By coincidence, on the day that one of my small handful of readers left a comment describing the Millennium Dome as an ‘Upturned Tupperware Dish’ I was planning to write about it in this, my next post. And that is because, now called the O2 Arena, I had just been there for the very first time.

Back in what were affectionately known as the ‘Swinging Sixties’ I spent a lot of my time in London having been raised at the nice end of the Central Line. Weekends were often spent travelling up to various points due west of Holborn and during those years, and my first two working years in Fleet Street, I grew to both love the city and to loathe it. Loved it for it’s vibrant undercurrents, it’s endless choices, it’s history – loathed it for it’s grubbiness, it’s decay and it’s overcrowded streets. London was a city that could charm one moment and appal the next and since those days trips to London have been more or less limited to necessity and have been planned as an incisive strike. Get in fast, do what is needed and no more, get out again as quickly as possible.

And then Mrs Swordfish bought me a delightful birthday present of tickets to see Eddie Izzard at the O2 Arena and we decided to stay a couple of nights in Leicester Square, take the Thames Clipper from Waterloo to Greenwich instead of using the tube and pay a visit to Harrods for some shopping.

And it was great. Well on the whole it was great. I did forget the rule that says if they describe a hotel as ’boutique’ and charge you £300 a night then you really do end up with a room that is crowded when there is more than one person in it. I mean you couldn’t have swung a cat in this room because the cat wouldn’t have been able to get in. But apart from that it was great. And to my great surprise, London – or at least that part of London – seems to have re-invented and re-invigorated itself. It’s looking really pretty good.

So – back to the O2 Arena. I too was one of those who grumbled at the building of the dome. It seemed to me ill-conceived and – as history shows – indeed it was. But what a truly magnificent structure it is. Stunningly beautiful as you edge around the bend in the river and you catch the first sight of it dominating the landscape, all lit up against the night sky. Same goes for the London Eye. A long, long time ago we could have built something like this and then there seemed to be a long period spanning a large part of the twentieth century where we lost our way. The old ‘Centre Point’ building was about as good as it got! It’s good to see that we have that vision back and have the will to undertake such projects.

And finally, we nipped in to St. Pancras Station to look at the renovations and were pleasantly surprised by what a great job has been done. Sadly, our train home meant using Kings Cross next door – a grim reminder of the ugly, dirty and neglected marriage of Victorian grandeur with mid to late twentieth century budget building.

Oh – and Eddie Izzard was great fun.

I don’t usually do travel tips but one or two here and there will do no harm.

I do not, generally speaking, like hotels that much. I have spent time in too many and while I have been lucky enough to stay in some really up-market places they are still impersonal and usually without much personality. There have been exceptions here and there but on the whole, I have found that inns or even guest houses suit me best – as long as they are good ones of course.

I have become quite a fan of the town of St. George in the south-western corner of Utah and have spent my visits there at the Seven Wives B&B which is not only a comfortable and friendly place but is also a historic site. To quote shamelessly from their website:

Seven Wives Inn consists of two neighboring homes and a cottage in St. George’s historical district. Edwin G. Woolley, who built the larger house in 1873, hid polygamists in the attic via a secret door, after polygamy was outlawed, by the U.S. government in 1882. One of these polygamists was Benjamin F. Johnson, an ancestor of the innkeepers, who really did have seven wives, hence the name Seven Wives Inn.
The house next door, built by George Whitehead in 1883, is called the President’s House because it hosted some of the early presidents of the LDS (Mormon) Church. Who could blame them for staying there? Esther, George’s wife, was said to be the best cook in town!
Both homes were built out of Adobe in the late 1800’s. The Woolley-Foster home was built in 1873 and is both a historical & federal landmark. The Whitehead home also holds a historical plaque.

It is also a little eccentric. On my last visit in October, I stayed in a different set of rooms than I had seen before that included one containing the Model T Ford shown in the photograph. It is, in fact, a whirlpool bath built into a Model T.

And you don’t get much more eccentric than that.

The young man in the local 3 shop said “it will just work”.
“Are you sure about that?” I asked. “That’s what T-Mobile said and that never worked”.
And neither did 3. Well – that’s not strictly true. It didn’t work in Washington DC and it didn’t work in Denver or anywhere else in Colorado. Didn’t work anywhere in Utah either. Or Arizona. Or Nevada.

But it DID work in Delaware.

So – when we arrived in Denver I emailed 3 customer support and said “The young man in the local 3 shop said it will just work. But it doesn’t. Although it DID work in Delaware. I can’t make or receive calls to the UK or to friends in the USA. But I CAN send and receive text messages. So what am I missing” How do I get this to work outside of Delaware?”

Next thing I am woken at around 3:30 in the morning by my phone announcing a text message. It’s from 3 customer support to tell me that they couldn’t get through to me and have left a message on the voice mail. Which, of course, I couldn’t call. Well – not without taking a flight back to Delaware which seemed a bit over the top.

And they did this three nights running! The stupid person at 3 didn’t think to themselves – “There’s no point in leaving voice mail because he CAN’T MAKE CALLS”. Not even “hey – this guy is in Denver which is 6 hours behind us so I wont text him at 9 in the morning in case he’s asleep”.

So – International Roaming. As long as you are in Delaware.

You watch the movies and the English guy get’s off the plane in New York and immediately makes a phone call home on his mobile. How does he do that? James Bond never has this problem. And I bet he’s never even been to Delaware. I use all the right codes. The +44 for the UK. 001 for the States. I connect to the local ‘partner’ network with no problem. Then nothing. Try and make a call and up it comes “Connection Error – Please go to Delaware and Try Again”.

If anyone comes visiting this sad and neglected corner of the web and knows how to make this work then please let me in on the secret. Unless, of course, the only place you ever visit in the USA is Delaware.

(When we got back home I accessed my voice mail to find three calls from 3 asking me to phone them to talk about why I couldn’t make calls. They weren’t laughing either).

I have to admit that this tickled my sense of humour. What you can’t see is the fact that this was the only bus in the coach park. There it stood – all alone, unloved, cloudy grey sky above, damp tarmac below.

Makes you wonder what it had done wrong!

I have touched on this subject before but events have now moved on a little and the battle lines are drawn. But first, a little personal history.

When I was a kid I used to play outdoors – most often in the forest that we lived beside. In warm weather and when school was out, my friends and I would disappear early in the morning and as long as I touched base at home from time to time it was likely to be sunset before I returned. We had a ‘play’ area that stretched for many miles and on those hot, lazy days, we would get cuts and bruises, eat the blackberries growing in the hedgerows and get dirty and covered in the detritus of the forest floor. The cuts miraculously healed themselves, the blackberries didn’t poison us and the dirt? Well, what was wrong with a bit of dirt. It washed off. Childhood was an experience, slowly pushing the boundaries of our independence and the odd medical emergency was a necessary part of learning to cope. We learned which adults to avoid, which ones we could rely on for help if needed and mourned a wasted day if the weather forced us inside.

As a young teenager I still remember buying my first pair of headphones. I bought them in a local hi-fi shop where the guy behind the counter not only had good product knowledge but was quite happy to impart it because he wanted you to go away happy with your purchase. And he wanted you to come back some day and buy something else. So I got advice. But more importantly I got to handle the goods and try them out for comfort and sound quality. That’s right, they went on my head and I put the earpieces over my ears. My actual ears. I guess many people before me had tried on some of those phones and guess what… I didn’t catch any diseases. My ears didn’t fall off two weeks later and the world as I knew it did not come to an end. This was a truly serious and risky business – my life was at stake. But I survived and, what’s more, ended up with a pair of headphones that were just what I wanted, fit perfectly and eventually gave me years of service.

Wind forward to today and I am in need of a new pair of headphones. You already know what this is about. There they are on a rack in John Lewis, all bubble packed in that stiff plastic you need to take an axe to and no – you can not try them on before you buy. You can not test for comfort, fit and, above all, you can not test the sound quality. So says the evil Health and Safety Executive. So – I naturally ask – what happens if I get them home, manage to prise them out of the packaging and when I get back from the local Accident and Emergency department find they don’t fit? Well – said the guy at John Lewis – you get your money back less 10%. I kid you not – that was what I was told. I bought them – those ones in the picture – whilst making a verbal declaration at the till that I expected a full refund if I had to return them. You know the rest. Got them home – there was much swearing and searching for industrial strength tools to penetrate the packaging which, in the end I managed to do with no blood being spilled and do they fit? Of course they don’t. For a £69 pair of phones from a respected manufacturer like Denon they are bloody useless. If I put them on and someone asks me a question to which I nod my head – they fall right off. When my wife tried them on, the ear cups dangled somewhere around her lobes missing the actual ear altogether. Did it say on the box that they were for people with really big ears and long heads? Did the guy in Lewis’s inform me they were no good to me because my head just wasn’t big enough? How many petty laws might he have broken of he had done?

So – as I said at the top – the battle lines are drawn and these have got to go back. Now forgive me for this but I am about to say something hypocritical. I have ranted enough in the past about petty regulations that strangle our every moment and dictate our every move but sometimes you just have to bite your tongue. What I want to know is who wins between the appalling Health and Safety and the office of Fair Trading who dictate that what I buy has to be fit for the purpose?

I guess I am about to find out.