Healthy, bright-eyed and slim

Back from holiday

We were in Aberdeen and the Grampians -- "a strange choice of holiday destination", as it was put to me beforehand.

It's true one expects Aberdeen to be always grey and wet, but we were lucky -- it was so for only one day. The rest of the time we had warm sunshine. It is actually quite a pleasing city. We hired a car and explored castles in the surrounding countryside, which is delightful. The National Trust for Scotland may be in trouble over its accounts, but the people showing us some of its castles did an impressive job.

The journey from London to Aberdeen and back was courtesy of Messrs East Coast, whose ageing but nicely refurbished HST 125 performed faultlessly. To my surprise, the train was pretty much full between London and Dundee in both directions.

On the way back, a young woman getting on at Dundee and going to York found a seat marked "reserved from Newcastle". "Which comes first, Newcastle or York?" she asked another young woman in the next seat. "I have no idea", was the reply. These were both British (in fact I think English) people, clearly intelligent and middle-class. I never cease to be amazed at some people's ignorance of elementary general knowledge. Do schools teach anything at all nowadays?

Which reminds me, I had been moderately impressed with David Cameron so far -- not all his policies, obviously, but his evident general competence -- until he said on TV in America that Britain had been the USA's junior partner in the Battle of Britain. As any fule kno, the USA wasn't even in the war for another 18 months at that point.

The summer of 1940, when Britain's very survival was hanging by a thread and when it stood alone against tyranny, was always supposed to be a, if not the, defining moment of this country's modern identity. And here we have our prime minister, for heaven's sake, educated at Eton and Oxford, who apparently understands nothing about it at all. It would almost be funny, if it weren't so desperately sad.

Railway poster of the day

This is from the pre-1948 LNER (London and North Eastern Railway). I remember my mother, who grew up in east London between the wars, saying it used to be known as the Late and Never Early Railway -- a reminder that public moaning about the railways did not begin with nationalisation.

Cripes! Boris goes all Keynesian

Well, I never. Until a couple of days ago or so, all Tories and the people they represent were scornfully dismissive of J.M. Keynes and everything he stood for.

How the worm turns! BoJo in today's Torygraph extols the virtues of Roosevelt's 1930s efforts to spend America's way out of depression by such projects as building the Hoover dam: 

It is no wonder, frankly, that the average tourist to America still spends a lot of time looking at 1930s infrastructure, because Roosevelt's New Deal created 122,000 public buildings, 77,000 bridges, 664,000 miles of road and 285 airports, as well as jobs for 8.5 million people. Like the German autobahns - built at roughly the same time - these investments were indispensable to the country's future growth and economic might.

The lesson to be drawn, says the Mayor, is that in our present economic mess we must press on with big projects in London: Crossrail for starters, various other rail schemes, the Thames Tideway tunnel, and maybe, in the long run, his favourite fantasy, a new airport in the Thames estuary:

We will beat this recession more speedily, and emerge in far better shape, if we make sure we put people to work in projects that boost the long-term competitiveness of the country. That means investing in the things that can radically improve the transport, attractiveness and general liveability of the capital city, the motor of the British economy. We may be in a hole, but the lesson of history is that tunnels and bridges and dams can bring jobs and growth.

Boris Johnson's attempt to pose as the new FDR is a bit rich: Crossrail and the other rail schemes, notably the transformation of the North London Line into the London Overground and the inclusion in the latter of the extended East London Line, due to open in a matter of months, were planned and got started under his predecessor, Ken Livingstone. BoJo has merely inherited them all. Ditto the various DLR extensions that are well under way.

Still, his confidence that Crossrail is definitely happening is reassuring. Presumably he knows something we don't, because all the rumours recently have been to the effect that the project is being drastically scaled down, as first noted back in August by The Railway Eye and later picked up by Private Eye.