You must be thinner than this to ride

A few years ago, I returned to my regular (i.e., once a year) clothes shop, Top Man, to buy some new jeans. Top Man was my retailer of chioce for jeans to the point that I had fallen for their store card which, as my credit card bulged, always seemed to offer space for new purchases.

On this occasion, I needed some new trousers and I was hoping that Top Man's usual "2 for 1" off on their own-brand jeans would be available. I found the style and colour I wanted, but couldn't track down any in my size.

I asked a Top Man man if they had any of the particular type of jeans I wanted in my (then) size (which, for my own vanity, I shan't reveal). He explainde that they didn't have any in that size; indeed, they didn't have any trousers in that size because the didn't make them that large anymore.

My initial shock (and embarrassment) aside, I wondered why, at a time when we're being told Britons are getting fatter, a major high street chain would stop stocking what I at least consider to be only largish clothes. Using retail therapy to terat my bruised ego, I got myself a Burtons card and vowed never to return to the size fascists of Top Man (who, it turns out, are part of the same group as Burton).

Now I need a new pair of shoes. I went to Burtons in the middle of Edinburgh and was horrified by the paltry range. They only seemed to have shoes in vile shades of brown and the concept of lace-ups seemed to have been lost on them. Dismayed, wanting to use my Burtons card and realising the Top Man were in the same building a few storeys lower, I swallowed my pride and headed into the depths. At least my feet aren't so big.

While being part of the same group as Burtons meant that Top Man would accept my store card, they also stocked a similarly small and unpleasant range of shoes. I realised my mistake. In future, I'll go to a proper shoe shop for shoes and never to Top Man for anything.

Bottomless glasses of despair. Er, of Pepsi.

Not everything last weekend was as glamorous as flying (albeit low budget) and riding the Gatwick Express. On Saturday night, we went to Pizza Hut and wasn't that a mistake...

The Chinese was heaving so we reluctantly opted for a "Feast for All" and bottomless glasses of Pepsi - a quick meal before heading into London. So awful was the service, we never made it into town.

Now, we knew better than to expect silver service in a fast (what a misnomer) food restaurant, but all such businesses these days make a big fuss about customer service. Ronald McPizzaHut or whoever their head honcho is would have been appalled.

It was clear as soon as we walked in that they were understaffed. It took a minute or two for us to be waved to a table, which is literally what happened as an apparently uninterested member of staff spotted us in the doorway.

After a longer wait, we were given menus. The only staff member in the front of house was cleaning tables. Eventually (having got us to lift our menus so he could clean) he returned to take our order.

The starters and drinks came quite quickly although with no cutlery. We made do although realised we should have asked for napkins after handling the chicken wings.

The main course was also fairly prompt. Sadly, we were not provided with fresh plates or any cutlery at this point with which to devour it. After waiting (and with no staff around to ask), we resigned ourselves to eating with our hands - at least for a while - and reusing the starters' plates, which (naturally) hadn't been removed.

We kept an eye out for someone from whom we could request knives, forks and plates. Some of the other punters seemed to be friends of members of staff who were chatting with them rather than circulating. I noticed more customer arriving and being similarly ignored.

Finally we flagged down a surly waitress. We didn't dare ask for more than cutlery lest she beat us, but she did at least provide these and we were able to eat with a little more class.

Now, one of Pizza Hut's selling points is the refillable soft drinks. This does presuppose, of course, that the restaurant is sufficiently staffed that you can find someone to refill it. Eventually I succeeded and she carried out glasses off. After a few minutes we began to doubt if she was planning to return. A good ten minutes later she did.

We were pretty unimpressed and discussed whether we would ever return to this particular branch. We'd spent longer than intended there and if we headed to London now we probably wouldn't get more than one drink in.

Keen to get going and tired of the surroundings, we looked around for a member of staff. Eventually a waitress appeared and we were able to attract her attention and asked her for the bill. And then we waited. And waited. And waited.

We looked at the menus (which they had left with us) and calculated the total cost of our meal. We toyed with the idea of leaving the cash and going. Despite the staff giving the impression that they wouldn't notice (and wouldn't care) if we left without paying, I was keen to ensure they knew we had. Eventually, I got up and went to the till. The two members of staff there ignored me for a bit but one of them finally gave me the bill.

Well, a bill. Not the bill. Someone else's. I pointed out her error and was finally able to pay. And leave (sans complimentary mints). We wrote off our the rest of our planned evening and went to Blockbuster for wine and films.

As I said, we weren't expecting service akin to a state banquet, but the customer experience was absolutely abysmal. There were too few staff, even fewer of whom attended to the customers in the restaurant. The staff gossiped together and showed no interest in providing even basic customer service. I don't normally write letters of complaint but I'm going to this time.

Looking back at this missive, you'd think it got to me, wouldn't you?

Photos

A couple of snaps to illustrate weekend travels.

I flew from here...

in this giant, winged (distant and low resolution) URL:

TV and DVDs

As it was the 41st anniversary of Doctor Who yesterday, we watched the first episode of The Talons of Weng-Chiang on DVD. Top stuff.

Before that, though, was BBC2's excellent new comedy (previously shown on BBC3), The Smoking Room. The BBC have announced that a Christmas special will be on at, er, Christmas, which is most welcome. And Robert Webb off of The Smoking Room appears with his comedy partner David Mitchell in the second series of Peep Show, Channel 4's best current comedy series. I picked up the first series at Virgin at Gatwick Airport and it's now on the DVD shelves having been devoured in the space of two days.

I believe I can fly

I flew down on Easyjet to London last weekend. For frequest fliers this may not seem out of the ordinary, but it was the first time I'd flown in over four years. While I'm not afraid of flying per se, I do get uneasy when I haven't done it for a while. And I'm not a fan of heights.

The trip to Edinburgh Airport went smoothly and I was pleased to discover I could use my bus pass on the Airlink bus - £3 saved. I was early and so went for a quick walk around the car park (with no CNPS success).

Checked in and passed the time in the departure lounge doing the crossword and watching TV. Everything was going to plan until I lost my passport twenty minutes before I was due to board the plane. I hurriedly retraced my steps but there was no sign of it, so I wandered back towards the security area, looking for a desk to which it might have been handed. There was nowhere obvious and I tried to think what where I would take a passport I'd found.

"Will William Howells please come to the British Airways hand luggage desk?"

That answered that question. I somewhat sheepishly reclaimed my passport only to discover the boarding was delayed by half an hour.

This, the pilot explained once we'd taken our seats on the Airbus, was due to problems at Amsterdam. He reassuringly used the phrase "a cunning plan" to describe his attempt to make up time on the previous flight from London but had been help up further by a 160mph winds. These winds, we were told, would now help us reduce trhe flight time southwards to a mere hour.

Before we watched the safety demonstration, complete with obligatory emergency exit semaphore, the pilot asked us to pay attention. He was, once again, reassuring: "If the cabin is on fire, it's not time to be asking silly questions."

I got a small thrill when the velocity down the run way turned into lift-off, but was mildly perturbed when we banked to the lift and I found myself facing the ground. We passed over snow-topped mountains and after a short while the co-pilot announced that we were about to start out descent into Gatwick.

I was more comfortable on the return flight on Sunday, hiding inside The Wooden Sea by Jonathan Carroll, safely ensconced in a seat away from the window. I even had one of those bijou cans of coke you only get on aeroplanes. For the price of a normal sized coke on the ground of course. No doubt something to do with high speeds affecting physical dimensions in the Theory of Relativity.

More on crosswords and the Guardian

Further to my previous post, one of last week's Corrections & Clarifications columns in The Guardian had to clarify, following some concern from readers, that the duplication of clues was, indeed, intentional. The readers in question must be kicking themselves.

I did complete today's crossword by Quantum, although I resorted to an online dictionary for help. This taught me that an acer is a type of tree and a racer is a type of snake. Favourite clue was "The fault's in the office, not the Church (8,5)" while the most elegant was "Mixed, as in molecules (13)."

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the paper Alexis Petridis'r review of the new Band Aid single includes a biting summing up of Dido: her "vocal style ... recalls a woman distractedly singing to herself as she tries to remember where she parked her car."

Oh, and Jonathan Calder highlights why Polly Toynbee's nanny state is undesirable.

Crosswords

Believe it or not, there is a certain amount of humour in cryptic crosswords. Take yesterday's Guardian puzzle by top setter Araucaria. 24 across read

A lesser figure in Jude the Obscure - have you read this somewhere before? (4,2)

The answer was "déjà vu".

On the bus this morning, I had a quick look at Paul's puzzle in today's paper and was amused to see 24 across:

A lesser figure in Jude the Obscure - have you read this somewhere before? (4,2)

Fireworks

As evidence of how little time I've had a camera phone, I couldn't resist getting it out at the Blackheath fireworks on Saturday. I haven't yet worked out how to get the videos into a decent format, but the photos are pretty straightforward.

The good, the bad and the musical

Been too busy to blog properly, not least thanks to my horrendous train journeys recently. Time to sum up the last week or so.

Bad
The re-election of That Man
The death of the Emperor John Peel
Getting a cold (cough, cough)
Commuting
Intercity train journeys

Good
Blackheath fireworks
New job
The Guardian and Observer cryptic crosswords
Savoury pancakes

Also good was the performance of The Phantom of the Opera I saw at the weekend in the West End. Only my third trip to a musical but well worth it. The staging was fantastic: inventive, stylistic and technically accomplished. The performances were uniformly top notch and the songs and score were as good as their reputation suggests. I was slightly disappointed that the ending was a little more upbeat than, say, the Lon Chaney film, but that barely detracted from the overall production.

Train again

For the second Friday running, I am in travel hell. Currently blogging from a rail replacement coach as I struggle to get to London after an earlier derailment. I'll resist the temptation to detail all the irritations the train company have been responsible for today and concentrate on wishing us to London before midnight. At least the time on the roads can be spent looking for a 60.

That election

I'm here at a party in central London watching CNN's coverage on a massive screen. Slight nerves about the result but the atmosphere is great. If I heard correctly, in the poll taken here Bush only managed 5%! Still waiting for results from Florida and Ohio, which I guess will tell us the final result.

Conference

I tried sending a blog entry from my phone on the train back from Bristol on Sunday but somewhere along the line (boom boom) it disappeared into the ether.

I was at LDYS conference, where, as chair of the steering committee, I missed most sessions because I was busy ensuring the conference ran smoothly. We had a number of speakers, including new party president Simon Hughes, and it was a pleasure to chair speeches by LibDem PPC Marie-Louise Rossi and fellow blogger and Welsh Assembly Member Peter Black.

On Saturday night, we experienced the dubious pleasures of LDYS members doing karaoke. I did end up belting out a number of songs with other people, and was happy with my harmonies for California Dreaming - although Ryan's just played me a video of it on his P910i and it was rather less tuneful than I remember. Perhaps the least said the better though about my, James Blanchard and James Graham's performance of Paranoid Android - not the most suited to karaoke.