Ralph’s Place

Train companies recently updated their ticket tarrifs to make things simpler for customers. Removing a large number of ticket types, on EMT services you can now get:

• Anytime - for use at any time
• Off-peak - for use at off peak times
• Advance - bought in advance, for use on a specific service

Along with these changes, prices appear to have been raised slightly… so that an Off-peak ticket actually costs around 10-15% more (based on London-Nottingham ticket) than the old, and equivilant, Saver ticket. Although on thetrainline.com, a Super Off-peak ticket seems to be available if bought in advance (isn’t this an Advance ticket?) at around the old price.

So while simplifying the ticket types, train companies have also managed to raise prices… great, but it doesn’t stop there! Some of the tickets that disappeared as part of the simplification have no equivilant. Take the “Weekender” that EMT offered on their services, allowing you to leave any time on a Friday and return anytime over the weekend or on Monday (you could also do this Saturday to Tuesday). This ticket used to cost just a little more than a saver ticket, but now the only way to do this is to buy an Anytime ticket, which costs more than twice as much!

This means that not only have they raised prices on simple tickets, but they’ve removed cheaper options, forcing you to travel at inconvenient times or pay a small fortune for your journey. Isn’t that just fantastic.

Fantastically shit. I think I’ll just drive.

The tube is phenomenal. A critical part of London’s public transport network, it ferries close to a billion passengers around the capital every year! While not particularly quick, it’s often the most time effective way to travel from A to B, avoiding the busy streets above.

It’s phenomenal though, because while all of this is true, and despite seemingly endless engineering works, you’d struggle to convince me that there’s been a single day in the last 12 months that there haven’t been delays/closures/breakdowns/signal failures… SOMETHING wrong on at least one (and usually more) line!

When this happens on your route, it’s usually carnage! At busy times, even when the Northern line works fine you often find yourself compressed to a point that even sardines would complain, or waiting 2 or 3 trains (each time watching someone squeeze into an unfathomably small space) before you can sensibly board. If there’s delays on the line though you might as well give up!

Ditching the tube means getting a bus, but that’s just as bad. An already overworked bus network suddenly taking on thousands of additional passengers from a crippled tube network is never going to end well. By the time you get on a bus you’re already late, and at that time of day the traffic’s so bad the journey’ll take much longer than you planned anyway.

Walking is rarely an option, except to another form of transport. If you’re lucky enough to live within walking distance of an overland station that’s an option, but trains only go as far as the outer stations, so getting from south to north still requires the tube… maybe you’ll get lucky?

Finally, probably over an hour late you arrive at your destination in a foul mood, great!

All of this seems magnified coming home from a night out, when closures and delays prevent you from getting home to your desperately needed bed. It doesn’t help when you realise that the delays were probably caused by a defective train at lunch time, and the network never quite caught up.

So the tube is phenomenal! In fact it’s both brilliant and unthinkably bad at the same time. Maybe one day they’ll sort it out, but will I still be around to see it?

Thanks to the BBC for this quote, which in just a few lines manages to outline what’s wrong with football today:

And Chelsea defender Ashley Cole said: “With my booking, I said to him, ‘I’m more than 10 yards. Why should I go back if I am more than 10 yards?’

“And he said, ‘Because I said so.’ I said, ‘But I’ m more than 10 yards’, and that was it. Yellow card. No warning or explanation.

Player’s “I’m right” attitudes are disgraceful. You argue, you get booked. Simple. It doesn’t matter who’s right, it’s about respecting the referee’s decision and doing as you’re told ffs.

Short rant over

I sure as hell couldn’t! My tollerance for the media, BS and the public in general is far too low, if it exists at all.

The media in particular piss me off. For most of the country, the media (in it’s various forms and providers) is the sole source of information about what’s going on in the world. The problem with this is that individual news providers only gives their view of a story, and most readers then take this as the whole truth. Sometimes this view has such a spin on it that it’s blown some tiny, tiny fact out of all proportion and thus missed the point of any action entirely. Some newspapers even resort to - quite frankly - making shit up! How is this acceptable?

That brings me nicely onto BS (for the not-so-quick among us, I mean Bull Shit ). I can’t stand the abundance of BS in the world today. Whether it’s political spin, sales lines or (pet hate #1) the media making mountains out of mole hills to sell a story, I say just drop it. It’s totally unnecessary and the world would be a better place without it. Just cut the crap and tell it like it is. If you did that then maybe people could actually know the truth and draw their own conclusions from it, rather than the ones drawn for us and waved in our face.

As for the general public, I can’t be bothered to go into that again…

So, suffice to say that I’m fed up with the way the world works at the moment. Shame there’s nothing I can do about it besides rant, but it’s good to get it out the system occasionally

I’d say I can see a rant coming up, but really I’m just throwing a few pennies into the fray.

IVF treatment is a privilidge, not a right. FACT. If your doctor agrees that it is suitable for you, then you get it free on the NHS. If not, and you still want to go ahead with it, you pay for it. Simple, no?

Should obese women be able to get IVF on the NHS? No. Why? Well, besides the fact that experts believe they would be at increased risk of health problems, the baby not being healthy or just not getting pregnant at all (all at the cost of thousands to the NHS), the fact that they apparently can’t look after their own health (except of course if they’re obese for reasons out of their control, such as a genetic disorder) doesn’t exactly bode well for them looking after the health of a child.

Harsh? Well probably yes. But seriously, obesity is a real problem in the UK! It’s already putting a strain on NHS resources to treat it’s related health problems, and now I’m hearing that people want the NHS to spend more money potentially putting these people at more risk, so more money can be spent treating them afterwards! What a mess, and all because (in the majority of cases) people just can’t look after themselves… by eating properly and taking a bit of exercise now and then. (And of course if the government tries to do anything to ensure people live healthier lives, like ban smoking or seriously unhealthy foods, everyone screams “Nanny state” before going on to say it’s their right to eat and do what they want… how fucked up is that!? - tbh, I’d be tempted to say “fine, but pay for your own healthcare when it all comes back to bite you in the ass” tangent…)

So yeah, that did turn into a bit of a rant, but the general public really do piss me off sometimes…

Note: Apologies if I’ve offended anyone, I know in some cases there are exceptional circumstances and these should always be considered on their own merits (in relation to my rant on NHS strain and lifestyles at least, re: IVF, I stand by my views that obese women should not receive IVF on the NHS)
Also, big post coming soon about Reading! As soon as I get the net working in the new flat!