At least make an effort

I am back, sorry for the gap but I have just had a city break in Oslo, and managed to arrive on Constitution Day. It is apparently the most important and patriotic celebration the Norwegians have and Oslo was packed with charming flag waving crowds.

In England it would probably have turned into a drunken melee by tattooed skinheads, screaming ing..eer..land and downing lager by the bucket load.

It is also nice to see an obviously prosperous, well run and efficient country. Not a pot hole in sight, clean well run public transport, a shiny new airport, a brilliant clean, cheap and fast train link to the centre of town, pedestrian zones, everyone on bikes or scooters. The city positively oozes wealth and health, the water was so clean people were swimming off the city centre piers.

I know they have vast amounts of North Sea oil, but then so did we and what did we do with it? Nothing as far as I can see.

So we returned to Heathrow to find that someone had nicked BA’s pier and we had to wait ten minutes for a bus, which took us to a manky back door of a tired looking terminal. We then drove straight out of the airport and into a traffic jam, caused purely by weight of traffic, just like every other day of the year. Meanwhile Thames water are fixing the same leaks on the same roads for the 5th or 6th time, and my own street has holes everywhere, despite the government promising to fix them all with the money it saved by cancelling HS2, as if.

What impression do you think this gives to the world and our visitors? I dread to think.

We can’t all be like Norway, but we could try to make an effort, we could invest in our infrastructure and clean up the place.

Surely we could manage that.

Jonty’s Jottings

Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.

By Jonty Bloom Media