Category: Blog

19th December 2014 / Blog /

Never trust a man in a purple onesie – and other thoughts (complaints) from the Alps

HAVING recently been in the Alps on a skiing trip, where there was very little snow, I had plenty of time between the few runs available to contemplate etiquette and general goings-on in the mountains.
At a café where a song with the lyrics “your sex is on fire” was playing (or something of the sort), followed by the 1980s Norwegian pop sensation A-ha’s “Take On Me” and various “Euro-beat” numbers, a friend and I had little better to do than compile a list of “What’s Wrong With Skiing”. We were moody as a result of the lack of skiing and lengthy queues at the lifts (we were at Avoriaz in France), so excuse me if we sound like we’re whinging . . . which we are (a bit).

Here is our list:

1) Never trust a man in a purple onesie. Such snowboarders, for they are almost always borders, are erratic, dangerous and a pain. They are also, we feel, a symbol of some kind of deep-seated social malaise.
2) Also never trust, or have dealings with, anyone wearing retro 1980s luminous/Run-D.M.C-style Adidas gear. They are usually annoyingly loud and think, as my friend put it, that “they’re so funny”.
3) Selfies. It is unacceptable to take selfies while skiing down the mountain. You can’t see where you’re going.
4) Middle-aged men wearing stereos on their heads blaring out house music. This is a particularly regrettable development.
5) Cafes selling Perrier for 3.3 euros in small cans without the offer of a glass (or a smile).
6) People who seem afraid to go on lifts with strangers, thus meaning that despite very long queues, half the chairlifts go up with seats empty (we partially blame the authorities for this).
7) Snowboarders who drop to their knees for a rest in the middle of slopes as though they are contemplating their latest great “trick” – just annoying.
8) Chanel or Prada ski gear. This is, says my skiing companion, “only acceptable if Claudia Schiffer or Claudia Schiffer’s sister is wearing it”. Apparently they can ski and get the stuff for free – anyone else who wears it, is talentlessly stinking rich and unlikely to know what they are doing on the slopes.
9) People who have “GoPro” cameras on their ski helmets: “Is it on? Is it on? Is the red light flashing?” Enough!
10) Middle-aged Britons who ask for advice on where to ski and then turn round and say to their friends, after good advice is given: “You can’t trust him, he’s not drinking beer!” At 10.30am.
11) People who talk about Ski Tracks, an app that measures how far you have travelled. Who cares?
12) 30 and 40 years olds who talk as though they’re 15-year-old surfers or rap stars – “yo! that was awesome” etc – and dressing like them too.
13) French people who give totally incorrect directions – seemingly for fun/evil reasons.
14) Women in their 30s who wear novelty helmet covers shaped like furry animals.
15) Borders who discuss Ibiza the whole time – as in: “This is so like Ibiza on snow.” No it’s not. It’s nothing like it.
16) Italian men who piss by the side of runs.
17) Queue-jumping French people (though that’s an obvious one).
18) The Swiss: why do they have to do everything so precisely? It’s annoying.
19) Essex wideboys: “Lawrence! Lawrence! Tell ‘em: table for 16 of us!”
20) People who try to steal your rental skis. I am specifically referring to the tall man with hunched shoulders and a sloping grey woolen hat who tried to avail himself of mine in Avoriaz. He simply shrugged, dropped the skis and walked away when challenged.
21) The minority fashion trend for wearing aluminium foil-style ski jackets – often emerald green.
22) Camouflage gear. War is not cool.
23) Elderly men wearing fake dreadlock hats.
24) “Hot French women should not be with French blokes. Full-stop,” says skiing companion.

Thus concludes an Alpine rant.

One might add a number 25 – “Brits putting the world to rights on deckchairs in the sun as the snow melts all around them”. But we chose not to.

• @tchesshyre

• Editorial consultant: Jamie Fox: @jamiefox1

Give it a rest:

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18th December 2014 / Blog /

Graham Greene’s Havana, cocaine and Obama’s “new chapter”

GRAHAM Greene visited Cuba several times during the 1950s and 1960s and his comic novel Our Man in Havana was published on October 6, 1958, not long before Fidel Castro’s guerrillas took Cuba’s capital on New Year’s Day 1959.

The book’s protagonist is a slightly gormless vacuum cleaner salesman, Mr Wormwold, who turns to spying to help pay his bills, not anticipating how tangled his affairs would soon become as a result of his espionage.

Within the book Greene uses many specific locations, mentioning the Tropicana Club (caberet-tropicana.com), the Seville-Biltmore Hotel (now simply Hotel Sevilla, hotelsevilla-cuba.com) and the Hotel Nacional (hotelnacionaldecuba.com). During his stays he often dined at the famous Floradita restaurant-bar (floridita-cuba.com), a haunt of another well-known literary visitor to Havana: Ernest Hemingway.

So there is a Graham Greene trail of sorts within the Cuban capital, which the author enjoyed for its seedy side. “Suddenly it struck me that here in this extraordinary city, where every vice was permissible and every trade possible, lay the true background for my comedy,” Greene writes in his autobiography Ways of Escape.

He was certainly no stranger to the city’s less savory appeals: “I came there . . . for the sake of the Floridita restaurant (famous for daiquiris and Morro crabs), for the brothel life, the roulette in every hotel, the fruit machines spilling out jackpots of silver dollars, the Shanghai Theatre, where for one dollar and twenty-five cents one could see a nude cabaret of extreme obscenity with the bluest of blue films in the intervals.”

Hotel Nacional features regularly within Our Man in Havana – which was turned into a film starring Alec Guinness and Noel Coward in 1959. The grand structure, built in the late 1920s, stands in a prominent position on the Loma de Taganana promontory. It is at the hotel that a key scene towards the end of the novel is set, with Mr Wormwold attending a dinner in which he fears that his drinks may be spiked in order to bump him off.

Greene describes him making his way through a lounge lined with “show-cases full of Italian shoes and Danish ashtrays and Swedish glass and mauve British socks” – it was before Castro’s communism and Cuba was much more open to the wider world. Greene was just one of many famous international guests, who also numbered Errol Flynn, Winston Churchill (who stayed in the Republica Suite), the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Rita Hayworth, and Frank Sinatra.

Greene took his research in Cuba to great lengths. After an evening of watching “Superman’s performance with a mulatto girl (as uninspiring as a dutiful husband’s)”, losing at roulette, smoking a joint and watching a lesbian performance at the Blue Moon, he requested that his driver provide him with cocaine. A white powder was swiftly procured though it had no effect other than inducing the odd sneeze. “We had been sold – at what now appeared an exorbitant price – a little boracic powder,” Greene recalls in Ways of Escape.

In his introduction to Vintage Classic’s edition of Our Man in Havana, the writer Christopher Hitchens revels in the old-fashioned, frozen-in-time feel of Havana depicted in the novel, commenting that it is likely to remain “until the day when the dam breaks and the full tide of Americanization flows in”.

Perhaps that day, with President Obama’s “new chapter”, has come.

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15th December 2014 / Blog /

Computer says no – so does Stephen Hawking

FRIDAY’S computer glitch affecting the air traffic control system covering the UK’s air space did not come as the greatest of surprises. Thousands of passengers experienced delays due to the “IT problem” at the HQ of the privately-owned air traffic control firm, Nats, based in Hampshire, with more than 80 flights cancelled at Heathrow alone.
The “computer says no” moment, which came at about 3pm on Friday, soon spread across the country, with airports from Bristol to Manchester and Glasgow suffering knock-on effects.
The meltdown happened with uncanny timing just a week after the eminent scientist Professor Stephen Hawking warned that: “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.” His belief is that computers could one day take over as the pace of their advancement is much faster than that of human evolution.
Well, it would seem that partial artificial intelligence is already causing quite a few headaches as it is. A few cancelled flights is just the latest in a run of IT mishaps that give pause for thought as we race down the route of organising our lives according to gadgets.
Here are a few glitches that are surely just a taste of what is to come:

* In 2005 it was discovered that almost one million taxpayer records were mistakenly deleted from Inland Revenue’s computer system (covering the period 1997-2000) due to a software problem resulting in some people being owed £82m and others not having paid £6m.
* In 2008 the London Stock Exchange suffered a computer failure that took almost a full day to repair and affected £17 billion in trades.
* In 2012 Royal Bank of Scotland chairman Sir Philip Hampton admitted “unacceptable weaknesses in our systems” after credit and debit card holders were unable to use cards or access account details for several hours.
* In the same year, the floatation of one of the world’s best-known internet companies, Facebook, was hit by computer glitches in the Nasdaq exchange.
* During the 2012 US Presidential election, in some states, touch screen devices automatically changed voter’s choices from one candidate to another.
* More than 250 United Airlines flights were delayed, with many flights cancelled, due to a software glitch, also in 2012.
* Earlier this year, UK Border Force machines failed causing lengthy queues at airports. “We are experiencing temporary IT problems,” admitted an official.
* Earlier this month, problems with computers used by the Post Office in Britain led to sub-postmasters being accused of theft with 150 claiming to be wrongly prosecuted or made to re-pay money. An internal report found the computers “not fit for purpose”.

These are just a scattering of examples, but then there are the computers that fail before they even begin. Millions have been spent on a Ministry of Defence recruitment computer described as a “botched” job. Hundreds of millions of pounds have been ploughed into an NHS system described by a member of the Public Accounts Committee as “one of the worst and most expensive contracting fiascos in the history of the public sector”.
In 2013, the BBC was forced to scrap a £98 million digital production system that the director general Tony Hall said had “wasted a huge amount of tax payer’s money”. The individual responsible for overseeing the software candidly admitted: “We’ve messed up, we’re sorry.”
Put it all together – and add in the countless times when you’re told that “computers are down” or the “internet is playing up” – and it’s easy to see that Stephen Hawking’s fears may be only too real.
If computers can affect world banking exchanges, democratic elections, immigration control, defence systems and government spending, it’s hardly a shock that an airport or two should close due to an IT flare-up. And if, as Hawking warns, “full artificial intelligence” comes – ie, when we possibly hand over decision-making to our hard drives – what happens when the “computer says no” and things go wrong then?
Anyway, I was lucky to miss Friday’s flight delays by a couple of hours, my easyJet plane to Geneva left in the morning. But it made me think about just how much we all now rely on machines that most of us don’t have the slightest notion of understanding.

@tchesshyre

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13th December 2014 / Blog /

Tail-walking – it’s all the rage

ONE of my jobs for The Times is to write a weekly UK hotel column. The role involves getting about a lot. I’m well acquainted with many of the best places to acquire a bacon buttie and a cup of tea at train stations up and down the nation – from Carlisle to Crewe (sharing a caff with trainspotters clutching notebooks), Doncaster to Dundee (lovely views from the Tay Bridge on the way in), Paddington to Penzance (one of my favourite rides).
There’s a fair bit of time spent on motorways, too – and it is on the road that I have noticed something.
Tailgaters. Lots of tailgaters. So many tailgaters . . . far more than ever before. Double the number of five years ago. On any two-hour journey I can expect three or four run-ins.
I have driven in many far-flung corners of the globe.
In America drivers are, for the most part, polite. On road trips in the US I have often pondered this. Why so nice? My conclusion is that, if you are not, you might be shot. People have guns, after all.
Elsewhere, those in Nordic countries are just too pleasant, usually, to tailgate.
Yes, in Italy there are many (very) crazy drivers, but that’s just because they’re in a rush to have a cappuccino, or whatever. It’s the same scenario in most Asian countries. There may be madness, but it’s a happy everyday acceptable madness. Nothing personal.
In Britain it is definitely personal. On one recent occasion I was almost forced off the road by tiny silver car of the sort that grannies use for the weekly shop (the driver was, I noticed as it flashed by, a hulking figure who might pass for a Lithuanian hit man).
Another time, on the way to a review in the West Country, I pulled up to some traffic lights, where I found myself side by side with my latest tailgating friend. A dreadlocked man opened the driver’s door, shook his fist and went to his boot to collect something (perhaps a weapon). Fortunately the lights changed before I was able to find out.
The safety group Brake along with Insurers Direct recently conducted a survey of 1,000 drivers and found that 57 per cent of respondents admitted to tailgating, although – somewhat hypocritically – 95 per cent were concerned about tailgating. The practice is responsible for many of the deaths and serious injuries on the road; in 2012 there were 88 deaths and 654 serious injuries.
Sections of the M25 are regularly closed due to crashes caused by tailgaters, prompting tens of thousands to beat their fists on dashboards in despair. “Tailgating precipitates road rages and should be targeted by the police more frequently . . . police forces only concentrate on speeding,” said a spokesman for the RAC Foundation, adding that tailgating is a “growing trend”.
I say all of this not to declare that I’ve discovered a new problem in Britain, but to add that I’ve noticed a worrying development. Tailgating seems to have entered our psyches to such a degree now that we have begun . . . tail-walking.
On the pavements of London I have become increasingly accustomed of the need to glance over my shoulder to see whether a speedwalker is about to barge by. What is especially annoying about these speeders is their assumption of right of way. I don’t mind fast walking per se. It’s the sheer aggression – a new, motorway-inspired walking way.
In 2007, the British Council conducted a study that found that people were walking 10 per cent faster than they had been in the early 1990s. Professor Richard Wiseman, who was involved in the research, said: “The key conclusion is the world is speeding up. We’re just moving faster and getting back to people as quickly as we can – and that’s minutes and not hours. That’s driving us to think everything has to happen now.”
We are walking faster because everything is faster: our feet seem to be rushing to keep pace with our over-stimulated lifestyles. But when you throw in another factor – smartphones (not prevalent when Professor Wiseman collected his stats) – all hell is let loose.
While some people are clearly walking faster, many others are going slower as they’re fiddling on little screens reading messages. This means the average walker has to avoid the slow-coasters, thus upsetting the “fast lane” crowd: the tail-walkers.
On London’s Oxford Street, the busiest for pedestrians in Britain, there have been periodic talks in recent years about having a “fast lane” for those who are not window shopping and dawdling. Those behind the scheme suggested a ban on the use of mobile phones in this fast lane.
I’m not sure what all of this means for the future of humanity . . . one day a walker’s highway code?

@tchesshyre

Crowds on Oxford Street:

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6th December 2014 / Blog /

The Chinese are coming . . . to Moto Cherwell Valley Service Station, M40, junction 10

I DID not expect to find a copy of China Daily (‘European Weekly’ edition) on sale at a WH Smith at a service station on the M40 in Oxfordshire.

Being just back from China and having become almost bemused by the feverish construction of tower blocks, shopping malls and offices – and also having witnessed the thick, awful smog that hangs over much of the powerhouse nation, thanks to all the booming industry – it seemed like a sign.

The lead story of the paper, which has been published since 2010 in the UK (I was surprised to discover; price £2), was about the growth in Chinese overseas tourism; which partly explained the existence of China Daily at a service station on a road leading to Birmingham and beyond.

It was full of intriguing statistics: only 5 per cent of China’s population of 1.3 billion possesses a passport. The number of Chinese visitors coming to Europe has risen by 21 per cent each year since 2009. More than 150 million travel abroad on holidays each year, up from 83 million in 2012. There has been is a 16-fold rise since 1994.

Russia aside, however, not a single European nation makes the top 15 foreign destinations for the Chinese. A lack of signs and Mandarin and Cantonese-speaking guides is to blame, say tourist officials in Beijing.

Our economies are missing out on a lot: the average annual income of Chinese international travellers is estimated to be US$39,784, compared to the average Chinese income of a paltry US$8,802. It’s also reckoned that the amount spent each day during a holiday is US$1,100, excluding accommodation. The new middle-class likes to shop.

During my recent trip to the Far East, I had become addicted to local newspapers. With a population of more than a billion there’s little shortage of goings on (though as I said in my last blog, censorship keeps much of the wider truth from the masses).

Take one day in November: a man in Henan province has broken the world record for continually spinning (managing 14 hours, and claiming to the reporter that he could read a book while turning circles); an eight-year-old girl from Chongqing had a hairball the size of a new-born baby removed from her stomach (she had, apparently, developed the habit of eating old hair); two students from Yunnan had been “expelled over professed love”; while in Shaanxi a man had poisoned his neighbour’s sheep for eating his pear tree, and a mobile phone thief had swallowed five sewing needles hidden in his collar upon arrest (but lived to tell the tale).

Private Eye‘s Funny Old World column is in no danger of running dry of stories, censorship or not.

These were all in China Daily. Three days later the Shanghai Daily ran pieces on free wi-fi on the metro, a “driver’s licence” for restaurants (“under the initiative, an eatery responsible for a death through food poisoning will lose its entire annual quota of 18 points and will be closed”, while deductions of 12 points were in place for food poisoning affecting “less than ten people”).

Authorities were cracking down on restaurants with an opium habit: “Putting poppy seeds containing morphine into food is illegal but some restaurants and snack bars still add it to their dishes to keep customers coming back for more”. And men in Shangdong province were signing up for “childbirth torture” at a maternity hospital so they could empathise with the pain of childbirth. Electric shocks were fired into abdomen: “It felt like my heart and lungs were being ripped apart,” said one participant.

Meanwhile the Beijing Chaoyang Court People’s Court was reported to have sent down Yang Xiuyu, a “former popular micro-blogger”, for four years for “spreading rumours online”.

Chilling stuff.

The Chinese are coming (and they’re bringing their wallets and world views). If you ever do stop by the Moto Cherwell Valley Service Station on the M40, junction ten, do pick up a copy of the local Chinese rag – it’ll probably pack quite a punch, and help the miles click by.

@tchesshyre

 

 

The Great Wall of China:

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27th November 2014 / Blog /

No signal required – thank you Chinese censors

I’M WRITING this first blog 30,000 feet above Mongolia or the edge of Russia. I haven’t turned on the “entertainment” screen on the seat in front (yet) as it feels like a moment of freedom. I have no internet, no emails, no bother from others . . . this is really rather peaceful. Fields of pink clouds are turning peach and scarlet below as we soar in the direction of Siberia.

For the past ten days I have been in China. During this period the internet has not worked as normal. This is because the Chinese government will not allow it to do so. Therefore I have not been able to access Twitter and the web has been strangely reluctant to divulge its usual secrets. Odd signs click up: “This server cannot regulate that command.” Google is impossible as well – it too has been banned, as has Facebook (though I’ve never bothered with that).

In China, the truth is regulated though many circumnavigate the authorities. Deep in darkest Wuhan in central China – and it was dark, thanks to the dismal and prevailing pollution in the country – a man I met told me that he had learnt how to see both Facebook and Twitter. “One app that’s all you need,” he said. “We all do it in the office.”

As on this flight, I enjoyed being offline for a while – Big Brother had done me a favour. When I took a picture of the Great Wall of China from an isolated spot and realised the subsequent tweet would not go . . . well, I thought, so what.

It was a relief. The internet, I believe, is having a pernicious effect on the way we travel. It’s a matter I raise in Gatecrashing Paradise: Misadventures in the Real Maldives, my new book that covers the darker side of this iconic travel “destination”.

The world wide web was just about everywhere, even on remote islands many miles from the traditional tourist resorts – some, I was told, had never had a tourist before. I was their first. Yet even on tiny hidden-away places that did not make the guidebooks – such as lovely Makunudhoo in the north-west of the archipelago – Google Earth was lurking in the sky. Figures in sarongs were fiddling on smartphones.

So as I did during my trip in China thanks to the authorities, I went Google-less for a while.

I had a great time. My colleague on The Times in London, Ben Macintyre,  once wrote that the internet “has brought the world to your room … there are no spaces on the map to be filled in, no place that Google Earth has not seen already”.

Yet he believes that this is an “illusion of omniscience” and the veteran travel writer Paul Theroux agrees: “If the internet were everything it is cracked up to be, we would all stay at home and be brilliantly insightful. Yet with so much contradictory information available, there is more reason to travel than ever before: to look closer, to dig deeper, to sort the authentic from the fake; to verify, to smell, to touch, to taste, to hear, and sometimes – importantly – to suffer the effects of this curiosity.”

In Gatecrashing Paradise I tried to dig deeper, to go beneath the PR spin of this most apparently “perfect” of holiday spots. I found human trafficking, rising Islamic fundamentalism, drug abuse, dodgy politics (a democratically elected leader ousted in a coup), corruption, floggings of women for sex out of marriage, prison torture (I talk to two victims), great gaps between the haves and the have-nots, and fear of a rising sea caused by climate change wiping the entire place out.

Not so much of this was on the internet – and certainly not, of course, in holiday brochures.

So I didn’t mind a Twitterless time in China. I realise that a “blog” is embracing the internet, but I’ll only post every now and then.

Happy travels… oh, and my Twitter feed is @tchesshyre

 

Gatecrashing Paradise: Misadventures in the Real Maldives is published by Nicholas Brealey

Fish processing plant on Vilufushi

Boarding a ferry on Utheemu beach

The Maldives

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