Chillidoggy

‘Mature dancing girls’. The ones that arrived on the mobility scooters last time?

Goodness me, and this despite the fact I never used any of them due to becoming fed up laying on my back staring at a pedal box and a snake’s wedding of wiring, wondering whether I’d ever be able to extricate myself, or whether I would simply expire in that position and have to be buried like that with the car in an unmarked grave. No doubt I’ll be stripped of the Exotics franchise following the inevitable decision handed down by the Watford-based kangaroo court. It’s a witch-hunt, I tell you! Whatever happened to ‘innocent until proven guilty’?

This isn’t news, at least not to local residents. It’s been going on for bloody years round here, and certainly years before Brexit. One minute we’ve got blue flag beaches everywhere, the next there’s warning notices not to bathe in the sea. No doubt there’s data confirming it somewhere, a quick Google showed one such incident in 2012, and that’s just one of numerous occurrences.

Heartless bugger. At least put some home insulation in the truck bed first.

Welcome to democracy!

Yes, but we do at least have the opportunity to vote them out every five years. Unlike the unelected EU mandarins.

I’ve just had a text to arrange for the covid booster, a day after I went to the surgery and booked it. At the same time I booked for a drive-through flu jab, presumably I won’t even have to get out of the car. Now that’s service for you!

Google is your friend.

It’s the DI Module. They are available from SJ. now.

Congrats, Tom You could have had mine though, you only had to ask.

Not that I know of. As I said, the best thing to do is to message Hugues to register an interest.

No, not daft at all. It's all about one thing - profit. More customer inquiries can lead to more frequent sailings, and also the possibility of more ferries, which in turn leads to more income. But if you recall my comments, and the figures for Dover, you'll see that whilst freight has remained steady, the arse has dropped out of the passenger/car sector, and a reduced number of sailings, coupled with slower running so as to maximise onboard revenue, are all cost-saving measures. Fuel is a big factor. A ship's fuel consumption is not an arithmetic progression, it's usually a curve that rises as speed (and therefore power requirement) increases to overcome the increasing drag. Because the ships currently have speed in reserve, it allows the operator to adjust crossing times in order to make the most profit from whatever punters they can attract. What the canny operator is doing is striking a balance between fuel consumption, onboard spend, and time taken to get to the destination. They would have estimated, or researched, how long the average punter would be prepared to spend on their ship. If the ferry takes a week to get to Santander, would it be an attractive option? Probably not. But by upping the crossing time from overnight to 30 hours (or whatever Pete says it is), they're hoping the punters will wear it, and it'll save them fuel and boost onboard profit. Some light at the end of the tunnel - let us not forget that the advent of Brexit has meant the reintroduction of 'duty-free' onboard sales, and we could eventually see the return of the 'booze cruise' where punters would get onboard, get drunk in the bar, sleep it off, get drunk again, and stagger off the ferry in Portsmouth clutching their duty free goods, never once setting foot in Spain. Not my cup of tea, but they were all the rage at one time!

Last time I went from Portsmouth to Santander, the ferry sailed at 18.00 and got in the next morning at Santander, 13 hours including the time difference. I see that it’s now it takes a lot longer. Were I being cynical, I would say it’s to keep you onboard and spending money for as long as possible, rather than getting you to your destination in a timely manner. They must be using oars instead of engines. If you’re looking for a what they’re calling a “cruise”, then fine.

I’d book return flights to Barcelona and hire a car at the other end for the duration.

@Steve V8