1. Introduction
The summer holiday got off to a lethargic start, with hot and dry weather and huge crowds drawn to the Montreux Jazz Festival. Travel all over Europe was an ongoing chaos with many airports and airlines in meltdown, unable to cope with the resurgence in demand, having fired most of their essential personnel. Images of passengers stuck in airports with impossibly long lines for check-in and security, missing their flights or having their flights cancelled altogether, with no end of the chaos in sight, made me resolutely stick to ground transportation during the summer. As I said before, it would have been better if all the airlines had been got rid of during Corona, all of them disappearing into insolvency, so we could start anew with something designed for the 21st century. Just to be free of this legacy mess, with procedures and protocols still lodged in the
1950s, would be a benefit to everyone and the world in general. It can't go on in its current state without something changing radically at some point. Of course this goes against our hobby of collecting points and miles but right now I am unable to think of a single airline that I could say I actually like.
Things were not quite as bad as they look in this almost apocalyptic photo from early September at the security line at Dusseldorf airport
This mid August pic looks equally as bad but, in fact, this was a fairly normal load of passengers at DUS in the summer months
In the newsfeeds on my phone I was regularly reading horror stories about the main London airports, cancelled flights, thousands of passengers camped out in the halls, endless delays, impossible queues for check-in and security. LHR and LGW were in the news every day, but not so much LCY. One appalling airport is MAN which surely must be one of the worst in Europe, if not the worst, and the photos and scenes portrayed were the stuff of nightmares. Others which fared badly were BHX and BRS. On continental Europe the worst offender appeared to be AMS, closely followed by DUS, FRA and HAM.
Constantly on the move at Geneva Cornavin main train station
While rehearsing the Haydn Harmoniemesse
with a choir in Lausanne on 2nd July we had some excitement from the neighbouring apartment block during the lunch break
I really needed time off this summer and refused a number of small engagements.. Since early April I haven't been able to do any work on basic accounting and paperwork, such as my tax declaration, and no work on my musical compositions and arranging projects. It took me right up to the evening before I departed for Germany in early July to just get caught up with all unfinished tasks and paperwork, tying up all the little details that keep things orderly and ticking over. The super rich, and probably the normal rich too, hire people to do all of this for them, but I think it's a good idea to do it oneself and take total control over everything, for a while anyway. I am pleased that I completed it all before leaving for Germany. The secret with tax declarations and other similar bureaucracy (such as sending out bills to clients in a timely manner) is to keep doing it as you go along, don't let a backlog pile up like I did.
One of my summer hikes, here the relatively inaccessible Bisse de la Tsandra on the tiny road up to the Sanetsch pass in canton Valais
Despite the stony nature of the walk there was time to stop and admire the view along the way
Montreux Jazz Festival crowds along the lakeside where the food stalls were
That same evening from the same location, I could turn around and look out onto the lake, a scene of total peace