tickety boo

Sailing Calmac's ferries in the Western Isles has become safer since I did an island hopping holiday back in 1992. Then, they collected your ticket only at the sailing's end. Anyone could get on but it committed you to still have this losable small object in your possession, not lost or stolen, at destination. Exactly what would happen to you carried fear through uncertainty. During that holiday I did indeed come across a case, an old lady in a disembarking queue in front of me had lost her ticket during the journey and was trying to cope by cracking jokes about going to jail. But this is a humanly sick situation against all practical common sense. What if she had been robbed, and she the victim had to talk of going to jail? I last saw her standing to 1 side with the ticket man, no idea what happened, I just wonder if the same would have happened to a teenager as to an old lady, both equally innocent.

I remember the system making me anxious all that holiday, and not being attracted to the Western Isles again for a long time. That old system is now gone, and that is some welcome progress, for Elas's recent visit to Mull and Iona. Now they do the tickets at boarding, less scary. But it would still seriously foul up your life to lose a ticket in those remote small port villages with scant buses or emergency facilities. It remains an example of how dangerous tickets are as a system, and have been for 200 years, and how the danger discriminates against anyone with a condition increasing their likelihood to lose small objects. Which is my case for banning tickets.

Duart castle, on Mull, is using a ticket system with echoes of Calmac's old one, for its private buses that meet the ferries at Craignure. If you get on without a prebooking, the driver gives you a ticket that you only pay for when you reach the castle entrance kiosk, along with your admission. The ticket's corner is cut off to validate it, then you need it in that condition for the bus back. As the castle is far up a track winding through empty farmland, a longer trek from the nearest village than it looks on the map, dear me you want the bus back. But that means not losing your ticket as you carry it around with you all the time you are at the castle. As a coastal promontory in a Hebridean firth, this is prone to be a windy spot, with quick change weather. We saw it go from sunny to misted up in a few minutes. Yet the entrance kiosk has no shelter attached to it for the customer standing on the outside. You have no shield from the wind, as the man comfortably inside the kiosk hands out to you your clipped ticket, and a little till receipt for your admission, and maybe a note in your change too as bus plus admission is £11. 3 bits of paper, none of which must you allow to blow away or else your day is wrecked big time. So pronto you have to find a spot to park yourself, back to the wind, to sort them all out. Sit on the step beside the kiosk, is what I did.

What are the castle folks going to do with anyone who can't do a long country walk and who is stuck there with a loss of ticket? When the castle wants to close at day's end, and the stranded person is missing their ship off the island too, let's wonder? It makes a disability question that should be pressed. As a practical matter of safety, your status in moving around should never be allowed to depend on the successful safekeeping of several small scraps of paper in a windy place.

What about your bigger bulkier travelling baggage? Does that carry anxieties? Procedurally or emotionally, do you cope better with keeping it with you at all times or with leaving it in a place of safety? There is an aspie coping question in there, and you want the answer to work for you. Consider this prize piece of ticketing logic, from Oban station's baggage lockers: "This contains the security code needed to recover your luggage and keep it safe." Keep it safe: can you find any practicality and logic in a system where retaining possession of a number code on a ticket and not losing it is critical to recovering possession of your safely stored possessions? I can't even look down that vortex, the anxiety this should logically give you. You need safe storage, so keep something else safe as you go around ... I mean ... This is all some of what tickets, and their acceptance as a concept, do to our lives.

Maurice Frank