I’ve been reading with interest and dismay about the strikes in Europe that are playing havoc with the travel and tourism industry. First the museum workers in France went out on strike and as of today, the employees of the Pompidou Center are in their 4th week of that action.

I understand that their concerns are primarily the staffing numbers since plans are afoot in France to only replace one out of every two retiring museum employees. Common sense leads me to believe that they have some very valid points, but consider the time period that they have chosen for this — at the end of the year just as the holidays arrive and tourists are flocking to France for a break. It is quite likely that they have chosen this period specifically for the sheer amount of pain that it will inflict on the French government, but the cost to individual small business owners and the French tourism industry as a whole will be inestimable.

Let’s also look at it from a traveller’s point of view. People who may have saved for the trip of a lifetime to Paris, couples on a romantic break or a honeymoon, families on their annual winter holiday — all of those have paid and packed and travelled only to find that they could NOT (for awhile at least) gain entry to the Louvre, Versailles, the Pompidou Center, the Musee D’Orsay, or many other museums due to the ongoing strike.

Now British Air employees are threatening a 12 day shut down beginning 3 days before Christmas and the British baggage handlers have jumped on board and are planning to initiate their own strike at major airports beginning on the same day that the British Air staff go out on the 22nd of December.

Several articles in online travel publications have noted that there will most likely not be any refunds issued to travellers who had purchased tickets on British Air and if those travellers haven’t purchased travel insurance that reimburses them, then they’re out of luck and out of pocket. And since it is the peak of ‘high season travel’ for the airlines industry, it is rather unlikely that anyone, casual or business traveller alike, will find it easy to book alternative tickets on another carrier at a cost remotely like the advance purchase fares that many of these people would have had.

One group casualty of the British Air strikes are the 1,000 young musicians from the USA who were meant to travel to London to perform in the New Year’s Day Parade. One spokesman for the group told the BBC news reporter, “They have funded their own travel costs, many working long hours at the weekend and throughout holidays, to make their dream of performing in London come to fruition.”

But wait — there’s more!

The Eurostar drivers and on-board staff have ALSO decided to strike this coming weekend and again on the 26th and 27th of December thus reducing even further the available methods of travelling between England and Europe in the weeks ahead.

As of the 10th of December, commuters on the RER train lines in Paris were feeling the effects of an ongoing work slowdown.

And finally — in a case that is not actually a strike but a case of insolvency, Scotland’s largest air carrier Flyglobespan has collapsed leaving over 4,500 passengers stranded and 800 staff out of work a week before Christmas. Add the British Air strike and the Eurail strike to this mix and there are a lot of would-be travellers that have a snowflake’s chance in hell of having the holiday or even the business trip that they had planned.

I can’t ever remember a year when forces conspired to make travel so difficult in one short period — and all clumped into one smallish area of the globe. My sympathies go out to any affected passenger who is dealing with this.

I actually have very little sympathy for the strikers. No matter how much they wish to make a point, this important time of year for many families is certainly not the time to list their demands and lock things down. I rather think that there are few travellers who will look kindly on the staff at British Air, Eurostar, RER in Paris, the baggage handlers in Britain, and the remaining museum strikers in Paris at any point in the future. What they WILL remember is how utterly ruined their plans were and how devastated they may have felt when they realised how very little recourse they had.

From the oft-amended grocery list within the “Shopping Lists” spiral notebook to the “Things To Do” list in my purse-sized dayplanner, my brain simply functions more efficiently when I am able to tick things off and sigh happily from the completion of a task. And I would probably never write another book if I didn’t have a notebook filled with ideas and insertions at my side as I type.

Hopefully the readers of this column are a bit more tidy in their paperwork wrangling than I because I have occasionally found myself in a full-blown moaning frenzy when I lost one of my MANY in-progress lists amongst the piles of predatory, list-eating paper-stacks that blossom and grow on my desk and coffee table.

Italian writer Umberto Eco, author of the much-beloved book The Name of the Rose and many other books and scholarly articles, also has a fascination with lists and he is curating an exhibit on that very subject.

This article in the German publication SPIEGEL discusses the new exhibition at the Louvre which gives us a glimpse into the lists made by well know writers and artists through the ages.

As Eco states to the journalist, “The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but often.”

The Louvre exhibition lists give glimpses into the thought processes of those long gone in many cases. But an even more trendy version of list mania is currently unfolding in the world of social media as Twitter Lists emerge online. Whether it is your own closest friends or simply curious strangers, anyone can now have a clear indication of who you think is worth watching on Twitter and how you categorise them. It’s a fascinating bit of ‘mind perv’ into the thought process of other Twitterers. And the lists concept has caught on like the proverbial wildfire around the world.

Eco’s curation of this new exhibit at the Louvre may only examine list-makers from the past, but he has also tapped into the zeitgeist of our current fascination with the lists of other people and our tendency to be armchair psychologists about the motivation for adding each item.

Do we learn anything from the lists of others? Do these small glimpses into the lives of others serve a constructive purpose? Are we engaging that ‘inner perv’ that resides within so many of us — the one which makes some people think that it is acceptable to have a wee glimpse into the contents of your medicine cabinet when they go to the loo at your house? Or are we simply allowing ourselves to indulge in a tiny bit of harmless human nature — a normal curiousity about whether other people do their organising differently, better, more creatively, more happily than we do.

Questions, questions — and perhaps the beginning of another list with ideas to discuss in future articles. We DO LOVE our lists!