This week I'll be mostly on a boat

"It's very very nice here"
Bown 2002

Right now I should be sitting at home, with my feet up in front of the fire, reading Autosport.  Instead, I'm on a boat half way across the English Channel.

Why?

Well, yesterday evening I should have been sitting on a plane, with my seat-belt on and my seat-back upright, reading Andrew Benson, Freakonomics, and Bel's Randomness on the Kindle.  Instead, I was on a train from Southampton to Chandlers Ford.

Why?

In a word - fog.

The fog has rolled in across the Channel Islands for a few days, and there is mayhem.  All the flights have been cancelled.  There have been no newspapers (or Autosport) since the mail plane can't land.  You've got hundreds of people at dozens of airports all thinking the same thing - catch the boat.  While BA, Flybe and Blue Islands might be making a loss, the cabbies at Poole harbour and doing a roaring trade between station and ferry terminal.



The Poole-Guernsey-Jersey-St. Malo ferry is totally stuffed full of passengers who were meant to be flying this weekend.  We've all got a story to tell.  And some sleep to catch up on, which I'm planning on doing once I've scribbled this down.

There are people sitting at my table who got the National Express down from Liverpool to catch the boat.  Others who got their cars back out of the long-stay car park at Gatwick, drove to Poole and put the car on the boat.  Others who were put up in hotels courtesy of Flybe for two nights, before giving up and getting the train to the port.

It turns out that the guy sitting next to me used to work in IT in the days when computer rooms were the size of five-a-side football pitches.  He remembers when video-conferencing was a cutting-edge technology that the big blue chip companies had, but these days his wife is on Skype with the family every day.  The couple opposite are visiting their kids and grandchildren on the island.  They remember watching the Queen's coronation on black-and-white tv, and still think mobile phones are a pretty neat idea.  A few seats away are the pair I was behind in the queue for the Flybe desk at the airport when an evening's worth of flights got cancelled.  They had popped over to visit someone in hospital for a few hours and ended up in the UK for 3 days.

We talk about Jersey, and the UK, and about 'today', and about the 'old days'.  In the space of an hour or two I hear myself saying out loud (and in all seriousness): "it's very, very nice here, but you wouldn't want to live here" and "if things don't change they'll stay as they are" and "you tell the young people of today ... they wouldn't believe you" and "don't mention the war, I mentioned it once and I think I got away with it".

After sharing stories, and some bags of sweets, it appears we are at Guernsey already.  All the millionaires get off, and we spend the last hour or so feeling a bit less like we're in a cattle truck.  Before you know it, we can just about see St Brelade's Bay through the fog, and shortly after that we're docking at St Helier.  We shake hands, suggest that we'll see each other back here in two day's time, and we're off.

I never did catch up on my sleep.  But at least I'm at home.  Even if my copy of Autosport hasn't turned up yet.