schoey.com : unboxed - the journal

So, I've been back from my extended sojourn in Scotland for about 3 weeks, and I have a whole pile of leave to dispose of before the end of March. It's all complicated by the fact that the leave I take while on secondment can't be carried back to my regular job, and there was a chunk of leave which I didn't take before I went on secondment at the start of 2007. And the weird 15 month year which is 2007/2008 - there's a lengthy explanation... you don't need to hear about it. No, really, you don't.

Anyway, it leaves me about about 10 days of leave to take in, what, 5 weeks. Hmm... it's like Christmas all over again. Also known as the "schoey's frantic leave disposal challenge".

I have been promising myself (this is a new tactic for 2008, trying to generate a self-perpetuating guilt trip on myself as a motivational exercise) that I would do something different than sitting home working on something work-related for a good chunk of my holiday. People have begun to notice these workaholic tendencies, and I've been warned.

It's Saturday. The motivational levels are high after a decent lie-in. And it's time to focus, and get booking this holiday. Have a bit of a think when I want to travel, and we're set.

All good so far. Have the itinerary, have booked the seats I want, have put in my credit card details, and have a booking confirmation.

Two minutes later, I have an e-mail from the airline complaining that my credit card has been declined and the booking cancelled.

Ten minutes later, my mobile phone is ringing. 0800 number. Don't recognise it, so refuse to answer the call. They leave a message - it's HSBC's fraud protection unit ringing me up from somewhere outside the UK asking me to call them urgently, blah, blah, blah, quote reference, open 24hrs, 0845, blah.

Finding the whole thing slightly weird, I call them back. I'm told that they think their sophisticated monitoring of my card activity suggest that my details have got into the hands of fraudsters, so have stopped it. He then relays through my last week of transactions. Strangely enough they're all mine. Tesco. Yep. Asda. Yep. Runcorn railway station. Yep. Petrol station. Yep. Yeah mate, I only ever shop in supermarkets, buy petrol and train tickets. So booking a holiday probably is a surprise to your system!

Maybe their monitoring system is aware of my workaholic inclination?

Call centre droid thinks this is good news, as they've managed to stop my card before any fraudulent activity has taken place. I think this is less than good news, as they've prevented me booking my holiday, and I've got to wait between 5-7 working days before a new one arrives.

By which time, the flights will have doubled in price. The hotels hijacked by a million American tourists. And if I'm really lucky a complete disaster/crisis at work preventing me from escaping Birmingham for a week.

As for where I was going? Well, that would be telling wouldn't it. And no... it wasn't a week in Wolverhampton.

As a further update to the previous entry, I thought something weird was going on at Runcorn station on Friday morning.

As I arrived, I was greeted by the car park looking as though it had been sweeped of the usual discarded elements of Runcornian living habits - namely pizza boxes, chip wrappers and fag ends. And... the place was having the windows cleaned. At 6.45 in the morning! Bet that cost a bit.

Walking through the all-new ticket hall, and passing by the few customers waiting for the Birmingham train, I noticed that there was some sort of wooden plinth thing being built in one corner of the building. Thought it could have been the new coffee cart/shop, but no... it appears my theory of a grand opening on Monday morning was just 5 days too early.

According to the press release, Friday morning was the day of the grand opening. Attended by Derek Twigg MP and some bloke from Virgin Trains.

Strangely enough, the first I read about it was when I got to work and read the e-mail in my inbox. If I'd have known, I'd have 'worked from home' and done what any good Travel Content Producer would have done - quaffed the champagne, and eat the canapes. Maybe take a few pictures, add some dodgy captions on Flickr and had a nice afternoon drinking tea. Instead, it was a Friday as usual as any other. Pah.

Good to see that the final bill for the 'refurbishment' was slightly over the original half-million pound estimate. It now totalises £650,000. And that's without the next planned works of the 3-deck multi-storey car park. God knows where they're planning to build that!?

If you ever get to visit, do check out the refurbished building to see if you can spot the gold bullion embedded into the walls, because it doesn't look like £650k's worth of work to me. Maybe inflation is more of a problem than we first anticipated.

The last three days provided the opportunity to travel from Runcorn (sleepy head/icy car), for the first time since I returned from Glasgow, and allowed me to examine the 'improved facilities' detailed below.

From Virgin Trains:

Passengers using Runcorn station are also set to benefit from improved facilities when a £500,000 plus improvement package is completed by January 2008. A First Class Lounge and Standard waiting area will be provided, served by a new refreshment area. The booking office and retail area will be moved and upgraded, and access improved for mobility impaired customers. Station staff will benefit from improved facilities. Improved cladding will enhance the exterior of the station building.

First things first. It's February 2008 according to my calendar, and the staff are still living in portable buildings in the car park. The Fasticket machine continues to live in a freight container, and er... the improvements still haven't been completed. Same project managers as the Rugby debacle involved perchance?

Mind you, it does look almost finished. And very smart it looks too - well, there's some new glass front doors with wavy line vinyl transfers. They look quite nice.

But the question is... Is it really over half of million pounds worth of improvements? I think they've been ripped off somewhere along the way.

All the builders seemed to do was to remove all the old 1960s metal cladding, re-baton the walls, do a bit of plasterboarding and fit some new aluminium-coloured metal cladding - nice enticing colour for the local graffiti artists, of which Runcorn has many. They don't seem to have touched the dodgy metal beam super-structure, or the knackered flat roof. For £500k I thought they might have just knocked the whole thing down and built something new.

OK, so the internal layout has been faffed about with a bit to create more space for things like the new buffet and first class lounge (hmm...), removing the weird situation in the previous station where it had about 95 different rooms for the staff taking up 90% of the station building space, and the small ticket hall area where all the Blackberry-wielding imbeciles cluttered up the thoroughfares with their wheeled suitcases, suits in bags and laptops.

Hopefully in the new layout they'll be annoying people with their loud 'business calls' and clickwheel-faffing in the comfort of the first class lounge with the other idiots in the improved facilities. Whilst us Standard Class peasants can just get about our business of getting to the platform and waiting for the train, rather than listen to the local auditions for the new series of Pain In The Arse Idol.

Looks like there was a little bit of a rush on towards the end of the week, putting in the passenger information systems (which only worked for about 2 weeks after they were installed originally), and the Fasticket machine in the new ticket hall and a load of new chairs and tables in the new buffet area. Wonder whether it's supposed to be finished by Monday for some grand opening ceremony, and they've only just realised. We'll see.

As a consequence of my general incompetence in planning anything with more than about a weeks notice, when it came to booking my forthcoming sojourn in Geneva, it resulted in Expedia returned what could only be described as 'fecking ridiculous prices' for staying anywhere in Switzerland.

As a result, I reluctantly booked into a hotel in Ferney-Voltaire, which according to Google Maps (never knowingly correct), shows the road in question, just over the border in France. This therefore requires me to remember to take my passport everywhere I go, and have to cross the border into Switzerland every morning to get to my place of 'work' for the week.

That should be fun. As practically everybody else at the conference booked into the expensive, recommended hotels, I'll probably be the only one staying in another country.

If I'm not shot on sight at the border controls, I should be back in the UK on Friday.

Day 8: Acton Bridge, Trent & Mersey Canal (Bridge 209, Acton Bridge) to Preston Brook Bridge, Bridgewater Canal (Bridge 1, Preston Brook).

Total Distance: 3.68 Miles, with 1 lock en route.

Journey Time: 1h:38m of cruising, including lock operating time.

Day 7: Nantwich Aqueduct, Shropshire Union Canal (Nantwich) to Acton Bridge, Trent & Mersey Canal (Bridge 209, Acton Bridge).

Total Distance: 27.24 Miles, with 8 locks en route.

Journey Time: 12h:06m of cruising, including lock operating time.

Day 6: Betton Bridge, Shropshire Union Canal (Bridge 63, Market Drayton) to Nantwich Aqueduct, Shropshire Union Canal (Nantwich).

Total Distance: 12.28 Miles, with 22 locks en route.

Journey Time: 8h:04m of cruising, including lock operating time.