So, i have arrived back in the UK for a couple of weeks after a solid 3 month stint tending to business in Yemen. I have left behind a country whose tourism people are visiting a tourism expo in Madrid off the back of the killing of 2 Belgian tourists and their Yemeni guides in Hadramout a week earlier. Not good timing for them, but perfect timing for whoever planned it. Anyway, more on that in a future post.

Arriving back in the UK i am confused and bamboozled by what i am experiencing.

The culprit being the British rail network and i have got a serious beef. Having bought a return ticket to the North of England for the exorbitant price of £88, over the internet, i was faced with the seemingly simple task of collecting it from a ’fast ticket’ machine at Kings Cross. No problems with that, done it quite a few times and it usually works smoothly. I collected all the tickets and waited to board the train. A new system at Kings Cross implemented by National Express, who seem to have taken over the GNER franchise, involved ticket inspectors checking tickets on the platform prior to boarding the train. I handed the wad of tickets spat out by the machine to the inspector so he could find which one was required. The ticket for my outbound journey wasn’t there. What next? I was told i couldn’t board the train. Panic set-in. I had taken all the tickets from the machine. I was instructed to go back to the ticket office, check the machine and speak to someone there.

To cut a long story short, the jobsworths in the office said they could prove the machine wasn’t at fault, i hadn’t counted the tickets and checked the mistake sooner. It was my fault. I had to buy another ticket for £110. £198 in total. A disgrace. It was my word against a machine. The machine couldnt talk, his spokesperson in the Kings Cross ticket office , one of the rudest people you could wish to meet, who finished me off with the line, ’I am not going to talk to you anymore because I have another customer to help’. You could have helped me.

What i cant believe is that there is no system to protect the consumer against what could be an honest mistake – even though i know i took all the tickets provided – of losing a ticket. For all we know it could be a preprogrammed sleight of hand by the operator to make more money. I stress that there was zero comeback for me as a customer. There was literally nothing that could be done. There was also a belief that the computer is 100% accurate, 100% of the time and that by placing a sign that says ’Check Your Tickets’, the operator basically has a get out clause. My tickets WERE checked, they weren’t all there, i had to pay again. So what is the point of saying check all tickets if nothing can be done to replace one if it wasn’t provided?

Once i got on the train i was almost nauseated by the list of instructions / rules / regulations read out by the train manager. No smoking, no mobile phones in the ’quiet carriage’, you cannot travel on this train if you hold the following million different types of ticket, ’extreme weather’ is meaning this train will have to run slow. God, why cant things be simple? This idiocy transcends the entire British transport system. It is caused by unscrupulous profit seeking private companies who, behind a smokescreen of ’cheap tickets’, have weaved a web of profit inducing pseudo ’non-laws’. It has to be stopped.

International reader, trust me on this, the people of Britain are very angry at being ripped off. Britain is not a rich country. The majority of people in Britain are treading the waters of a rising tide of debt, repossession and job losses. A recession is here in all but name. Stupid rules, confusing pricing schemes and rogue ticket machines are just some of the many things sited by unhappy Brits. The list is long.

Thankfully, and i suppose selfishly, i am happy to be returning to Yemen. I will quickly forget about the ticket scam machine. My problems dont compare with some of those facing the average Yemeni. I am blessed with a life of travel and the ability to pay for it. These are things a Yemeni can only dream about, dreams that are somewhat reliant on people like myself investing in Yemen. Lets just hope that people wont stop travelling to Yemen in the wake of the Belgian tourists’ deaths and what could be the start of a potential security crisis.