The Grumpy Old Blog

One of the most useless travel ‘must haves’ has to be the faux business class offered on short-haul flights, rail travel etc, although it has to be said that some long-haul flight share some of the irony treating travel as something it plainly isn’t. Fake boarding the plane. They call out business-class, or in the case of the budget airlines, idiot-class, to board first, followed by women with young perambulated offspring. What this means is, instead of reading a little longer in the comfort of the airport lounge and its slatted, haemorrhoid-inducing seating, you are rushed on to the plane ahead of the other passengers. Now I appreciate the purchased-teeth, four-wheel-drive, electric gate brigade from, say Cheshire, love strutting their stuff in airport lounges, safe in the knowledge that the remaining cattle class passengers are fully aware they have paid for the privilege of being referred to as business class and are called to board the plane before anyone else. ...

I took to the dark web yesterday, not to obtain illicit drugs, fake Euro notes or to purchase live ammunition. No, rather than mess around with a proxy server and have to log out of my LinkedIn connection that is on auto-connect with my current browser (i.e. then have to look up what the password is again when I want to log back in), I simply used the dark web browser to anonymously look at the profiles of some of the people asking me to be their connections on this here LinkedIn. The reason for this carry-on was because when you do look at someone's profile on LinkedIn, it registers with that particular someone that you have looked at. And some of these 'someones' not only look a bit shady, but I can't find even the slightest connection between me and them that would be to my - or their, unless their ultimate aim is to try and extract money out of me - benefit. One request in this week was from a 19-year-old girl studying German at the University of Lagos, an ins...