On a recent flight back from Stockholm Arlanda, I noticed a slightly different boarding procedure.

At the gate, check-in staff collected boarding passes or read the 2D bar-codes on print-at-home ones. A printer nearby printed off a bus-ticket-sized piece of paper with key details - flight number, name, seat, and presumably date.

Interesting.

Is this done to make the life of the cabin crew easier - after all, they have to scan anything from stubs of conventional boarding passes to print-at-home boarding passes to SMS messages on mobile phones. Presumably it's easier if all passengers have the same size piece of paper!

Does anyone know? Is this really the reason, or have I missed something?

I was on a walking holiday in Southern Sweden recently, staying in the pleasant little town of Nykoping. There are no big hills there, just forest, rocky inlets and arable land - very pleasant, very low-key.

One downside of where we stayed - about a kilometre from the harbour - was that, by the harbour, there was a cafe which broadcast very loud live music every night except Sunday. Sometimes it started at 21:00: sometimes at 22:00. By 2:30 mercifully all was quiet.

And I wondered why.

Presumably the cafe wants to increase its patronage - in which case, why amplify the music so much that a quarter of the town could hear it? If there was no amplification, people wanting to listen would have to go to the cafe and listen, rather than just sit there with their windows open!

Presumably the performers like a big audience. I have news for them. Hearing their over-loud performance from a kilometre away sounded terrible - but I'm told that, close up, it was really not bad.

Presumably some of the population liked hearing it, and looked forward to a free night's entertainment. But my guess is that they were outnumbered by that part of the population which didn't like that style of music, needed to get up early in the morning, had small children to try to pacify or just fancied a good night's sleep!

Presumably no-one dislikes it so much that they are driven to call the police or go down to the cafe with a pickaxe! Or they all leave it to each other and no-one does anything!

But certainly my abiding memory of this pretty town will be, sadly, that it's not a place to go to again unless I stay somewhere well away from the harbour.

Why do they do that?