This blog post is a bit late because I’ve been a bit distracted for a couple of reasons, one good and one bad. The good one you can read about in the News section, and the bad one was because I downloaded a piece of entirely legitimate software from a major company and discovered that it came with an unannounced extra: a Trojan that took me the better part of a week to track down and eliminate. That might be a story for another time, but for now, back to the plot.
A few years ago we had to fly to Venice to join a cruise ship so that I could entertain or bore the passengers – it’s always a bit subjective – with a series of lectures about the various ports the ship would be visiting.
We took a private taxi to Gatwick to catch the outbound flight to Venice, and at the airport I found a convenient hobby horse onto which I could climb. I turned on my laptop just to see if by any chance there was a wireless system there which I could log onto without making a significant dent in my credit card. The third one listed said ‘FreePublicWiFi’. Now, I don’t know about you, but that seemed to me to be a fairly clear indication of the service on offer: surely that would mean that members of the public could log on to that particular wireless network without paying a fee, right?
Actually, wrong. I’ve tried logging onto such networks around the world and every single one I’ve tried has been anything but – not free, not accessible to the public, or in some cases not even a wifi network. But I tried anyway. Gatwick didn’t disappoint, though in a way that I hadn’t expected. It was accessible to my laptop, it was free and it was a wireless network. In short, it did, as they say, exactly what it said on the tin. What it didn’t do was what I – and what anybody else who logged on to it – would reasonably have expected it to do: it had no access to the internet. Or to anything else.
That, I have to confess, rather puzzled me. Why, in the name of all that’s reasonable, would anybody have gone to all the trouble and expense of setting up a wireless network at a place like Gatwick, and then disabled access to the internet? What, exactly, were they trying to achieve? What was the point? Apart from pissing off the passengers, obviously, which they certainly managed to do in my case.
But the cruise was as good as we’d hoped, with calm seas and excellent weather apart from the day the ship was in Naples, where the skies produced torrential rain all morning but brightened considerably during the afternoon, when we drove back along the Amalfi Coast. The ship, the Crystal Serenity, was just as delightful the second time around, the destinations were all interesting, and I had good audiences for my lectures, which always helps.
Then we left the ship in Barcelona and flew back to Heathrow. I had a couple of meetings in London, and I definitely knew I was back in England when the illuminated sign in the train announced: ‘Welcome aboarl thas service to Sevenoaks.’
General literacy obviously hadn’t improved while we’d been away …
A couple of weeks later we climbed back into the car, hammered through the Eurotunnel and headed south towards Andorra, where the weather had been fantastic, by all accounts, just as it was through France. That lasted pretty much until we drove across the border, when the temperature dropped like a stone and the rain started. In fact, not just the rain. There was no snow at our altitude – we lived in a house at the end of a valley just outside a hamlet named El Serrat that’s at an elevation of around 5,000 feet, or about 1,500 feet higher than the top of Mount Snowdon, to put it into perspective – but there were almost permanent white caps on the mountains all around us, and we knew we’d see the first serious falls of snow within a couple of weeks.
And that meant that pretty soon all the Mercedes and BMW saloons would vanish from the roads – they’re completely useless in the snow – and the commonest car in the country would as usual be the old model Fiat Panda. The Fiat Panda? The old Fiat Panda? Yes – the old, boxy 4×4 version of this cheap and cheerful little car is far and away the best possible vehicle to drive when there’s snow on the ground, much better than the current model.
Its simple four-wheel drive system delivers precisely 25% of the engine’s modest power to each of the four wheels, it has relatively high ground clearance, it has thin wheels which are usually permanently fitted with snow tyres in Andorra, and it could get to places that the big 4x4s simply couldn’t reach. Every public body in the country used them – the government, the comuns, the medical services, even the phone company. We had one as well, just like most people who lived outside the towns, and it never once let us down.
The local pundits were already claiming it was going to be a hard winter, which would be good for the country, because it’s a ski resort. Less good for non-skiers, perhaps, but we were always able to escape to France or Spain if it got really bad. That was one of the advantages of living in a postage-stamp sized country bordered by two other nations – you could easily and quickly get out if you had to.
The other advantage of being a resident of Andorra was the then absence of income tax, though this was introduced a few years later, but at a very modest rate of 10%. But it’s also worth pointing out that the Andorrans were deprived of all the other benefits of living in the European Union. So they didn’t have toxic debt, banks going under, VAT, corporation tax, inheritance tax, capital transfer tax, capital gains tax and quite a few others.
Living there was hell, really …
