Even pre-all-that, airports and flying had become an ordeal to get through before the holiday fun starts. After a three-year break, I’d forgotten the degree to which air travel has become an exercise in queuing before you finally get on the plane. BA, it seems, are going for the nostalgia effect, not just by rebranding as BEA and BOAC (kids etc.). No, our beloved Downton class system is revived, alive and well: ‘We’ll be serving our EuroClub customers with a choice of meals and drinks from the bar. And we’ll be throwing EuroTrash, sorry Traveller customers a complimentary bottle of water and packet of crips’. About as classy as a cheap yet still ridiculously snotty golf club. At least you know where you stand with RyanAir.
“The working-from-home illusion fades”
Are workers working from home more or less productive than those catching the 7.02am to London Bridge every day? ‘Probably sitting at home in their bleedin’ jim-jams’, said someone recently of a less-than-helpful call centre employee, the assumption being that, were they surrounded by colleagues and with a manager cracking the whip, he or she would have sorted his energy bill more efficiently.
