Wednesday 30/7/08: For Suzanne

The ease of being able to do this blog in the comfort of your bed, on your laptop is brilliant! I can now at least keep my fingers working and when I think of my friend Joe, in his nursing home in Naas, with his by now sausage like fingers, bloated by years of living with multiple sclerosis, it motivates me to keep on banging on the keyboard!

I'm now engaged in another saga with Ryanair. They seem to have no customer telephone service whatsoever. They keep you on hold for ages then cut you off. This happened to me eight times today. They obviously want everyone to use the web only, which might be ok if their damn server wasn't constantly down, and riddled with errors. There is meant to be some new EU law in now about passengers with a disability and airlines. At the back of my mind, I am nervous that because I will be travelling alone, I will get to the Ryanair doors and be turned away, as happened to a guy with cerebral palsy a few weeks ago.

As far as I am concerned, Ryanair are fine if you are ok with being treated like a herd of cattle, but when their prices can be higher than Aer Lingus, a certain level of customer satisfaction is to be expected. Originally, I booked my ticket to Pisa with them because they are the only airline that flies there, and I wanted to reserve my seat and notify them, as they only accept two wheelchair users per flight, on a first come first served basis. Now Pisa is dropped because it is too expensive (€4500 without spending money) and I have found an assistant in Manchester, who won't bankrupt me!