The recent Macfilos story on the Swiss alpine railways bought back memories for me of a quite remarkable railway journey I made in October 1982. It was in an Orient Express reenactment from Istanbul to Interlaken in Switzerland. We travelled in a train using the original Orient Express rolling stock and pulled for much of the journey by steam locomotives. As I recollect, at that time the carriages were owned by a Swiss railway enthusiast who also ran a travel company.

When I carried home my new space-grey 1.3GHz MacBook yesterday I had already decided to do a complete, from-scratch installation. I did this with the iMac earlier in the year and haven't regretted the two or three days of fiddling to get things back to the way I like them. Over the past six months I've had repeated problems with Migration Assistant on a variety of computers (mainly friends' new toys). MA would run for several hours and then stop for no obvious reason. In the end, a reinstallation was the best choice. This came as a surprise because in the past MA has been rock solid.

I've been fretting about not having a credit or debit card enabled for Apple Pay. Last week there was a flurry of activity and I found that I had two likely suspects in my wallet so I decided to have a go.

Yesterday I spent an indulgent hour in the Covent Garden Apple Store (where better to spend a sunny Sunday afternoon) trying to make up my mind—finally—on the perfect portable computer for travelling. I've written before about this thorny problem and my inability to choose between the svelte and featherlight MacBook and the sturdy, sensible 13in MacBook Pro retina. I have been sitting on the fence so long that I decided I'd better make a decision.