Transport

There’s a distinctive glow of virtue that emanates from people recharging their electric cars in public places. I call it the Light of the Charge Brigade. In the run-up to Easter, I spent two hours observing the phenomenon at Fleet Services on the M3. It was mostly men doing the charging. They’ve cracked the EV way of life, and are very pleased with themselves. A sparklingly fulfilled man called Paul was driving from Colchester to Seaton in Devon in his Skoda Enyaq with a carload of friends. He’d planned this stop for a first charge and Pret elevenses. Later he was planning to stop at Montacute House in Somerset for a late lunch and a second charge on one of the National Trust’s chargers.

It was lucky that the bus was behind schedule – mainly because the driver had stepped out to take his own photograph for social media (#endofanera) – otherwise the young lad in the hoodie might have missed it. ‘Is this the last bus?’ he asked as he fumbled for change. ‘It’s the last bus from Mousehole Harbour, ever,’ the driver replied, before waving him on without paying. People rarely get as nostalgic about buses as they do about trains. Flanders and Swann wrote a song about the 1960s Beeching cuts. It pretty much consists of Michael Flanders reciting the names of closed rail stations to music – and it is an elegiac masterpiece. The only time I ever saw my father cry was when someone sang it at a village hall concert.

‘They should ask me. I’m a complete cripple,’ said my husband, heaving himself from his chair with great determination to reach the whisky. The Department for Transport is asking disabled people whether the term invalid carriage in legislation should be changed and what term they might prefer. ‘Language has moved on and changed,’ the government says, since 1970, when legislation was drafted. One problem is having to keep changing terminology. No one, even my husband, should be called a cripple. No one should be called handicapped. Now no one should be called disabled, but rather a person with a disability. These changes are paralleled in the languages of our neighbours. The Paris Métro had seats reserved for mutilés de guerre. The term was replaced by personnes handicapées.

Rob Henderson is justly famous for coining the phrase ‘luxury beliefs’. These are opinions which are unshakeably held irrespective of any countervailing evidence, either because the display of such opinions confers status on the holder, or else because adherence to them is an article of faith among some social or professional group in which you need to be seen to belong. The only approved vision of the future involves extracting people from their cars and cramming them into mass transit Such beliefs are hence closer to religious creeds than to any conventionally formed opinion. Consequently, any contradiction of such accepted beliefs in public, however intelligent, is treated as heretical: a social gaffe at best, a career-ender at worst.

Working people Government ministers may have had trouble defining what was meant by ‘working people’ in the Labour manifesto, but where did the idea of classifying people who earn their living as a distinct group come from? – According to the OED,the term ‘working class’ has been traced back to the 1757 edition of the Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce written by Malachy Postlethwayt, a former adviser to Horace Walpole. Postlethwayt was born the son of a wine merchant in Limehouse, east London, in 1707. He certainly fitted Starmer’s definition of a working person in that he appears to have died, in 1767, owning no assets.

The first nimby Who coined the term ‘nimby’?  — The expression, from ‘Not In My Backyard’, entered the political sphere in Britain in 1989 when it was used by the then environment secretary Nicholas Ridley to describe people who were in favour of house-building in general, just not near where they lived. He was later ridiculed when it emerged that he had objected to a development next door to his own Gloucestershire home.  — But the term originated around a decade earlier in the United States, when it was applied to people who were opposed to the dumping of nuclear waste near their homes.

It happened six years ago on a flight back from the United States. ‘Sir, I’m pleased to say you’ve been upgraded to first class.’ ‘Wonderful! Where would you like me to sit?’ ‘Anywhere you like, you’re the only passenger.’ The anti-car movement is idiotic – a luxury belief shared by deluded metropolitans For the next few hours I dined on fine food brought to me at any time I chose and drank the finest wines known to humanity. I had a staff of three to myself. At one point they brought me a silver tray with magazines on it, one of which was The Spectator. ‘Would you like anything to read, sir?’ ‘Yes, I’d like to read something written by, let me see… oh, I know – me!’ I didn’t actually say that, you understand, but I thought it all the same.

I can’t remember the name of the comedian, but he had a wonderful ambition, one which will sadly now never be realised. He wanted to interview Neil Armstrong for an hour on live television without mentioning the moon landings once. I wish he’d succeeded. In fact Armstrong might have leapt at the opportunity to pontificate about baseball or gardening, rather than the Apollo missions. It must be maddening when every conversation with a stranger turns to one brief event in your life: rather like being in the Eagles and knowing that, in a two-hour concert, 90 per cent of the crowd is only there for ‘Hotel California’. Following in this vein, I have a secret retirement project where I interview the world’s leading minds on trivial and tangential topics.

When I drive to see my parents in the once-peaceful farming country where I grew up, it is a strange, bittersweet experience. The car journey takes me through places I ought to recognise but I don’t any more, because the green fields of Warwickshire, the villages and the farms, are scarred by the tortuous works of HS2. The distinctive red earth is laid bare for mile upon mile as the bulldozers do their worst. Rows of cottages and entire villages lie deserted, testimony to the billions already spent. As I drive along the main Banbury to Coventry road, I see mountains of earth piled high as flyovers take shape. I stare at this curiously outdated project – old hat both in terms of the controversy and the purpose it was meant to have.

I have two suggestions for HS2. Either stop it or make it stop. The spiralling cost and delays are reason enough to rethink the project, never mind the changes to patterns of rail use since 2021. Any economic case based on pre--pandemic projections needs to be revisited. So one option would be to stop the project completely. But what if the project goes ahead in a reduced form to save face? Well, in this case, the need for speed is questionable. The value of speed to passengers is far from linear. For instance, cutting a journey time from four hours to two, as the TGV did between Paris and Lyon, is a game-changer. Reducing a journey from 80 minutes to 40, on the other hand, isn’t that big a deal.

The first LNER train I booked on Sunday from Durham to London was cancelled due to ‘action short of a strike’. I hadn’t heard the phrase before, but I instantly admired it. It’s so impressively confusing. With a strike, you know whose side you’re on. You can look up the salary of a train driver, for instance, discover that it’s £70,000 after only a few years of training, and become icily indifferent to their plight. But action short of a strike? What is it? ‘Action short of a strike’ turns out to be an ingenious way of screwing your boss while still getting paid Action short of a strike, ASOS, turns out  to be an ingenious way of screwing your boss while still getting paid.