(Also, regarding South Korea — not Korea! — I wrote ‘roughly’, as in one-third more or so. Doesn’t break any comparisons, same ballpark for most demographic purposes.)

No go educate yourself! ;-) (Hey, I’m trying to be polite, give me some credit.)

Edit in reply to your edit: technically, England _is_ a country. Also, just because Scotland exists doesn’t mean that England’s geographic and demographic properties just disappear; my comparison was very favorable to England actually. Japan has good rail services to some of the remotest towns in the mountains, i.e. they do have very challenging terrain to work with.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependent_territories_by_population_density

(Korea: 487 p/km2, almost double the density of the UK)

Update: Ah yes, the English counties together have a pop dens. of 395 p/km2. But that is not a country — you can’t cherry-pick bits of a place.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/2967374/England-is-most-crowded-country-in-Europe.html

The bureaucratic equivalent of the ‘Close’ button in an elevator: it doesn’t actually close the door, but pressing it repeatedly helps you ease the tension ;)

However when it comes to leaving, my best is 1 hour before departure. If there are only two passengers, why wait. 

It’s all about priorities if you ask me.

Edit: want a country with a decent railway system that’s roughly comparable in terms of size, general shape, population and density? Try South Korea. Not as good as Japan but not bad, either. And they did most of the good stuff in the last 30-odd years.

Britain has major cities in a crazy quilt pattern all across heavily varied terrain, while Japan has almost all of theirs in a straight line down a single coastline with agreeable terrain. General rule with trains, the more crossed lines you have, the harder it is to manage.

The Oxford Tube long-distance bus runs from Victoria to Oxford all night, it’s every hour overnight. I have no idea how much it costs.  Both stop at Marble Arch.

Your taxi would have been much, much faster than this though.

I’ve only used Heathrow about 4 times (inbound), but I’ve never had to queue for more than about 15 minutes.

Also, does anyone know if this is all of Heathrow, or just certain terminals?  It’s so huge it’s almost three/five airports.

£160 and hours later I ended up back in Oxford.

This is new – I had the same thing happen a few weeks back with a 3 hour wait. I have been traveling regularly in the UK for the past several years – never seen anything more than a 45 min wait in any Heathrow terminal.

UK Border Agency – Austerity does NOT MEAN employing only 2 Agents when 10 are needed. This is incredibly DANGEROUS for your country – you are over working your front line security protecting your border. Get your shit together – this is LONDON not the 3rd world!!!!!!

Aslo, a friend of mine (US citizen) got denied entry into London (England) the other day. He had all his things there at a friend house. Jut flew for the weekend to a party in France, and they wouldnt let him return…. reason: unknown. 

So in France they told him they will happily accept him back, and arranged a hotel for him till he figured out what to do.   

The current government is already under pressure because it’s completely unable to fulfil their outlandish manifesto promises (they wanted to cut immigration by some awful number which is completely unattainable as long as Britain stays in the EU, so they’re squeezing everyone else and still will never go anywhere near a level who’ll satisfy the racists), so they’re quite happy to effectively close the borders to the “unwashed”. Cameron’s millionaire friends all have their private jets and VIP privileges anyway, I bet none of them go through Heathrow these days.