A train is the perfect place for writers and thinkers

I am writing this column on a train, as I often do. I also write emails, letters, speeches – even company reports and presentations when I can secure one of those individual airline-style seats that afford some protection to client confidentiality.

In short, I find rail travel hugely productive and always have done. There are usually fewer distractions than in the office. This is particularly true for those like me who supposedly work at home, where the temptation to make a pot of tea, potter around dusting the bookshelves or take the dog for a walk so often proves irresistible.

If I do say so myself, over the years I have done some of my very best writing on trains. Helped no doubt by the 5.30am start required to get me on the first departure from Alnmouth to King’s Cross. Because like many people I am at my best for work purposes, if not for small talk, early in the morning.

But even late journeys home are rarely a waste of time, enabling me to catch up on much accumulated reading. Before the accountants abolished that civilised institution, I also made more useful and interesting contacts in the restaurant cars of the East Coast main line than almost anywhere else.

An image "The GNER restaurant car, RIP" has been removed to avoid potential charges (financial, not criminal) from the money-grubbing image copyright police. I wish I had taken my own photograph while I had the chance.

Partly, no doubt, because it was one of the few places where one would routinely share a table with total strangers.

Hence I am a great – some who have ventured into my attic might say obsessive – fan of trains and rail travel. Yet according to a study commissioned by the Department of Transport last week, I am in a tiny (well, ten per cent) minority in actually finding train journeys useful.

The other 90 per cent of business travellers apparently waste their time watching other people, staring out of the window, reading trash or surfing the internet. This seems completely at odds with my own experience and observations.

Is he bored? Or is that a light bulb above his head?

But what a helpful coincidence that these timely survey findings should back up the Department’s claim that there is a sound business case for splurging £17 billion of our money to shave a massive 23 wasted minutes off the fastest journey time from London to Birmingham New Street through the construction of the HS2 high speed rail link.

A project which will, at the same time, lead to a marked deterioration in service for those travelling from the current intermediate stations on the West Coast line.

The problem for the Transport Department is that anyone with half a brain can see that high speed rail between London and Birmingham makes no sense at all. This is not to deny that they could make a case for it between London and Glasgow, though only if one believes that faster transport links boost regional economies rather than sucking life out of them to the centre, as all the evidence of the 186 years since the opening of the Stockton & Darlington Railway suggests to me.

But for PR purposes they surely need to start building the thing in Sauchiehall Street, so that by the time it reaches the West Midlands adding an extension to Euston could be presented as a no-brainer.

The last traditional main line constructed in Britain, the Great Central Railway’s London extension to Marylebone, was developed that way around. Purpose-built to the Continental loading gauge for connection to a Channel tunnel, it was ripped up in the 1960s by a typically forward-thinking Government that assumed trains had had their day.

How useful some of the main lines, diversionary routes and passing loops destroyed by Dr Beeching would be today. Would it not prove more cost-effective to increase capacity by reinstating those rather than embarking on the HS2 project?

Beeching: the prime hate figure of my childhood

Unless, of course, you believe that all time spent travelling is wasted. But if that is the case, why aren’t we all flying on the rocket-powered successor to Concorde?

And are the Department’s researchers really on the right lines when they loftily dismiss the time business travellers spend staring out of the train window as “daydreaming”? Perhaps they are actually indulging in that most important activity for any of us: thinking. It might be helpful if our politicians and civil servants tried it more often.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Thank heavens for global warming

Are you wondering just how bad the weather must have been in the olden days, before the onset of global warming?

Then wonder no more. Because I sat next to my aunt at her 86th birthday lunch in Morpeth on Sunday, and was able to ask her to cast her mind back over the decades. And the word is that, throughout her childhood, she fervently hoped for a “white birthday” on November 28 each year, but it never happened.

The Wise Woman of Morpeth

Yes, I know that true believers will hasten to point out that cold snaps will still occur within their sacred warming trend, which also allegedly makes extreme weather more likely. But for lousy timing, it would be hard to beat the Met Office’s announcement on Friday that 2010 is shaping up to be one of the two warmest years on record.

Unless perhaps someone in authority presented a “garage of the year” award for mechanical excellence to Coco the clown, seconds before his own exhaust blew up and all his car doors fell off.

Still, at least as I surveyed the growing accumulation of snow outside my house I was able to console myself with the thought that the drifts customary on my hilltop were completely absent. Because there was no wind.

My back gate: not easy to open

Some sheds. With snow on them.

So in a few years’ time when the Northumbrian uplands are festooned with wind turbines and everyone’s electric heating is turned to maximum, we may be in a little bit of a pickle.

Has Coco the clown perhaps moved on from cars and wallpapering to the formulation of official energy policy?

I have a new all-purpose theory on the Government’s strategy, and am increasingly convinced that the turbines are simply going to be erected as a warning to us sinners, and will not actually be connected to the National Grid. It’s precisely in tune with the novel plan of building two aircraft carriers but not having any planes to put on them, and keeping nuclear submarines but scrapping the newly procured Nimrod aircraft that provided their air cover.

You watch: they may build the new (and unnecessary) high speed rail link from London to Birmingham, but will they buy any trains to run on it? Why not save money by just hiring the replacement buses that will be used most of the time anyway?

Egg yields heading the same way as Irish bank bonds

Similarly, when I was out and about at the weekend, in defiance of police instructions, I came across a number of tractors with snowploughs and nifty, well-stocked gritting trailers, but not one of them was actually spreading any grit. Clearly no-one is prepared to run the risk of admitting that they have run out of the stuff after last winter’s debacle.

Those tractors looked like they should really have been delivering hay to snowbound sheep or flailing hedges to make sure there were no winter berries left for the birds. What happened to those big yellow council lorries we used to see? Sent to the scrapheap with Ark Royal and its Harriers? Were their drivers unable to get work because of the snow? Or are the authorities just roping in the farming community to show us all the Big Society in action?

But let this not be a piece of unalloyed cynicism. Snow can provide glorious fun for some, and I could hardly sleep for childlike excitement last Thursday night as I looked forward to getting out with my young son to build my first snowman in almost half a century.

We could not even buy a carrot for his nose: talk about hardship

Unfortunately Charlie rapidly decided that snow was a cold, wet, unpleasant nuisance rather than a source of joy. Let us hope that he comes to see it in a more positive light in the next few years, before global warming really kicks in and he relapses into the long haul of Meldrew-like moaning about it that is his paternal genetic inheritance.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Savage cuts - and even worse in store?

So, electors of Britain, how would you like your spending cuts? Bold, savage or draconian? What, you were hoping for the usual pre-election promises of more cash for schools ‘n’ hospitals, the faint hope of a high speed rail link in your lifetime, and the even dimmer one of a dual carriageway A1?

Forget it. It isn’t going to happen. Not at the coming election anyway.

No, it looks like your only choice is going to be deciding which party would do the best job of wielding the axe. Which, as Paul Linford was suggesting on Saturday, should hand an advantage to the Tories because they have a reputation for that sort of thing.

An unjustified reputation, as it happens, since Mrs Thatcher actually presided over an increase in the proportion of GDP absorbed by the British State, and record increases in health and welfare spending. But at least we all knew that, in her heart, she wanted to rein things back. That surely needs to be the default setting of anyone aspiring to govern the country. We have tried the alternative of the surprisingly open-handed Scotsman who wanted to spray our cash around like a drunk with a fire extinguisher at a crazy foam party, and we have seen precisely where that got us. In the proverbial, in case you had not noticed.

I can think of no better illustration of the madness of the current regime than the fact that yesterday I sent off the £250 voucher graciously sent to me to open a Child Trust Fund account. Apparently if the little fellow makes it to his seventh birthday they will send me the same again. Only they won’t, with any luck, because it will be one of the egregious wastes of public money that whoever wins the next election will abolish. Along with my £20 per week child benefit and the tax credits paid to couples living on what sound like perfectly comfortable incomes to me.

The Government needs to recognise that most of us can look after ourselves, thanks, and want nothing more than to be left alone. In particular, we have no desire to fork out yet more in tax to pay for bright sparks to dream up ever more complicated schemes to “help” us, which require thick, glossy brochures and well-staffed call centres to explain what on earth they are about.

We can also do without all their efforts to protect us from miniscule risks of harm through their ever-expanding web of databases, surveillance and checks.

I would pledge my vote today to anyone who guaranteed that they would scrap ID cards, the NHS IT scheme and the 2012 Olympics, withdraw from Afghanistan, allow a free and unbiased vote on our continued membership of the European Union, and focus welfare spending on those in genuine need. So, sadly, there is not going to be any candidate in 2010 that I really want to vote for, and many more of us are going to be in the same boat. Thus turnout continues to diminish and politicians keep wringing their hands wondering where they are going wrong.

And why 2010, incidentally? Why not now? According to the conspiracy theorists, because Lord Mandelson is on a mission to prop up Gordon Brown until the Irish have been brow-beaten into rethinking their opposition to the Lisbon Treaty, the new European Constitution is enacted and Tony Blair installed as President, calculating that “Dave” Cameron will lack the bottle to give the British people a referendum on the subject when he is faced with this fait accompli.

I am not normally a believer in conspiracy theories, but this one seems more plausible than most. Could all the talk of vicious spending cuts and tax increases simply be a ploy by the political class to take our minds off something even worse?

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.