A harrowing story in yesterday’s Daily Telegraph considered the plight of 2,000 passengers held in Los Angeles for security checking. How much is true and how much embroidered is hard to tell.

Some days ago I wrote that I couldn’t remember the last time we had such a good weather forecast for an Easter holiday. It has turned out that this has been the warmest Easter since 1949. So many of us have been out and about making the most of it. Car mostly but for longer journeys the train has been answer. The number of people heading out of Paddington on Thursday night to the west country or out of Kings Cross or Euston to the north gave witness to that but was this the best way to go?

Yesterday I went to the Daily Telegraph sponsored Cruise show at the NEC in Birmingham. So did thousands of you. And even more. At times you couldn’t see the carpet for people. The same, I am told, happened on Saturday. Try buying a cup of tea? Long queues were at those places as well as the stands.
So the organisers should have been pretty happy with the turnout. The exhibitors seemed to have been. At least in one sense. They were rushed off their feet and had little time to sit down. Brochures were being collected by the armload but were visitors just collectors or were they buying? Had they just come to enter the free competitions because just about every stand was offering a prize draw for a cruise?

5 lucky couples (or families since under 16’s are free) can win tickets to Cruise being held at Birmingham’s NEC on the weekend of the 16th/17th of October. The Daily Telegraph presented show features 37 exhibitors which, between them, cover most of the cruises that are available. Whether you have never been before or are a seasoned traveller, CRUISE will have something for everyone.

To win a pair of these tickets just email sue@escapeevents.co.uk with your name, address and e-mail address (so she can let you know you’ve won!) with the all-important CD-Traveller mentioned in the subject line. So that there will be time to get the tickets to you, the closing date is Monday 11th of October at midday so you haven’t a lot of time.

UPDATE: 18th March. BA has announced that there will be extra flights as more volunteers have come forward than they expected so do check on the link below to see if things have altered since the original flightplan was drawn up.

BA has announced the standby measures it has put in place to get passengers away during the 3 day strike planned from March20th-22nd. You can see the details and how you might be affected at http://www.britishairways.com/travel/strike-ballot/public/en_gb?refevent=HOME_URGENT_CENTRE.
Only about 850 flights out of the 1,950 scheduled to fly will be cancelled. From Gatwick all long haul and about half of the short haul flights will fly. From Heathrow about 60% of long haul will fly but only about 30% of short haul. All affected passengers will be contacted by BA.

See the subtle difference?

According to the Daily Telegraph, the National Trust has spent hundreds of thousands of pounds rebranding itself by dropping the word “The” in front of its name. It is also switching to lower case letters and, according to the article, “jazzing up its brand with bright colours.” The oak leaf symbol will be bigger and instead of just the green, other colours will be introduced.

Should you tip? When do you tip? Is it extortion under another name? Guide books offer tedious pages about it.
I offer no solution to help you at all. Sometimes I have tipped, sometimes I have refused and had the odd surly look. Sometimes I have insulted people by leaving a solitary penny because I was so annoyed and I thought that would annoy them as well.

Images are used to sell all sorts of things. Celebrities are used to promote items that you seriously wonder if they have ever tried. You can see a castle promoting California but at least that castle (the Hearst old home) is genuinely to be found there.
Not so with the case of Durdle Door.

Well I suppose it had to come.After saying it would happen in 2006 and frequently in 2008, Ryanair introduced to passengers the chance to use their mobile phones on some flights yesterday. So if you feel like paying between £2 and £3 a call you can indulge yourself by saying unecessary things like “I’ll be [...]