abi @99
That's not unique - the airport for Basel, Switzerland, is near Mulhouse, France.
Railways can be fun too - I remember entering the station at Buchs SG, after getting off the postbus from Liechtenstein, and seeing two ticket windows - one operated by the Swiss Federal Railways, and one by the Austrian Federal Railways. Going back to Basel, when you travel from Germany the first station you call at is Basel Badische Bahnhof, which is operated by Deutsche Bahn and you pay for your tickets in euro, and if you stay on for a couple of km you arrive at Basel SBB which is the main Schweizerische Bundesbahnen station (logically enough) but at least before Switzerland joined Schengen you had to go through French customs and immigration before you were allowed onto the SNCF platforms.
Unfortunately they got 2 people elected to the European Parliament three weeks ago, and for my sins the odious Nick Griffin is now one of my 8 MEPs. Personally, I voted Green as the least-bad of a not particularly inspiring choice, and if they'd got only 5000 more votes then they'd have won that seat, and not Griffin. Come to that, the vote was sufficiently close that if UKIP had got 1000 more votes, they'd have won that seat in addition to the other one they won in this region - even though I don't agree with them, at least they're better than Griffin.
pendrift @109: The Deutsche Bahn site gives exactly the schedule the *NHs got, if you plug in Amsterdam and Roma with an 07:00 departure, with platform information as far as Lugano - http://reiseauskunft.bahn.de/bin/query.exe/en
You can see why Consumer Affairs take the view they do, unfortunately there are too many scumbags in the world ready to rip off needy people. Personally, I just phoned the High Commission in London on Monday to see how I could help, and following their advice made a donation directly to the Australian Red Cross' appeal (www.redcross.org.au).
Gareth @ 77
I recall seeing in the Guinness Book of Records once that the shortest will was by a Czech person who left "all to mother", but apparently in Czech that's just two words!
The fact that they turned on the LHC on 10/09/08 (European format) has been commented upon. It looks like someone was running a countdown.
Serge @ 12: I thought that was the CamAARRGH...
abi @ 60. Do you actually need to exchange your British licence for a Dutch one? According to the DVLA EU/EEA licence holders moving to the UK don't need to exchange their licences (since they're all in EU format now anyway) and if they're still valid at home then they remain valid in the UK until the holder's 70th birthday, or for 3 years if they're already 70+. I'd be surprised if the Dutch don't have a reciprocal rule.
Like Dave Bell, I was about 10 when Powell made his "Rivers of
Blood" speech and didn't particularly notice it at the time - race
relations weren't a pressing issue in rural North Wales at the time, I
was 11 before I met my first non-white person, and Himanshu's doctor
parents moved back to India a year later.
There was an interesting series of documentaries on Channel 4 in the
last month, "Immigration: An Inconvenient Truth" by Rageh Omaar, which
looked back on Powell's speech from 40 years on, and on how his
predictions have turned out. An amusing-in-a-way part of the
documentary was seeing second and third generation descendants of
Indian and Caribbean immigrants expressing, in strong local accents,
pretty much the same views about the current wave of Polish immigrants
as was said about their ancestors. Powell certainly wasn't all wrong in
his speech - he warned against immigrant communities setting up their
own closed communities, which has happened in some areas, but the main
effect of his speech was to render it impossible to have a rational
debate about immigration in the UK.
It would be wrong to characterise Powell as just a right-wing looney
- he was a polymath, beginning learning his 12th language, Hebrew, when
he was 70; he learned Urdu to improve his chances of becoming Viceroy
of India, he was the youngest university professor in the Empire -
appointed Professor of Greek at Sydney University at age 25, two years
later on the outbreak of WW2 he joined the army as a private, and
finished the war as its youngest Brigadier (the only man in the entire
army to have so many promotions). As Health Minister he promoted the
policy of closing the huge Victorian mental asylums, and started the
"Care in the Community" policy instead (though he complained that later
governments didn't adequately fund the system). Ironically it was in
his time as Health Minister that many West Indians arrived in Britain
to work for the Health Service. He was a sponsor of homosexual law
reform, opposed the death penalty, and though coming from Birmingham he
warned against passing anti-terrorism legislation in haste after the
1974 Birmingham pub bombings. Powell was a complex personality and a
review of his career is fascinating.
Abi @ 52.
It must have been a long time ago if you needed a passport to cross from the Netherlands to Belgium! In that neck of the woods, have you ever been to Baarle? Thanks to various medieval treaties, landswaps, and trades between aristocrats the border is famously complicated round there - the Belgian side is called Baarle-Hertog (just under 7.5 sq km, population 2400), the Dutch side is Baarle-Nassau, (population 5000). Baarle-Hertog is 24 separate pieces of land - there are 20 Belgian exclaves contained within the Netherlands, and there are 7 Dutch exclaves contained within the Belgian exclaves! The general rule is that a house pays taxes to the country that the front door is in, but quite a few buildings show signs of doors having been moved over the years. At one time, restaurant customers had to move tables to Belgium when Dutch laws required them to close an hour earlier than Belgian restaurants.
British, September 1958. I'm not sure if I remember JFK "live" or just just from retrospectives. I do remember the winter of 1962-3 as it was one of the worst ones of the last 50 years in the UK and we were snowed in for a while.
Most of my earliest memories of public events come from 1964 - the Tokyo Olympics, reading an article in the TV Times about "Churchill at 90"; I remember going out into the farmyard the next January to tell my Dad and a neighbour that "Mr Churchill's died". Then there was the 1964 General Election - we had the day off school because it was being used as a polling station, but the thing that really stuck in my mind was coming down to breakfast the next morning to find the TV on with the results programme - the BBC never had anything on in the morning except the test card in those days!
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 6 |
| 2008 | 4 |
| 2007 | 2 |
Total: 12 comments. View all these comments on a single page.
The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by arwel:
Show all comments by arwel.