Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder.

On the shortest day of the year, midwinter's day 21st of December,

and the good news is, and I'm genuinely excited about it, from now onwards,

the days start getting longer.

And you can imagine all the glorious things that are going to be happening in six months' time on mid-summer's day.

Looking back, six months, that was when we had the very first national rail strike of the 21st century. Yes, hadn't seen them really

since the 1980s. And since then, we have had, if my maths is correct, from the RMT, 12 days of

national strikes, from the Drivers Union, Asleff, five days of national strikes.

Once or twice, those have overlapped.

We also had the three non-strike days, which actually, because they were called off so late in the day,

effectively were the same as strike, certainly adding a couple of strike days to that total.

And we seem no closer to getting any resolution.

There's reports that the RMT union has had last ditch talks with Network Rail,

but the strike, I think think for this coming weekend starting on

christmas eve on saturday at 6 p m carrying on till tuesday morning at 6 a m we'll go ahead and

looking across at the border force strike as well, that's going to cause some problems.

But I'm not absolutely convinced that airports are going to be shut down.

I very much hope that I'm being realistic rather than optimistic about that.

But let's just walk through where we are.

Rail is absolutely the big problem at the moment because my view,

which is that we should all get where we need to be by Friday tea time is unfortunately slightly

unraveling due to the large number of cancellations on Avanti West Coast, where they've got huge resourcing issues,

...