offpeakfang

Valletta Harbour as viewed from the Upper Barrakka bastion, May 2024 Norwich is an airfield that I have personally piloted a light aircraft into*, so when I noticed that there were £13 tickets available from Norwich Airport to Malta International Airport - one of the few countries that I hadn't yet visited on my medium-term project to visit every European country - I was delighted to take the opportunity.  Ryanair is well known for using its loss-leader ticket prices as bait to then gouge the customer elsewhere. The real marginal cost of filling a seat on an already-scheduled flight instead of leaving it empty is the sum of £13 Air Passenger Duty, ~£3 extra fuel to lift another passenger's mass into the air, ~£5 per passenger to use airport terminals, and another ~£10 in the cost of the risk of rebooking/accommodation/compensation if flights are delayed or cancelled. Each airline's marginal break-even ticket price is commercially sensitive, but if a flight ticket is less th...

Crossing the Seine by métro, August 2024 Paris is a very extravagant day trip from London, and I'd certainly recommend much more time there for a first-time visitor, but for those who've already been plenty of times then it can be a day trip. About a week before the start of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, I noticed that there were still quite a lot of reasonably-priced tickets still available - including in table tennis, a sport that I do occasionally enjoy and am alright at. So, for €44.50, I bought a ticket to a Table Tennis Team Quarter-Final.  There are plenty of ways of travelling between London and Paris - over the years, I've done all of them. The Eurostar is by far the best, but is expensive at short notice. Flights are usually relatively cheap, but price-inflated at Olympic time and an exceptionally poor environmental choice especially when the overall city-centre to city-centre price is the same as the train and the journey time is in practice slower by air. I'...

All the candidates in the Ipswich constituency sent me leaflets for the 2024 General Election, with the exception of the Heritage Party. I'll archive the leaflets here from each party, in order of the election result.  Notably, Labour were the only party to knock on my door or have any kind of ground game that I was able to see.  Overall : 52.1% of voters voted for left-wing parties: Labour / Green / Communist 5.1% of voters voted for the sole centrist party to stand: Liberal Democrats 42.7% of voters voted for right-wing parties: Conservative / Reform UK / Heritage 42% of the total electorate didn't bother turning up at all. Labour Co-op: Jack Abbott (Elected)   Conservative: Tom Hunt (Incumbent since 2019, unseated)   Reform UK: Tony Love Green: Adria Pittock Liberal Democrats: James Sandbach Communist: Freddie Sofar   Heritage: Terence Kevin Charles No leaflets or contact at all. I'm very pleased that the Communist Party beat the Heritage Party.

Japan Rail Pass My week in Japan was the part of my trip that I most looked forward to. Having arrived at Shimonoseki station off the ferry from Busan, South Korea, my first task was to collect my Japan Rail Pass. The rail pass could easily have been delivered digitally, like how InterRail passes in Europe can now be instantly delivered as a QR code on an app, but instead the purchase process was: Buy the pass online through an online travel agent (charging its own commission) A few days later, receive a physical paper voucher with a reference code on it through (compulsory extra-paid) international post Bring the voucher with me to Japan Go to one of a small subset (!) of Japanese rail ticket offices to have my passport photocopied (onto paper, with other paper forms that the ticket office bloke had to spend a while filling in and stapling) to then exchange the voucher for a physical ticket.  Even if it needed a foreign ID, I don't see any good reason why there can't ...