Happy Mondays,

First of all I would just like to say I had a wonderful weekend, despite it being wet and windy and feeling like I was coughing up a lung pretty often. Edingburgh Zoo was wonderful, but it was tough climbing to the top because some of the paths in there are REALLY steep. I finally had the joys of meeting a panda, and also saw a kaola bear, too. They're a lot bigger than I expected them to be - I thought that they were diddy little things about the size of a newborn baby, but they're not! 

We also got to have a lovely time in the restuarant Ask and I picked up miatures of some pretty expensive gins that I have been wanting to try, so overall it was a good trip. However it has been framed by two horrid experiences and one of them was in Nando's for heaven's sake.

Like many people my age, I love Nando's , despite not eating chicken. It'ss not because they give me a good old discount for working for the NHS or because they are the best place if you want to be choosy about what you do and don't want on your burger  I just like what they do and 99.9% of the time they do it realy well. Trusst me, Saturday night in Edinburgh was their 0.1%.

Now I know what Nando's is and I love it. It's not gourmet food; you are not there to be waited on hand and foot, but there is an issue when the hot plates bar is so full that the kitchen staff actually have to start piling plates on top of other plates. There is a problem with your staff when they are essentially standing there staring at it as though they do not know what to do with it. There is an almighty big problem when it takes until about 15-20 minutes after I have ordered for you to come to tell me that you don't have one of the vital ingredients and if there is a price difference between my original order and what I'm having to choose instead that was not what I wanted, I shouldn't be the one pointing that out. The Nando's on Lothian Road in Edinburgh needs to seriously take a look at itself. If your trainees have more of an idea of how to run the place than your seasoned staff, there is A BIG BLOODY PROBLEM! Thankfully I am one of the fatihful who knows that this is a blip - it has coloured my view of that restaurant and not the brand in general. When II walked out of King's Cross tonight and just wanted comfort food I knew just where I wanted to go and it was straight back to a Nando's that I could trust not to cock up. 

Not that I can realy face eating it.

I left Edinburgh almost eleven hours ago. I only arrived home at 9. I waas travelling for 10 hours and it was not because of the planned engineering work that is notorious for delaying Bank Holiday journeys, but because of a technical fault with the power supply cables that messed up EVERYTHING between Peterborough and Kings Cross and left a tailback of trains to Doncaster. I mean, Doncaster. What on earth is in Doncaster? Welll, we were for about an hour actually, and the only thing I could surmise is that it is in fact where the zombie uprising will begin, because it was dull enough to be such a place. 

It's not even the time that annoys me so much, really it's not. I've been getting the trains between London and Manchester for so long that delays don't really bother me too much, but to leave people on a hot train with no food and not enough water is disgusting. The toilets stank, everyone was getting cranky and headachey and we all just wanted to get home. How on earth they couldn't figure out getting even just bottles of water to one of thre stations we were stopped in I really don't know. the East Coast trains aren't like the pendolinos either; there are no blinds, so we just sat getting hotter and more headachey. 

I get that they do the delay repay thing, so we should get the cost of the ticket back since it was a three and a half hour delay, but theere was no sense of care whilst we were delayed. We were travelling over two meal times (set off at 11:09 and arrived at 19:20) and yet they ran out of sandwiches before we even knew about the delay. It's all fine when we're a captive audience paying for things, but companies need to remember that then you need to care for that captive audience. I had a greedy bag with me, so I had enough sweets and stuff to keep me going, but in terms of water, I wouldn't have thought I needed enough for six and a half hours, so I didn't have enough. I had the good sense to go buy more when they first mentioned the delay, but because of the sun on us it still wasn't enough really. 

Considering how much money they make on the trains and the fact that this isn't the first time they've encountered a problem, you'd think that there would be a procedure in place to keep passengers feed and watered and with a usable toilet, but apparently not.