Hello and welcome to the final independent podcast of the week, which comes to you from a ferry,

not across channel one, but actually a little electric one, which is shuttling across from the

town hall at Marseille, across the harbour to the other side of the old town and a lovely

little trip it is which costs all of 50 cents for a journey of good three or

four minutes I'm going to be talking about other crossings though notably

between the UK and France.

And in particular, the problems that we saw with the Euro Tunnel Shuttle on Tuesday, just

because lots of people have been getting in touch and saying how concerned they are about the fact that the

shuttle got stuck and it appears to be quite an upsetting, alarming issue for a lot of people.

And goodness me, I completely sympathise with that.

The shuffle is a very unusual piece of

transportation. If you've not done it, then well here's what happens. You go to

what looks like I guess a ferry terminal, very complicated slip roads from the

motorway and you're funneled in and you go through the

check-in and the border crossing which of course these days requires you to have your

passport stamped checked but then you go from there and you're directed eventually sometimes you need to wait for a bit

into an area where you drive effectively sort of sideways into a train and then drive all the

way down till you're told to stop. It's kind of a great long stretched, I guess,

garden shed arrangement. And once everybody's on board, then you stay in your vehicle and off you go.

And about 30, 35 minutes later, you are in lovely Calais and you just drive away having crossed

French frontier before you left. So for an awful lot of people it is their preferred way of getting to France. It's swift.

Crucially also, it's kind of easy and comfortable.

...