Sounded like a plan

I have been attending international matches at Twickenham for over 50 years, always with a group of chums called 'The S Club'. This season though I decided to embrace the events in a different way.

For some time now we have said that the match has been the low point of the weekend, and, with kick-off scheduled for 16:45, the night life has become less appealing to a group of 70 somethings at 9pm than it is after normal 3pm kick-off  times.

Couple that with hotel room's now costing in excess of £120 per night, and the match tickets themselves being between £130 and £150 for an 'average' view, and the whole experience needed to be revisited. 

So, my plan was to catch an early train from Liverpool, have a few beers and a meal with 'The S Club' and then travel back to Liverpool watching the game on the train. So first part of the plan was executed as I got a cheap day return ticket and was all ready with technology and food supplies for the train journeys.

Imagine then my nervousness when the day before travel I got a warning note from Avanti North West trains saying my train may be cancelled. OK I thought I can get the earlier train, albeit that was 07:40.

So an early alarm got me up only to see that train had been cancelled. My scheduled train was still running but the train afterwards had also been cancelled. Then just as I was about to leave a notification informed me my scheduled train had been cancelled too. To cancel one train is unfortunate, to cancel three is carelessness, even incompetence.

So what options? Drive to Crewe? Ah, go from Chester, but then found out the Birkenhead to Chester service was delayed so I could not get a connecting train by going that route. So I am now consigned to a day at home watching on the television.

I don't use the train very  much these days so am not sure how often this sort of disruption occurs, but Liverpool Lime Street must be mental today with three train loads of people trying to find alternative ways to get to London, whether or not many of them are going to the rugby.

And what of Avanti and their bed fellow the dinosaur which is the Unite union. Their members are trying to bring the Country to it's knees when they are over paid already and clearly underworked as they have no trains to drive most of the time.

Virgin trains were never as poorly operated as Avanti but given there is little chance of the Avanti franchise being renewed, they don't give a toss about customer service.

Now I see three of the four evening return train services have been cancelled out of Euston so goodness knows whether I would have got back tonight anyway. Come on England  prove us wrong about the match and make our day!!

Strike a light

Not quite the lowest postings in 2022, but will try to find something each week as we move into the New Year. It has not started too well with SWMBO struggling to shake off her third bout of Covid which looks like it could be a long Covid type of hang-over. We shall see how she develops over the next few weeks.

The year end has been dominated by strikes and the national nurses, railworkers and border force strikes have been augmented in Wirral by a bin strike.

Now this is an interesting case study. Firstly the whole of the Wirral population is affected, unlike the National strikes which affect smaller percentages of the population. The bin men are employed by BIFFA and the waste disposal sites ( the tips) are run by VEOLA. They are both subcontractors of Wirral Council.

As mentioned in an earlier post Wirral Council are £46m in debt so they are unlikely to let their sub-contractors off the hook regarding their financial deals. That said, they did call all parties into a Zoom call on Christmas Day, and the press are indicating that the bin men accepted a 10% pay rise and went back to work.

Deep joy for the residents and probably a bit of double time for the refuse collection operatives, to give them their correct title. Think, however, of the good will they have lost. They were not working the week before Christmas so must have lost out hugely on the traditional Christmas box which I and other residents surely still give them. £100 a street must be worth several thousand pound per lorry. Losses they will never recoup. The postal workers were in the same boat. So they have bowed to their Union wishes without  thinking it through.

Let's look at the RMT, and their dinosaur of a leader, Mick Lynch. Liverpool is one of the last bastions of the Union movement. Unite and Unison are investing heavily in student accommodation in an effort to brain washing their residents into the benfits of joining a trade union. 

All the RMT union seem to be doing however is alienating their very customer base and they could see many being permanently driven down other transportation routes, particularly as working from home seems to be becoming a more accepted work pattern.

Any why are they striking? Clearly they want more money, don't we all, but working practises play a part as well. They are opposed to the closure of ticket offices, but very few people buy tickets at the station these days. what the train operators are saying is get off you backside and help out of the station concourse. Technology has been forcing people to retrain for decades now, the RMT really do need to remove their blinker's and embrace the closure of ticket offices and the introduction of driverless train. The DLR in London and the Metro in Paris do not have any more accidents than Metrolink or the London Underground. There needs to be a bit of give and take to allow the Country continue to operate without the Unions trying to hold us all to ransom.

Finally to the nurses. Yes they need a payrise, but not the 23% being bandied around. Undoubtedly the independent pay board will allocate a double figure rise for them in the 2023 assessment, and hoepfully the Government will accept and implement it. There are two areas, however, which I am struggling to understand.

The first is bedblocking. What has happened to the Nightingale hospitals developed very quickly for COVID patients, but rarely needed. why can't these facilities be used for people with either little or nothing wrong with them, who are waiting for aftercare, or for the new wave of flu and COVID patients, making them almost isolation hospitals?

Second is the cost of accommodation. In the day, every hospital had nurses home to allow the staff  subsidised living facilities. Maybe the Unite and unison investment in property could be better used to reintroduce these facilities and help their members in a more practical way.

Time will tell.