Stag Nights: Bad enough at home.....

The true and tragic tale of an overseas Stag Night. It's full of amusement and unpleasant incident in equal measure. It's funny because it's true.

If you're one of those impatient characters who just want to know how it turns out, it concludes thusly:

I wake up covered in bruises and sunburns. After getting a bite to eat, I am admonished again, this time for booking a late flight. We end up in Hogans bar again, drinking til 3pm when we make our way to the airport and a flight delay. By the time everyone rolls back into Gatwick, it is 11pm on Sunday night and my name is mud. I try not to tell too many people that I've got the week off work.

At Victoria tube, the group is now down to me and two Kevins. Garry heads south and misses the last tube. Kevin A and myself run out at Oxford Circus and jog with backpacks to the Central line, but it's too late. A tannoy is announcing that the underground has now closed for the night, and Fuck Off. We surface to a drizzly London evening. The first people we see are Polish maintenance men and cockneys about to tinker with the tube and, on street level, a group of Spaniards going one way, and a French group going another. We are forced to add to the £300 spent this weekend (not including flights and accommodation), and get a black cab home to West London. I'm home gone midnight.

Picture of the Day

Wish you were here?

I'm afraid I can't tell you precisely where this is, but I'm willing to hazard a guess that it isn't in the Home Counties.

If you've been to one profoundly disappointing theme park, you've been to them all...

An axiom which fails adequately to explain why this chap went all the way to Thailand in order to visit a Happy Shopper Disneyland.

Speaking personally, I wouldn't trust my overall well-being to any rollercoaster on the basis that they tend to be assembled by surly unemployables with 'cut here' tattooed on their throats : the idea that I might travel (at great expense) to some distant land where the natives display an even more laissez-faire attitude to health and safety than that of our own itinerant showmen would be intensely comical were it not an indictment of my basic common sense.

Picture of the Day

Ski-ing: On the downside it's very bad for the environment, it'll be cold, ski resorts are full of braying poshos and you might well hurt yourself pretty badly.

On the upside...there is no upside.

Picture of the Day

Life under canvas, it's so relaxing...

And they say there are no winners from the Terminal 5 chaos

Of course there are. The Light-fingered baggage handler for starters. The sticky-fingered Raffles of the conveyor belt need not fear discovery if everyone's bags are lost. He can just take their pick of the choicest items safe in the knowledge that there's almost no way he could be caught in the current chaotic climate.

The other big winner is of course the auction optimist, that panglossian Lovejoy who buys unopened cases (cases that still technically belong to some unlucky traveller somewhere let's not forget) at auctions which further boost the profits of the very airlines that claim to have 'lost' these cases.

The final big winners of the sketch , of course, are clever souls like you and I who never go on holiday, and therefore never lose our stuff, so we can enjoy a long and loud chuckle at all the baggage burglars, hapless holiday makers, and Samsonite gamblers involved in the whole sorry business.

The pain doesn't stop when you land...

This splendid comment from Richard Morrison in The Times this morning, which I take the liberty of quoting in full, so elegantly does it illuminate my point that holidays are an unalloyed arse-pain from soup to nuts.

On the seventh day, thou shalt be duped

One dubious thrill of returning to Terminal 5 on a Sunday is that you discover that there's an even sleazier racket being inflicted on the travelling public than the Heathrow Express. Yes, it's the Heathrow Express Sunday service! A sign says “train every 15 minutes”, so you grudgingly fork out a whopping £15.50 for the 15-mile journey. You then get down to platform level and discover that the next train departs in 26 minutes' time. Some express service! You'd have been halfway to Central London on the Tube, had you known the full facts. “But it's Sunday,” says a station assistant when you confront her - as though her company has a special licence to con the public on the Day of Rest.

Incensed, you go all the way back up to the ticket office to demand a refund - only to find that the queue is so long that you use up the 26 minutes waiting to reach the counter.

Welcome back to rip-off Britain.

Les mots justes, Richard. Les mots justes.