approaches a check-in machine, enters her booking reference, scans her passport and is given in return a sticker for the big red tarpaulin bag at her feet.

Act 1,Scene 2 – London Heathrow Airport, SAS Tagged Bag Drop

CHECK-IN MAN: I’m sorry, you’ll have to pick up your bags in Oslo

The ridiculous creature is pleased by this.

Act 1, Scene 3 – London Heathrow Airport, Terminal Two Security

The ridiculous creature puts her watch into her coat pocket, takes out her laptop and places it in a tray with her documentation and coat, then takes the ridiculous boots off and puts them in the tray. She approaches the security gate with some trepidation, certain she’s not wearing anything metallic but expecting the detector to beep anyway. It doesn’t.

The trays containing her luggage go through the scanner. She waits for them to be shunted off to the side, to be inspected separately but they come straight down to her with no problem. She puts the laptop and documentation away, dons coat and boots and walks away, surprised.

Act 1, Scene 4  – London Heathrow Airport, Terminal Two departure area

The ridiculous creature sits with her laptop open and writes a screenplay about this memorable day.

END

Our flight was delayed by the late arrival of the incoming plane and it was 7.58pm by the time we took off. The wifi was free for SAS Plus passengers but not for us lowly SAS Go passenger but luckily, it didn’t actually work so I wasn’t missing anything. I was, of course, in the window seat and there was someone supposed to be in my aisle seat but he soon noticed there was no one in the entire row of seats opposite and shifted himself to the opposite window, giving us an entire row each, which was nice.

There was snow in the ground as we came into Oslo. I wasn’t expecting that. Hadn’t given a single thought to the idea that mainland Norway in November might be snowy. We disembarked from the back door of the plane, discovered that the area around the wing is very slippery and icy, presumably because it’s wet there from the wings being deiced and then had to climb a flight of stairs next to the front door to get into the airport. SAS, by the way, give all their planes Viking names and mine was Saga Viking. I’d like to start a collection but my SAS collection would take a lot longer than my Icelandair collection because Icelandair only have a dozen or so planes and SAS have… lots. I might count them in the back of the magazine on tomorrow’s plane.

I knew I had to pick up my luggage but it turns out, I would have had to anyway – something to do with coming in from an international flight and transferring onto a domestic. I had to when I flew to Trondheim as well, although I didn’t when I flew Narvik-Oslo-London. Presumably it’s a different story if it’s domestic to international.

Anyway. We landed at 10.37 and by 11.10, I was on a moving bus, heading for my hotel – which I reached with no problems whatsoever. My first ever successful arrival at a Thon hotel. The room is huge, the TV is enormous and the underfloor heating in the bathroom is so hot that you don’t need a sauna, just sit on the bathroom floor for a few minutes. Basic breakfast starts at 4.30, proper breakfast about 6.30 and my next job of the night is to see what bus I need to get so I can find out what time I need to be up.

EdFringe 2015: the pictures

The adventure begins
Here’s the train
Here’s my carriage
The castle
Nice pointy volcano on the horizon
Oh no! The waves caught my feet!
The Stand Comedy Club from the outside…
The Stand Comedy Club from the inside
Sunset over Waverley
Pat & Ed get gunged at Get Your Own Back Live
Even the Omni Centre giraffes are joining the party
The castle by night
My room
My building
Arthur’s Seat looming in the distance
Nearly there…
I made it!
Bagpipes atop Arthur’s Seat
A rainbow in the valley
Look at the size of that flag!
Time to go home

EdFringe 2015: Wednesday & Thursday

It’s only been more than a week since I got back but I’m going to finish this!

Wednesday

I planned to start Wednesday with a lunchtime Free Fringe show but it turns out that even free shows can sell out and so I missed out on Ed Gamble and also found myself with an unexpectedly free day. I ambled up and down the Royal Mile, bought a nice fleece tartan blanket for use on the train on the way home (the train is freezing!) and eventually found myself back at the Underbelly Med Quad in time to see Laura Lexx’s show. A large part of it revolved around whether or not her boyfriend was going to propose to her and a handful of us had been spoiled for the ending by the girl in charge of the queue outside who told us Laura is really nice, she’s married to one of the guys from the Noise Next Door, so that gave it away before I even knew it was going to be a question.

Next was a slow amble down the road to Just the Tonic at the Community Project, a five minute walk if you walk really slowly, where I sat outside and read Wallander for an hour before I went into Comedy in the Dark. It’s basically your typical “four comedians do twenty minutes each, one you’ve seen before and three you haven’t” except that they turn the lights off and you can’t see a thing. This particular one was hosted by Joel Dommett (one I’ve seen before, at Altitude), with Amy Howerska, Stephen Carlin and Paul Sinha (him off The Chase) and the darkness… was a novelty. I don’t know how much it actually added, other than the reveal that Lauren Black, owner of a huge voice, turned out to not look at all like his voice and also turned out to be sitting right behind me, rather than at the back of the room.

I finished the day with Daniel Sloss, right out at the EICC, which was my closest venue when I was staying at the Premier Inn in 2013 but is now quite the trek. Google Maps says it’s about a twenty minute walk – which is actually only about as far as the Assembly Rooms but I stopped for food along the way and then I stopped to look at the castle glowing in the sky on the way back, before they turned out the bright red lights and the castle just vanished into thin air.

Thursday

I had to be out of my room quite early on Thursday, so I packed, left my luggage at reception for the day and went off down to Holyrood for the purposes of climbing Arthur’s Seat. The weather had no idea what it was doing – it got damp, it got hot and sticky, it got cold, it got windy and it changed every couple of minutes, which meant I was constantly taking layers off and putting them back on again. I took the summit path which is pretty direct and took about three quarters of an hour. The internet had said an hour to two hours, depending on how slow you are and as I was pretty slow, I was expecting it to take two hours. As I started the first real climb, the sun came out and it went really hot but when I got up to the little plateau right below the summit where the easy path joins from Dunsapie Loch (it can’t be that easy if you’ve got to walk fully half the circumference of Holyrood Park before you even start climbing) it got a bit wet and a lot windy. So I thought. I scrambled up to the top – the path sort of runs out there and you just pick a line to the summit and go for it. As for climbing up onto the rocky top, there’s no path of any kind. I picked the north side of it to scramble up in winds that were by now ferocious – so ferocious that when you lift a foot to move it, the wind buffets you and you put it down in the wrong place, resulting in the most awkward stumbling scramble ever. At the very top, it was so windy that you couldn’t even sit down without tipping over. I queued for my chance to climb up to the trig point and I took a few selfies there, since I didn’t have anyone down at the main summit to do it for me. Having climbed up, I didn’t want to go down immediately but it was very windy. I took photos in all directions and as I was about to descend, a man came up with some bagpipes, so I paused to watch that. For five minutes, it was entertaining to listen to the bagpipes being played at the summit of Arthur’s Seat and then I started to feel like I just wanted him to shut up and put them away.

When I got back down to civilisation, I thought I’d go and have a cup of hot chocolate at the bookshop and I went via the Mound, for some reason. As I walked along Princes Street, it occurred to me that the road was very quiet, just as I noticed the signs blocking it off. “Well, that’ll be a Festival thing”, I thought. The signs were Police Accident ones but I didn’t think anything of that. They’d just found some road closure signs. I couldn’t find the bookshop. I’d gone too far so I turned back and walked in the other direction. But before I found it, I stumbled upon a huge crowd being held behind blue police tape and looking through the crowd, I could see police cars and ambulances and blue flashing lights. Oh. An accident after all, and I’d come up on the wrong side of it and not noticed it. I crossed the road. Couldn’t get through there either. Couldn’t get through via the gardens. I had to cross the valley and go via the other side and as I approached Waverley Bridge, I began to see the scale of what was going on. Six fire engines, a fire brigade lorry, a fire brigade ladder lorry, an ambulance, half a dozen police cars and hundreds of people staring at the Scott Monument and taking photos. I got out my camera and used the zoom as a telescope to see what was going on. I could see someone in a yellow police vest up there and some people with ropes and helmets, some kind of mountain rescue. And by now I could hear mutterings that there was someone trying to jump off it but I couldn’t see a thing. I left the chaos and went into the tourist information to see if there were any Arthur’s Seat badges for my blanket in there and then ambled off to the Royal Mile to see what was going on.

I sat down behind the Tron to watch a street show – a man juggling a chainsaw and then riding a ten foot unicycle, during which I got stung by a wasp. It was crawling around on my knee and I didn’t notice, so I must have moved and accidentally annoyed it. It didn’t fly away. It kept crawling around on my knee so I sent it flying with a swipe of my sunglasses and when the show was finished, I limped off to get some magic to make it stop hurting.

I stumbled upon the City Cafe, the venue for my last show of the day, which it turned out I’d walked past at least every day for the last week. It’s another free venue, so I went in and sat down and watched the Clean (As Possible) Comedy Show, in which four comedians tried to keep it family-friendly – with more success than they did at Hyde Park a while ago.

After that, I thought I’d kill a bit more time so I jumped on a bus and went out to Ocean Terminal. I saw Britannia but she wasn’t nearly as interesting as the tall ship parked next door, with the biggest flag I’ve ever seen attached to her stern – a bit flag almost as tall as the masts. I took the bus back, through the city and out the other side, then decided to turn back as it was raining quite heavily.

I went and sat in the City Cafe again and watched Seizure Kaiser not doing the advertised show. I was expecting Supervillain, a tale of wearing capes etc and instead I got Gutless, a tale of “everyone’s got cancer and I’m going to be a bit too graphic”. But Mae Martin, my last show, was on straight after so I stayed put when everyone left, only for Mae herself to approach me and tell me she needed to empty the room and I needed to join the queue but if I wanted to sit there, she’d put a reserved sign on my seat so I could come straight back to it. We had to queue right down the stairs in the semi-darkness and the heat for ages but when I finally got back, she had indeed reserved my seat, which was just as well because Mae has been on TV once or twice and is far and away the most popular act at the City Cafe and the place was packed, and justifiably so.

After that, it was a bit of a dash back to the station. Well, I supposed it wasn’t really. The train didn’t go until 11.40 and we were allowed on at 11 and I wanted to be there at 11 to get settled and comfortable for the night and decide who I was going to hate all night (the people behind me who had the single seat and one of the double seat and argued in matching Margo Leadbetter voices about who had to sit next to a stranger, and the people who’d brought two small girls into the sleeper seats, especially the mum, who wouldn’t sit still, kept deliberately waking them up and tried to squish into the seats with them – those seats are already not that comfortable to sleep in, especially not when you’re trying to squish three people into two seats, despite having your own seat with the fourth member of your party). For some reason, I just couldn’t get comfortable enough to fall asleep. We sailed through Carstairs, paused on the far side and then went back in. We stopped at Carlisle, Preston and Watford Junction. You can get on and off at Watford but I don’t understand why Carlisle and Carstairs are on the timetable because you can’t get on or off there. You can’t get on or off at Preston either but at least they don’t put that on the timetable.

London crept up quite unexpectedly. One minute we were at Watford Junction and the next minute I could see the Post Office Tower. Blanket got hastily put away, boots shoved on and the next minute we were gliding into Euston. It had crept up so unexpectedly that half the people on the train were still asleep. They weren’t when we arrived in Edinburgh – the sun had been up and bright by Carstairs and people were awake and giggling half an hour before we got in. Maybe they’d all had too much comedy in Edinburgh and were too tired to notice the sun as they arrived in London.

I got across to Waterloo in record time (no tube strikes after all!) and back to Winchester by just after 9.30. Just in time to get home, get my Guide uniform on and go out to Wellies and Wristbands….

EdFringe 2015: Monday & Tuesday

Monday: a slowish start because I needed to be just down the road at the monolith of comedy a couple of streets away (I’ve found a shortcut and halved the walk to the Gilded Balloon) that is the Gilded Balloon and George Square – they’re actually completely separate sets of venues but as they’re only really separated by a road crossing between them, I regard them as one big area. However, having found that shortcut, I then spent half an hour wandering up and down various roads nearby desperately searching for somewhere that sold bread. I’d found little bitesize bits of cheese but getting the bread to go with it proved difficult.

So, show one – in the Big Purple Cow, which has moved because there are building works where it should be – was Austentatious, an improved Austen novel, which meant you didn’t have to know the first thing about Pride & Prejudice, which is good because I don’t. But I’ve been reading Thursday Next recently and it pops up occasionally in there and as I was in a Thursdayish mood I thought I’d go. I’m glad I did, it was funny.

Show two – just a couple of hundred yards away from my front door in the Underbelly on Cowgate – a lovely sort of vertical labyrinth that looks like it may once have been prison cells and smells of wet rock. The internet won’t tell me what it used to be. Anyway, it makes a useful shortcut between the upper and lower streets and I went to see Giraffe – “give us a cheer if you’ve seen us before!” well, I was the only one. I like a bit of sketch comedy every now and then, especially in a room shaped like a train tunnel that smells like a forgotten cave.

Third up was Fred MacAulay at the Assembly Rooms but some idiot went into a shop, spotted some chocolate milk, thought “ooh, I fancy that” and then drank too much of it and consequently had to go home and lie on her bed whimpering for a bit.

At half past nine I went to see Aisling Bea. I was feeling a bit better – better enough to go out but  bit like someone very heavy had sat on me. Everywhere in the Gilded Balloon is hot, so Aisling had made/had had made lots of paper plates with “YOU’RE HOT. I’M A FAN” written on them and then, because apparently she’s a maniac, as we all came in and took out seats, she was dancing t the front in a full morphsuit over her normal clothes. I’d have died of heat exhaustion long before the last person came in and then she fumbled her way over, more or less completely blind in the thing, felt her way to the front row and then shoved a piece of card and a microphone at me. I panicked and shoved it at the person next to me – fortunately not quite witnessed by Aisling herself – and let her do the whole “welcome to the stage” bit.

And then you’ll never guess who I met at the bottom of the stairs when I came out of the show.

Tuesday morning was my earliest yet. I had Shakespeare for Breakfast and when I left the building, it struck me that there were a lot of people standing around outside reception – more than are usually smoking out there and most of them weren’t smoking. I caught the word “fire” a few times and when I went out through the gate, there were three or four firemen and a fire engine with its lights on. I don’t know what had happened but as I walked up the road, watching constantly over my shoulder, people started to go back into the building opposite mine, so I don’t think it was anything major.

Shakespeare for Breakfast this year was Hamlet. I don’t know much about Hamlet – I’ve picked up a little bit from… you’ll never guess what – Thursday Next again – and I know a teeny-tiny bit because it seeps out into life – “alas poor Yorick” although I don’t know who Yorick is and “the play’s the thing” – but they don’t exactly stick to the script (they don’t stick to it at all!) and they throw in jokes and quotes and some I definitely recognised from other plays and other places so I really don’t know which ones are actually from Hamlet but assuming they stuck even slightly loosely to the plot, I now have the vaguest idea what happens. And they also provide croissants and tea/coffee/juice, so you can get fed and entertained.

Next job was to find an optician. An arm fell off my sunglasses on Monday. People are always telling me that the screw is coming out and I either tighten it up with my fingernail or I ignore it because it doesn’t actually fall out. Well, it fell out! I thought I was going to have to retrace my steps all the way back to the Big Purple Cow before it dawned on me that the missing arm might still be in my hair and it was but on Tuesday I had to go and find an optician to reattach it, because the sun is really out here and my retinas are getting destroyed every time I leave the building. The nice lady in the optician put in a new screw and tightened the other one and cleaned them with something that smelled of strawberries but it won’t be permanent because she thinks the thread inside the arm is gone – I’m inclined to agree, given how often the screw slides out. I’ll have to keep a closer eye on it in future.

Next was The Noise Next Door. I genuinely had no idea what to expect. I knew the name but I knew nothing about them and I wasn’t entirely expecting improv. The singing was a little less of a surprise. I enjoyed them, it’s always nice to go and see something new and enjoy it.

It wasn’t worth going home since the next show was in the same building three-quarters of an hour later (I have timed it; from the gate of my building to the gate of the Gilded Balloon is five minutes and two seconds, but it’s still not worth it). The next show was Get Your Own Back Live. Dave Benson Phillips has been doing this show for about the last three weeks – having appealed for any kids at the Fringe to get their own back on adults and only had responses from adults, he’s been doing an adults-only version on stage. But today was a special edition and he was very excited. On the Blue Team was captain Stephen K Amos and Will Seaward. On the Yellow Team was captain Ed Byrne and Patrick Monahan. Ed himself told me he was doing this and asked if I remembered it, so it would be rude not to go – and also, I was hoping to see him gunged, in which I was not disappointed. Dave was clearly not expecting anarchy, disobedience and misbehaviour on the parts of four comedians, all competitive and all apparently reluctant to be gunged (and Stephen forgetting very regularly “it’s a family show!” and using words Dave’s five-year-old son in the audience shouldn’t know yet). Cheating happened, trashtalk happened, fights broke out regularly, cold beans were eaten (I hated that bit), balloon animals were made very badly and then Ed and Pat were stripped of their shoes and socks, put in the chamber and thoroughly gunged. And had to stay there while the audience made their way out, because they were dripping and their feet were covered in gunge that they couldn’t track all over the stage. Photos were taken with soggy gunged comedians (not by me, but I did watch. The whole thing was hilarious.

The final show of the day was a second attempt at Fred MacAulay, a much more successful attempt and I’m very pleased that I didn’t just write him off. Fred of “boo!” fame lived up to the boo, delighted to shock and disappoint septuagenarians fans from the radio.

Tomorrow I have a lunchtime show and on Thursday, if the weather’s ok, I really should climb Arthur’s Seat. If I put it here, I kind of have to do it.

EdFringe 2015: Saturday & Sunday

I started Saturday by trekking all the way up to Princes Street to poke around the shop, had a late breakfast of croissant with jam (in a little jar; I have taken the leftovers home to have with the croissant that will be provided at Shakespeare for Breakfast on Tuesday), apple juice & hot chocolate in Waterstones, in front of a massive window that overlooks Princes Street and the gardens. Then I went outside, got on a bus and went off to its mystery destination, which turned out to be the seaside to the east of Edinburgh. I didn’t go all the way to the end of the line – I got off at a suitable bit of beach, enjoyed the spectacle of what looked suspiciously like a perfect cone-shaped volcano in the east, played with the waves, was surprised by how clean the water is and how many blue mussels there were and then, eventually, went back because it was getting on for comedy time.

  1. Tiff Stevenson, in a nice cool room with a sparkly chandelier
  2. Adam Hills, who had a massive queue going all over the hill
  3. Nick Doody, in a fairly warm cellar
  4. Massaoke, a big late-night mass karaoke event

It was raining when I came out of Nick Doody’s show and as I walked home down the hill behind the Tron, I heard a man slip on the wet cobbles and shout to no one in particular in a Scottish accent “Oooh! I don’t want to die!” which was almost as hilarious as anything I’d heard in the last couple of days.

Massaoke was fun but too noisy for my taste and too late, because it started at half past midnight and finished at 3 (I didn’t stay until the end) and also, it was pouring with rain – really, really heavy rain – as I was walking down to the Gilded Balloon. In all the kerfaffigans when my clothes went missing on Thursday, I managed to forget to pack my waterproof trousers but it was ok! Long before I reached Greyfriars, my trousers were so wet I didn’t care about it any more. They were stuck to my legs and they couldn’t get any worse. There are building works where the Udderbelly should be and a footpath around the edges – a footpath that was totally flooded. Fortunately, I arrived a bit early and the queue was inside (although no one knew where, so everyone just stood around in bars and corridors and on stairs and waited to be told to go in) and I lurked and dried off and wondered if I looked like someone who worked there because I got asked questions and directions every five minutes, and I also spotted Jarred Christmas, Al Murray and Jay Foreman. The Gilded Balloon is clearly the place for comedian spotting.

The rain had stopped by the time I left, replaced by a really thick yellow fog. At least, I don’t know if it was really yellow or if it was just the lights around the Gilded Balloon that made it look yellow.

On Sunday I got up a bit late, went outside to get some food, discovered that it was painfully hot and sunny, ate food and then went to the pool.

I have many opinions on the pool. It’s a bit too cold. It’s inside. There are no hot tubs or hot pots or bubble baths or slides or anything. There’s a fifty metre pool divided into two pools by what I presume is a removable pontoon. There’s a not-quite-warm-enough baby pool that’s almost as big as a standard pool, if not quite as deep. There are diving boards – big diving boards and a big five-metre deep diving pool. But the actual swimming pools were interesting because someone stomped on the bottom of the shallower lane pool and it sounded hollow. So I investigated and I’m 99% sure that the bottom is removable to make it deeper. Maybe even frighteningly deeper. Some Icelandic lane pools are four or five metres deep at the deep end. I went in the baby pool, leaned against the wall and felt the pool breathing, so I investigated underneath. Another false floor and this one you can push out by nearly half a centimetre. You just stand there with your back against the wall and your feet or knees on the floor and you can feel the floor moving around.

I came back from my nice swim (I did swim! I didn’t just investigate the floors!), had some more food, read, had a nap and then went out for my quietest day, just the two shows

  1. Craig Campbell, who I want to adopt
  2. Andrew Maxwell, who I also want to adopt

I only had 45 minutes between those two and they were at opposite ends of the city – well, opposite ends of the bubble that contains 95% of the Fringe shows. I was a bit concerned about making it in time but Craig finished earlier than expected and then – because I had a bus day ticket – I caught the 3 from Princes Street across North and South Bridges to Nicolson Square, which is less than five minutes from Teviot Row, which is just to the north of Andrew’s theatre, so I actually had 35-40 minuets to kill chatting to two ladies in the Gilded Garden – they’re seeing opera and spoken word and “heavy plays” and a bit of comedy and asked things like “and what sort of show is that?” when they asked what I’d seen and enjoyed. “Well…. it’s stand-up comedy. Pretty much everything I’m seeing is stand-up comedy.”

EdFringe 2015: Thursday & Friday

When they say “the Caledonian Sleeper is as romantic as ever!”, clearly they weren’t sleeping in the seats.

Oh, they’re not so bad. They’re nice and big, they’re laid out 2+1 which means I could pick a 1 seat and not have anyone next to me but when you come down to it, you’re trying to sleep in a seat for seven hours and that’s not very comfortable. I’m pretty sure I twisted some internal organs into the wrong place overnight. We stopped at Preston and Carlisle – don’t know why because you can’t get on there and I’m pretty sure you can’t get off either. I do understand why we stopped at Carstairs – in order to separate our sixteen-car train so half could go off to Edinburgh and the other half to Glasgow. By Carstairs, it was about 6.30am, the sun was up, people were awake and they were giggly, as if they were at a sleepover, instead of having spent a good chunk of the night awake and all of it curled up in a chair.

Edinburgh was not as quiet as I expected at 7.30 in the morning although I was later to learn that by August standards, it was very quiet indeed. By mid-afternoon, it’s extremely difficult just to move. But all that was a long way off.

I had breakfast of toast and apple juice and then went off to my flat – and when I say “flat”, I mean “student room”, which wasn’t available until 3pm but they did let me leave my luggage there. I ambled around a bit, went up under the castle, went to the Fringe shop and collected my tickets, eventually – the machine having malfunctioned and thus convinced itself it had printed tickets it had not. It took four people to sort that one out. But once that was done, I was essentially just killing time. I’d deliberately not planned much on the Friday to give myself time to recover from a night on the train and all that ended up meaning was that I was at a loose end and homeless. Somehow I stumbled across the Hop On Hop Off tour buses and that seemed as good a plan as any – get taken on a tour around Edinburgh, with a seat, kill some time. I did the full circle and then started it again until we got to Holyrood and Arthur’s Seat because sitting down there is a place called Dynamic Earth. I don’t want to call it a museum but I can’t think of any better word right now – it’s a series of interactive exhibitions on subjects close to my heart such as earthquakes, volcanoes, glaciers and tectonic plates. First exhibit is a room full of Scottish scientists discussing the various roles they played in our current understanding of the Earth, one a hologram, four others moving portraits – all surprisingly lifelike, actually. Then you go in a time machine to watch the creation of the universe and then in the earthquakes and volcanoes room and so on. They did have a few problems – their iceberg has melted, leaving nothing but a wood and mesh frame, and no surprise really, given that the room it lives in is about room temperature. The 4D flight is currently 2D because of systems failure when the plane crashed, so you don’t get the 3D glasses or most of the special effects, except the snowstorm. That still worked. It finished up with a show in the showdome – where it’s all projected onto a domed ceiling and that’s pretty impressive.

Even better, when I came out starving hungry because it was gone two o’clock and I’d last eaten at eight in the morning, I found that in their cafe you could make up a lunchbox, with apple juice and cheese rolls and so on. It didn’t say anywhere that it was for children so I went ahead and did it before taking the bus back to Waverley Bridge.

My room… is on the basic side and it has a fluorescent bulb so weedy I have to put the lamp on until I’ve been in the room for at least an hour. Flat 3 is split across two separate corridors and it turns out (on Saturday afternoon) that the kitchen is in the other corridor. I’ll investigate further in the morning because I’ve just eaten and I have no need to use the kitchen right now, or later on this evening.

First up was Jody Kamali, in the Clover room in the Med Quad – these are all run by the Underbelly and so everything is cow-themed. I’m not sure what to make of the show – teeny tiny room, audience of 19 of which at least three were children and I spent the first half an hour wishing I could escape without looking so conspicuous. But then people start to relax and get into it and you know it’s silly but you stop hating it and start going along with the silliness.

Second show – and last of the night – was Ed Byrne in an oven at the top of the tower at the Gilded Balloon. Not the sort of heat that grows over the course of the show – the sort of heat that hits you as you walk through the door and makes the entire audience fall asleep ten minutes from the end.

And that was it for Thursday and Friday. Having got to the Gilded Balloon via the Pleasance, I found the more direct route back with no problem, fell onto my bed- the train already seemed weeks ago rather than merely last night – and discovered that, student-style, it’s rock hard. Fortunately, that’s how I like my bed and I would have been very comfortable if not for the roaring all night from next door – air conditioning, I assume. If you’re not listening to it, it fades to a background whisper but the moment you notice it’s there, it becomes deafening.

Monday: trying to get home

I’d planned to spend Monday morning in the spa – if the hotel has one, it seems foolish not to use it. However, as the spa cost 3500kr, I decided to give it a miss and go into town and buy the glass volcano coasters I’ve been staring at for years. I collected my bus pass from reception, crossed the road to the bus stop and discovered that on bank holidays the buses don’t start until nearly ten. The Hilton is a little way out of town but not far and it’s certainly not difficult to get there – it’s on Laugarvegur so you just walk in a straight line until you crash into Lækjatorg. Of course, being a bank holiday, hardly anything was open – only really the souvenir shops. I acquired my coasters, got some juice from the 1011 – the leftover dregs of four-day-old Fanta wasn’t really what I wanted for breakfast – and then decided, since I had time on my hands and not much to do, I’d go and have breakfast in Eymundsson on Skólavörðustígur – right opposite the Thor Guesthouse where I’d started the holiday. I had croissant and orange juice sitting out in the sunshine and then went back to Lækjatorg in time to catch the 11 at 11.08. I’d been told the 11 would take me from Lækjatorg to the bus stop right by the hotel – it hadn’t occurred to me to ask what bus stop. Off we went and soon enough, I realised that I needed this vital piece of information. Well, I could see the Grand Hotel and I knew the Hilton was close-ish to that so I jumped off and found myself on an unfamiliar road with no idea where to go. I had a map but it didn’t seem to do much good. I found the road I was on but as the smaller roads branching off weren’t named, I had no idea where on the road I was. I could see mountains at each end and I could identify Reykjanes and Esja but I couldn’t get my head around the fact that Esja is north of the city and that I had to go north to get to the hotel. But I walked towards Esja and bumped into Miklabraut, one of Reykjavik’s biggest roads. That threw me completely. According to my map, that shouldn’t intersect with the road I was on at the angle that it did. I couldn’t comprehend it and eventually I had to conclude that I’d gone the wrong way. Off I went in the other direction and ran into another large road and a hospital. That road shouldn’t be meeting my road at all! It took so long for all the pieces to fall into place, that the road I was in had two halves and I was on the southern half, not the northern half. It was about 11.40 by this time and I was supposed to be checking out at 12 and being picked up to go to the airport at 12.30 (a piece of genuine genius; I’d planned to take the bus and drag my 18kg+ luggage down to Lækjatorg but instead – having realised that the luggage was heavy – I’d popped into the Greyline offices and pleaded to have a hotel pick-up added to my booking, which was about the same price as getting the bus and far more convenient). I stormed up the road, realising I was at least half a mile in the wrong direction and at least half a mile to go after that, hot, thirsty, angry and frustrated. I found a bus stop. The bus was due in four minutes. Surely that was more efficient than continuing to storm up the road. It was.

The lovely bus driver stopped at the right stop for me and pointed me in the direction of the hotel. I was fifteen minutes late. No one has ever shoved everything into a bag as quickly and as recklessly as I did. I checked out five minutes later, sweating like a pig, still breathless from my haste – and no one seemed to care that I was late for check-out and I probably had no need to panic – and then I spent half an hour sitting outside on the luggage waiting to be collected.

The coach trip was uneventful, the waiting at the airport was uneventful – except that all the flights go out within about an hour and a half of each other – that’s thirteen flights to North America and seven to Europe which is far too many for a little airport like Keflavik which was only really designed for about a dozen flights in a whole day. The non-Schengen zone was packed so tightly that you could hardly move. The main departure area has had a lot of changes since I was last there – the nice restaurants where I could have some of the bread without having the soup has transformed into a weird kitchen where you order hot things and are given a Nebari life disc which lights up when it’s ready and you can’t have the soup or salad until you’ve got whatever it is you want  – hot dog, burger etc – already on your tray.

My flight was an hour delayed and I’m pretty sure it took off even later than that. I passed the time watching the second half of Kingsman, the second episode of Fortitude – so I could point at it and go “I stayed there!” “Oh, that’s Henry’s house!” and “Look, you can see the towers!” – and finally the bits of Walter Mitty that were filmed in Iceland.

But the adventure wasn’t over when I landed, at 9.12 rather than 8.10. By the time I was back in my car it was 10.30. The ticket machine told me I owed £250 for parking – no, I prepaid and it sure wasn’t that much, so I had to dump my car the wrong way round on double yellow lines to go and see Customer Services who acted like this happens all the time, which it probably does and that’s why you should have somewhere people can leave their cars. I was struggling with the car, actually. For a start, I’d tried putting my foot on the clutch to start the engine, as the Golf demanded but Puffin doesn’t. I’d tried to put it in gear with my right hand. I’d tried to put my foot on the brake and succeeded in hitting brake and accelerator at the same time, which felt really reassuring for a trip along the motorway if I ever managed to escape the car park.

Nice and easy to get out of Heathrow, follow the signs to the M4. Which I did. M4, turn left onto M25, turn right onto M3, straight down it until I get home. I reached the M4 junction. Turn left for The West, turn right for Central London. Ok, that’s a left. I drove along the M4, expecting to hit the M25 in under ten minutes. How odd, I seem to have been on here for ages. Did I see signs for Slough on the way up? Hmmm. Maidenhead. Is Maidenhead inside the M25? I genuinely didn’t know. But I did know that Reading East isn’t and in much rage and fury and fear, I turned off, drove for miles down a road before finally coming across somewhere I could get to the other side of the road to get back to the M4 and head east back to London. I found the M25 turning! It was closed! Now tempted to stop the car on the hard shoulder and just sleep right there and forget ever getting home ever again, I continued on into London, wondering what was going to happen. How did I cross what turned out to be twelve lanes of traffic without even noticing? The motorway has clearly been moved. Ah, here’s the Heathrow turning, more than an hour after I left it! Here’s where I can go back on the M4 westbound again – this was a repeat of the morning in Reykjavik except at higher speed, in the dark and with decreasing hope of ever getting any sleep. It was 11.37 before I finally made it onto the M25 and quarter to two before I got back home. I am never driving to Heathrow again.