For
several consecutive years I have been given a complimentary ticket to the Battle
of Britain Flying Display at Duxford (a friend is an Imperial War Museum
Volunteer) but It can be a very long and tiring day spent mainly standing and to
be honest I find it to be rather tame; but that’s the schoolboy who went to
every SBAC show at Farnborough in the 1950s and several in the 60s and 70s talking.
The days before Heath and Safety took over and jet fighters would exceed the
sound barrier above the crowds.
So this year I offered the freebie ticket to a young friend who lives a little
way up the M11 on the way to Duxford. Unfortunately he found that car parking
could only be booked via a Smart Phone App and he doesn’t own any sort of mobile phone.
One wasted ticket.
How can anyone do anything without a mobile phone in 2024?
By pure chance another friend who works for Allianz Insurance offered me a
freebie ticket to Twickenham for the England v New Zealand Ladies’ match on the same day.
That was all App based too. Download something to my phone, install it and
register the phone number and by some magic that I did not understand a QR code
appeared on my phone two days later. Then at a very crowded admission gate
everyone had to pass their phone under a scanner.
Apart from the crowd being funnelled into a turnstile it was actually fairly
easy but obviously an impossibility for my young friend from Hertfordshire. How
many people like him cannot fully participate in life? For unfathomable reasons
it is his choice but not everyone has that freedom.
As you can see I had a very good view and it was a very good game. However I
came home just as knackered as I would have from Duxford.