Did The Earth Move For You? - A Visit To London

Did the earth move for you? I went to bed on Tuesday night setting the alarm to wake us at 5am on Wednesday morning as we were on an early train to London. What I was hoping would be a good night sleep was disturbed at approximately 1am Wednesday morning by the bed vibrating and the handles on the bedroom furniture rattling loudly. I calmly decided it was an earthquake and settled back to sleep. I was in Swindon that night and apparently nothing was heard 20 miles down the road in my home town of Calne. What a weird experience!

Anyway, we woke up at 5am as planned and headed for Swindon's railway station. Back in early January my girlfriend asked me if I wanted to go with her to London as she had an NHS course to attend. I decided that I could entertain myself during the day by visiting a museum or two. I bought my train tickets straight away on-line at a total cost of around £25, my girlfriend's tickets were pre-booked by her employer and to be picked up at the station. After she bought them we compared tickets and I was absolutely astounded to discover that hers had cost £104! Now if her tickets had been bought at the same time as mine then the NHS could have saved itself around £80 or around 75%. If this is standard procedure in the NHS (and presumably all Government departments) then the excess costs of travel incurred through bad planning and organisation must be costing this country millions of pounds. I feel a Freedom of Information Act request coming on and I'll report back on the outcome on this blog.

We got to London and I made my way to the British Museum, on the way I passed the Trades Union Congress building and crossed the road to look at the display in their window. It was advertising the LGBT history month. Now for those who don't know what LGBT is then I am sure they will be only too pleased to find out that the union dues they pay and which presumably help fund the TUC is being used for the TUC to campaign for Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender people at work! No wonder the morale in, certainly the public sector, is bad when it is apparent that the TUC is obviously not fighting for the improvement of conditions for the "ordinary" workers.

I thought I had better head for the British Museum very quickly! For those who haven't been, please note that entry is free. For more information about the place, click on British Museum. Whilst there I made a point of visiting The First Emperor exhibition which included exhibits from China's terracotta army. A fabulous experience and well worth a visit.

Although whilst visiting most of my attention was given to looking at the museum exhibits I did spend a lot of time avoiding the groups of school-children who were also visiting the museum. What did strike me about the dozen or so groups I saw was the fact that probably less than 10% of the children were white. I left the museum wondering whatever happened to the English.