When I told Dieter, a German neighbour in France, I was heading to his home city to cover G20, he offered a sympathetic smile: "And I am staying here. Hamburg is the last place I'd want to be just now."
Dieter had a point. If you want some relaxation, don’t volunteer to report on potentially round-the-clock demos from a jumble of anti-capitalist, student fun-seeking, green campaigning and troublemaking hordes, while also trying to make sense of what is being discussed and decided by the world leaders present.
And don’t have my sort of day getting to the northern German city.
Knowing I need to rise early is always a deterrent to sleep. I was tired even as I left to drive to Nice airport.
The journey was uneventful to start with. I passed the ravishing Vallée de Sauvebonne, its early-morning beauty crying out to be painted (nothing I have seen on google Images compares with the view from the main road, though I don’t paint and there’s nowhere readily obvious to stop).
The drive went a little wrong when I made a detour into the small town of Pierrefeu to buy a birthday card. First, I could find no shop selling suitable ones; then the GPS sent me on to a pretty but hopelessly narrow back road to reach the motorway and I had a loutish van driver on my rear bumper for a good 10 miles. He finally overtook but could get no further ahead and stayed immediately in front, though at a sensible distance, until our ways parted.
On the A8, I stopped to fill up. The Visa machine rejected my debit card so I paid with another. At Nice airport – where road signs to car parks always offer the ones you haven’t booked - I rang Nationwide to ensure my card was unblocked. I had assumed it had something to do with cash withdrawals I’d made the day earlier and/or online problems the building society’s banking arm has been experiencing.
The woman on the end of the line assured me all was well with my account. Why, there had even been a garage transaction of €33.10 that morning. “But I’m perfectly able to read a French message telling me my card has been declined,” I exclaimed. She was friendly enough but had nothing to suggest beyond going back to the service station (maybe 80-100km back down the autoroute). “It's gone through. We have released it for payment. The problem must be at their end.”
She offered to get someone to call but I had a flight to board in half an hour and said that in any case, there wasn't much point if the caller had nothing useful to say. My number was taken; no call was received.
And I remain to be convinced of her explanation. A card issued to me by my bank/building society is ostensibly refused by a machine used by a global banking service, but payment is taken anyway and a business pockets the proceeds, leaving only the cardholder disadvantaged, all while the card issuer is having online problems?
But by the time I’d located a phone number on my receipt, called the garage and been told they would be unable to check for double payment until next day, I must have spent a good proportion of that €33.10 in phone calls. The woman from Nationwide assured me it was not their fault; it certainly wasn’t mine.
The Eurowings (part of Lufthansa) flight to Hamburg was smooth if basic, once I'd stopped looking daggers at the well-fed man in ill-fitting jeans who cynically jumped an impossibly long queue to access the departure lounge even after baggage security checks.
A snack was served as part of the deal; the tiniest cheese-and-goo sandwich I have ever seen and not especially tasty at that, plus a small packet of what looked like children’s jelly sweets (I shall never know) and a modest carton of water. I ordered a drink and some crisps ("that'll be €7.30, thank you sir") but had missed the fact that they were paprika-flavoured – I eat only ready salted or, as I call them, crisp-flavoured crisps – so left them. Eurowings could argue that plenty of airlines offer no free snacks at all.
How much I shall actually see of Hamburg is open to doubt. But at least watching the demonstrators for a few hours and the long walk back to my hotel afterwards were a doddle after that start to the day.
Recent Comments