So I spent today working from home. Around quarter past seven last night something – and nobody’s yet saying quite what – happened to the new bridge just outside Liverpool Street.

You know – the one that they were working on over the Easter break that they guaranteed would be completed on time, only for it to over-run so that I and countless other commuters spent a day working from home. It’s the one that replaced the bridge they took out over Christmas and the New Year. You know – the one where they planned ahead so they would get the job done on time and we’d all go back to work at the start of the year without a hitch. Only for it to over-run and for me and countless other commuters spend another day working from home.

Are you seeing a pattern here?

They got fined for that Christmas cock-up. £14m in total, making it a very expensive bridge indeed.

So anyway, last night something happened, which blocked the track and cut off Liverpool Street. The inevitable outcome was radio pronunciations not to travel on the trains unless absolutely necessary, although why they think anyone would ride a rush-hour train to London unless it was ‘absolutely necessary’ is beyond me.

It couldn’t have happened on a worse day in terms of PR, as it coincided with a story on Railway People about what is going to happen to that £14m fine, which most commuters would probably like to see ploughed back into the network so we can get a better service.

Rail chiefs have reacted with annoyance to the news that ORR’s £14m, imposed on Network Rail for the New Year’s over runs, will not be ploughed back into the railway industry. Instead the money will be remitted to the Treasury…

Michael Roberts, ATOC’s Chief Executive, described the decision as a missed opportunity. He said. ‘While the ORR has clearly considered this matter seriously, train operators and passengers will find their decision disappointing. It represents a missed opportunity to use the money to deliver some real additional improvements to passengers. Instead, we are left with a ‘money go round’ where money raised from the taxpayer to fund Network Rail is just being ploughed straight back to the Treasury.’

So Network Rail will be losing some of its subsidy, which will have to be made up somewhere – either through cost-cutting, which risks introducing more problems as corners are snipped, or by the costs being passed on to the train companies. And we know what will happen then, don’t we: ticket prices will rise.

So ultimately the fine for those delays will probably end up being paid for by the people who were delayed in the first place, the passengers. And they say they want to encourage less people to use their cars to get to work…?

So if I reckon the UK on the whole can’t pick a winning Eurovision entry, how did our party do? We voted each song and performance on a scale of 0 to 10, with 10 obviously being the best and 0 the worst. After collating them at the end of the night, these were our results. Shockingly the UK actually came third in our group, despite all my bitching, so we were well out on that one.

We did best in predicting the final positions for Serbia, Turkey, Israel and Albania, getting them exactly right. We were one spot out for both the Ukraine and Germany, in each instance liking them just a little more than the rest of Europe. Of the others we liked more than Europe, we were three positions out for Norway and Georgia, four for Poland, five for Denmark, Romania and Croatia, and well out for France, Finland, Iceland, Sweden and the UK.

Shockingly we somehow put the UK third. I still don’t know how as we all agreed that we didn’t actually like it.

Of the ones we disliked, we rated Bosnia & Herzegovina and Spain three positions lower than the rest of Europe, and everyone else – Greece, Portugal, Latvia, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Russia – a lot lower than the rest of the continent (nine or more positions lower than they actually achieved).

So we didn’t do so bad, but again we weren’t brilliant. We pretty much got the second placed contestant right, but were shockingly off the mark when it came to spotting the winner.

Or, to put that another way here’s how the positions we gave the finalists differed from their actual finishing places. The darker the background, the further out we were.

Technorati Tags:
eurovision, eurovision song contest

So my prediction came true. The UK didn’t win Eurovision last night. In fact, we crashed out and came joint last, polling votes from just Ireland and San Marino.

There has since been the inevitable talk of block voting by Eastern Europe, which saw Russia triumph, and Wogan is hinting that he may call an end to his 30 or so years of BBC commentary, bowing out before next year. Some say it should go further than that, and the UK should pull out altogether, withdrawing its funding like a petulant child taking its bat and ball home because the other kids won’t let it win.

Well, for one thing, I think Wogan leaving could be the best chance we have of reviving the UK’s Eurovision fortunes. He isn’t exactly known for championing the show, and he doesn’t seem to see that we simply don’t write the kind of songs that have a chance of winning any more. New Europe does. A defeatist attitude like that is almost certain to put us off really trying to win.

And if you think Eastern Europe only gets points from Eastern Europe, think again. Look at the voting patterns for this year’s contest and you’ll see that of the big four (UK, Germany, France and Spain, each of which is guaranteed a place in the final without even trying), we ourselves showed a definite bias towards the entrants from the old Soviet bloc.

Each country had 58 points to award in total (1 to 8, plus a 10 and a 12), with three of those four giving more points to the East than the West. Spain gave Eastern Europe 36 points, with the remaining 22 going to the West. From Germany, 39 headed East and just 19 headed West. In France, it was 36 to the East and 22 to the West. Only the UK gave more points to Western Europe, but it was a close-run thing. We gave Western Europe 31 points, and those in the East 27.

What does this prove? Only the UK seems not to appreciate the talent coming out of Eastern Europe, and that’s why we can’t write songs that will appeal to the new mass of the continent. As a result, we lose every time.

As for the winner, Dima Bilan… well, it’s not surprising he won. We didn’t like his entry at the party, placing him last in our votes, but he is a massive star in Eastern Europe. Twice now he’s won Artist of the Year and Song of the Year gongs from MTV.

And Russia wasn’t the only country to field a star. The Ukraine’s Ani Lorak is massive at home, and as such she polled a respectable second.

We entered a talent show runner-up and sulked when we bombed out.

Technorati Tags:
eurovision, eurovision song contest, terry wogan, dima bilan, ani lorak

Because we have a crap song. And a rubbish stageshow. I am so sick of people claiming that we don’t win any more because of some imaginary block voting going on in Eastern Europe. Stop with the paranoia.

Yes, they do all vote for each other – that I won’t deny – but it has nothing to do with a feeling of ‘them and us’, or of new Europe punishing Britain for sticking its destructive nose into places like Iraq and Afghanistan.

Eastern Europe isn’t some homogenous single entity as anyone who has done much travelling there will attest. It’s barely a decade since half the region was at war with the other half. Have they really had time to put all that behind themselves and vote each others’ songs to the top in a camp singing show? I think not.

The sad fact of the matter is that Britain doesn’t need to try to get into Eurovision, and so we don’t. Instead we buy ourselves a ticket to every final along with Germany, France and Spain. And by strange coincidence we all seem to do very poorly indeed these days.

Spain’s entry this time around is some bizarre comedy act that looks like Rolf Harris and sounds like a ringtone from 1998. France has made a language concession and switched to English, but otherwise has an entry whose whose main attraction seems to be a talent in throwing and catching a microphone. The UK has entered what sounds like an album filler and goes nowhere. It’s instantly forgettable. Nobody will remember what it sounded like by the end of the night and, as a result, we’ll poll very poorly indeed. As we deserve. Of the big four, only Germany seems to have entered anything half worth listening to.

You only need to look at some of the favourites, like Ukraine, Sweden and Malta to see what we should be doing with Eurovision. They have seen how times have changed. The voting British public, which chooses the most bland entries for us year after year and then wonders why they get nowhere, clearly has not.

I’m sorry, but if we’re serious about ever winning Eurovision again we should let the countries that know how this works – from the Balkans, the Baltic and the like – choose an entry on our behalf. Then we might stand a halfway decent chance of winning.

Meanwhile, I’ll spend tomorrow night waving the flag for the Shady Lady of Ukraine.

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eurovision, eurovision song contest

OK, so a long shot this one, as I think the first minute will put off a lot of voters, but get past what your grandmother might call ‘noise’ and it’s surprisingly catchy. Chances? Better than 50%, I think, but probably not better than 75%.

Still, here’s the official video, which is better than the live version where she seems to slip out of tune. Nox did that when singing for Hungary in 2005 and a promising entry ended up doing not very much at all.

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eurovision, eurovision song contest

…but then again, while I’d love for the Ukraine to win, there’s a good chance it could go to Sweden. They’re putting forward Charlotte Perrelli with Hero, which is about as stereotypical a Eurovision track as you can get:

And you know what? She won it once before already. In 1999 she sang Take Me to Your Heaven and took the crown at the contest in Israel. It was vastly inferior to this year’s effort:

Well, perhaps, but I think the Ukraine has a very good chance of winning it this year with Shady Lady by Ani Lorak. Like Greece in the year they won, she seems to be touring pretty much the whole of Europe to get us familiar with the song.

The UK, unfortunately, is once again putting in the usual dismal durge.

On Saturday we went to Sizewell and walked down the beach to the bird reserve visitors’ centre. There were almost as many binocular-wielding twitchers as there were actual birds but it still made for a pleasant, interesting walk. We stopped for tea and picked up some leaflets; among them one for Rendlesham Forest.

So it was that we found ourselves driving out there on Sunday.

The forest is famous as the site of the most significant UFO encounter in Britain. In December 1980, airmen on the US airbase in the middle of the woods reported seeing strange lights in the sky. Three of them set out to investigate, but then radio communications started to break up, and so while one stayed back at the edge of the trees the other two ventured forward.

Eventually they came to a clearing where they saw three ‘mechanical’ lights that hovered just a few inches above the ground. The animals on a nearby farm were getting distressed and the airmen could hear the sound of women screaming. Eventually the lights shot off into the sky.

A couple of days later a tall pillar of light appeared in the sky, which when the airmen went back to investigate opened up at the top to reveal a large black eye. Radiation levels at the site were ten times the background norm when measured the following day, and the investigators found three indentations in the ground that could have been where the feet of a craft had come to rest.

Nothing has ever really been proven one way or the other about the sightings, and nobody has properly explained what caused them. However, the forest was extensively replanted after the storms of 1987, but no trees would ever grow in the clearings where the lights had apparently come to rest.

Now you can visit those clearings by following the UFO trail that leads you through the forest’s broad, open paths, and that’s just what we did.

We’ve driven through the forest loads of times but never broken off from the road and so didn’t know quite what to expect. As it turned out, it was very much like Thetford, with a lot of pine trees and some fern, but also camping areas and, on its edge, agricultural land.

Walking through it on our own was quite spooky. In places, where the canopy is thick, it can turn quite dark, and we were the only ones about. Now and then pine cones would drop down, and sometimes a whole branch would come crashing to the ground and make us jump. The biggest surprise, though, was the family of deer that ran out from the treeline and straight past us, not two metres away. We saw them again some minutes later standing in a clearing. We stopped; they stopped. We all looked at each other, wondering who would move first. Eventually we did, but not for the next five minutes, and all that time we stood watching each other – them just as curious as we were.

As for aliens – well, apart from the markings on the back of the trail signs, which show an alien head and some strange code that apparently appeared there last year, we saw none.

Probably for the best.

In all the times I’ve been to Paris (and there are many) I’ve never actually been in the spring – arguably the classic time to visit. So, it was a bit of a first for both of us.

It looked for a while like things were going to be dodgy weather-wise, and we even packed scarves and gloves, but in the end it was hot and sunny every day and we tanned to the point of peeling.

Notre Dame in the sun

So what did we do? Well, it was Rich’s first time in the city, so we did the regular sites, walking between them rather than taking the metro as they’re all so close together.

The Tower was on the list, of course, and we chose to take the stairs rather than the lift. You can only go to the second level when you do that, but it was still 700 steps up, plus another 18 to get to the upper second tier. You don’t see quite so far from there, of course, but the guidebook assured us the view was actually better than it is from the top. Looking back at pictures I took last time around from the third floor, I’m inclined to agree.

The Eiffel Tower

We went to Versailles, which I’d always ruled because I assumed it was too far out of the city. Turns out it isn’t; it’s a 20 minute ride on the RER from Austerlitz, and when we got there the gardens were free to enter (the chateau itself was closed, but neither of us was all that bothered about going in – we just wanted to get out of the city centre for a few hours).

The grounds are huge, extending for hundreds of acres and filled with statues and sculptures. The contrast between this and the way the general population would have been living at the time of the revolution must have been stark, and you can see why the royals were dragged back to Paris from there to have their heads lopped off. It’s ironic, though, that they then continued to spend a fortune on the place to keep it looking good.

Statue at Versailles

We spent a relaxing afternoon walking among the grand tombs in Pere Lachaise cemetery, which had far less recognisably famous corpses in it than I remembered. Now that they’ve cleaned up and fenced-off Jim Morrisson’s grave (which has its own security guard) the new focus of graffiti seems to be Oscar Wilde’s grand Egyptian-styled resting place, which is now covered in waxy red lipstick kisses.

Pere Lachaise cemetery

We toyed with the idea of renting a couple of the Velib bikes that are now almost as common as cars on the city streets, but ultimately chickened out. We didn’t fancy the idea of being squashed flat by the Arch de Triomphe.

Still, it was good to see them used so frequently, and it would be great to see something along similar lines in London, particularly as the first half hour of use is free. As the racks for picking them up and dropping them off are all so close together it means you could transport yourself around the city all day long without ever paying a bean, so long as you checked it in again every 28 minutes or so.

Free-to-use (for the first half hour, at least) Velib bikes

We went to the first night of Kylie’s 2008 tour, at Bercy, just south of the river. It was a fantastic show, massively stripped down from the flamboyance of earlier performances. Feathers, sequins and grand sets were out. A simple lit stage, long dresses and lots of Kylie singing on her own were the order of the day. She started fashionably (45 minutes) late, but nobody seemed to care, and went on for over two and a half hours. We eventually left the venue with ringing ears just five minutes before midnight.

Tiny Minogue

But mostly we just enjoyed being in Paris, enjoyed the sun, enjoyed wearing our shorts again, enjoyed eating cheap set menus in the Latin Quarter and enjoyed dodging the Gayelord Minceurs and the strangely bestial adverts for Orangina.

Paris in the spring. Highly recommended.

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paris, versailles, france, kylie, kylie+minogue

The bonus of backdating blog posts is that you can write up your notes when you get back from travelling and post them on the appropriate day.

The downside is that anyone using a browser rather than a feed reader will probably miss them by not scrolling down past postings that then appear above them.

So as it took the best part of a week to get my notes from Morocco online, here’s a link to the relevant entries for browser-based readers who probably won’t have seen them:

Day one: An introduction to sweet mint tea.

Day two: The Souq, the square and boiled cows’ heads.

Day three: Over the mountains by 4×4, donkey polo, and checking your bed for scorpions.

Day four: Hold-ups in Casablanca.