Life after Bobby: Life Journeys

Today it’s two years since my Dad died, a marker of sorts, just another day, and an anniversary all at once. I’m never quite sure how to mark anniversaries, does your death day deserve a celebration? In a culture that so readily celebrates birth days, why not death days too? I mused this quite a […]

Life after Bobby: Grief turbulence

Ding dong! Hello, this is your First Officer speaking, please return to your seats and fasten your seat-belts as soon as possible. As you are aware we have entered a period of turbulence, myself and your Captain today will do all we can to adjust our altitude to ensure a safe and pleasant journey for you. […]

Life after Bobby: Hospice Care Week

This is the view of the Rocky Mountains in Banff taken from Bow Falls yesterday. What has this got to do with Hospice Care Week? Everything. One of the objectives of Hospice Care Week is to raise people’s awareness of the work that hospices do. There are many myths and misconceptions about hospice care that […]

The legend that is Paul Clarke

Many, many years ago I started following Paul Clarke on twitter. I wasn’t sure who this man was particularly, and until today I had no real notion how digital he was, so either he was very modest or I wasn’t paying enough attention, but I liked his tweets. He was eclectic, witty, said it as […]

Life after Bobby: Missing Dad

It’s 264 days since my Dad died. Nothing particularly significant about that, I had to sit and work it out as I don’t carry a mental tally of the days since his death. In one hundred and one days I’ll have lived a full year without one of my parents. I feel very lucky that […]

Ticket booking with First Great Western – step two

A couple months ago I blogged some feedback about the new First Great Western online booking system. I also blogged about one particular member of their staff who I felt had dealt with me, and my fellow tweeters, particularly well – Ollie. Since then I have received lots of tweets and comments from fellow train users, […]

How to handle disgruntled customers – Ollie style

Last night I reached my tolerance of the First Great Western website’s new booking system and fired out a despondent tweet venting my frustration. You can read more about the concerns I have with this new system and the apparent lack of user testing (because I refuse to believe that anyone did test it) on […]

Ticket booking with First Great Western #feedback

I had a moment this evening, a little one, where my frustration peeked when I went to book my train tickets for next week. I try not to book with The <insert mode of transport>line because they are explicit in their charges of a booking fee and a credit card transaction fee. Of late I’ve […]

It takes time

A couple weeks ago I had the pleasure of being on holiday in Beitostølen in Norway. I’ll do a post holiday reflection blog another time, but suspect it’ll be broadly similar to last year’s – which you can read here if you’re interested. In this post I wanted to share some sage advice that I was […]

Another trainline fail

Booking train tickets is the bane of my life. I’m very lucky in that I have someone who can help book my travel if I’m organised far enough in advance to ask them to do so, however the reality is I’m not always as organised as I’d like – especially when I’m trying to juggle […]