As has been proved beyond a shadow of a doubt in Beijing this week, Britain is a country that is remarkably difficult to describe in any lasting way. Just when I thought that "being useless at sports" was one of the key things that defined this place, our athletes go and put themselves third in the medal table. While we're on the subject, track cycling is much, much cooler than I ever thought. Whoever had the idea of a sport where all the competitors have to dress up like superheroes was a genius.
Some aspects of this country, however, do not change. I was in Liverpool Street station last night, waiting for a train back to Enfield (and listening to Belle & Sebastian, so I was already filled with the very British combination of slightly melancholy whimsy) when the giant video screen in the station started showing BAA's new Terminal 5 advert.
Terminal 5, as you'll probably remember, is the newest part of London's Heathrow Airport. It's been open since the end of March, but its grand opening was sadly marred by the fact that they hadn't quite got the rather important function of matching up passengers with their luggage working properly. Impressively, the terminal managed to misdirect 28,000 pieces of luggage in a mere 10 days, reaching new heights of incompetence previously unseen.
So, here we are, over four full months down the line, and what is the advert tagline that BAA has decided to go with?
"Terminal 5 is working." Not "Terminal 5 is working well." Not "Terminal 5 is a nice place to catch a plane." Not even "Terminal 5 – Now Losing An Acceptable Proportion Of Your Luggage."
No, BAA reckons that it is worth advertising the fact that – a third of a year after the terminal was supposed to be fully operative – it now performs to the standards that it was meant to be meeting all along.
Only the British could possibly think that was a good idea. My national identity is once again secure, no matter how glittering our athletic prowess. Thanks, BAA. Thanks.
Monday, 18 August 2008
The United Kingdom. Reassuringly Useless.
Tuesday, 29 July 2008
Buses are under-represented in both films and music. Except in Speed.
Although they have a bad reputation in this country, trains really are pretty cool. That's not just the ten-year-old version of me talking either, the one who spent entire summer holidays carefully counting how many trains he saw at level crossings and so on (the record was 20 in six weeks) and once made his entire family wait beside a railway line for about half an hour until one came past. No, this is current me, the one who lives in the least car-friendly city in the UK and who likes being able to fall asleep halfway through a journey and have a reasonably decent chance of waking up again.
I don't know what it is about them – perhaps the speed, perhaps their size, perhaps the fat blue sparks that leap off the overhead lines and make you really nervous – but for the most part, I do really enjoy train travel. It's surprising, then, that for most songwriters it's cars that get all the love.
Most genres of music seem to be oddly car-fixated. Hip-hop is the most obvious – although back in the days of Run-DMC it was fine to just rap about your shoes, nowadays that's not nearly enough, and you have to be rollin' in your BMW with blue neon lights underneath to be taken remotely seriously. (Apparently.) Cars are seen as a sign of affluence, and therefore importance – the humble train is just not cool enough.
Modern country music is heavily into cars too. Here, though, they're less a sign of wealth and more the embodiment of ordinariness. Country, as the name suggests, has its home out in the wide open spaces, where it's simply not practical to go anywhere without an engine. That means that if you want to evoke an image of space, freedom and salt-of-the-earth folk (an expression that, surprisingly, doesn't mean "sharp, gritty and leaves you with a nasty aftertaste"), you can't go far wrong by singing about beat-up pickup trucks. Trains are the things them city folk use.
It wasn't always this way. Listen to any older country – American roots music, if you like – and this emphasis is entirely missing, simply because back then the situation was reversed. Cars were rich men's playthings, the railway lines ran everywhere, and if you needed to get out of town and be free, you hopped on a train in the dead of night. This kind of atmosphere made it through roughly to around Johnny Cash, whose "Folsom Prison Blues" starts with a train a'comin' and rollin' round the bends, and even today peeks through sometimes to evoke images of distance and life passing one by (REM's "Driver 8" and Eels' "Railroad Man" spring to mind).
Film-makers, on the other hand, have no qualms about sticking their heroes on board trains whenever they feel like it. It's a ready-made metaphor for a journey through life, an easy way of throwing people from different walks of life together, and a plausible way of containing and isolating the characters from any outside influences. Oh, and they make a terrible mess when they crash, so either the hero of the piece can save everyone (or at least his cute girlfriend), or the villain can kill hundreds while laughing maniacally.
Trains even pop up when they're not the main focus in films, but this rarely happens in songs; I suspect this is to do with the relative lengths of each medium. A song, like a car journey, can be as long or as short as you want (within limits), but unless you're in a very urban environment, the train is reserved for relatively long and important trips. You take the train off to war, or to go and have a deep personal revelation, not when you're condensing a few moments of life into music.
Although there's a fair amount of exceptions to this rule, the general idea still seems to hold: the longer the format of your work, the longer the journey you can fit in it. I think that's a shame. Songs are more than capable of covering vast sweeps of time, mostly metaphorically, but also literally once you hit prog rock. Likewise, the road movie is a shamefully underdeveloped film convention, having been pushed into teen road trip movie and schlocky horror territory. Of course, sometimes their efforts won't work, and we'll be left with bizarre and pretentious experimental work. But at least it'll be new bizarre, pretentious experimentation.
All of which means that I can leave you with one of those rare things: a song that breaks the conventions, and carries it off brilliantly. Here's The Who's "5:15".
By the way, Pete Townshend screaming "Girls are fifteen, SEXUALLY KNOWING!" was a biting comment on the society of the day 35 years ago. When he did the song again in 2000 at the Royal Albert Hall, it was just creepy.
Wednesday, 4 June 2008
I wonder, would a bus driver let you on if you just waved some blue cardboard at the Oyster reader and shouted "BEEP!"?
So it's been some time since I posted here. At least, it feels like a long time – that would be because I have now moved to a new city and started a new job, and things are still so weird that my perception of time has been doing strange things. I haven't abandoned this blog, though. Hopefully once things have got more sorted out, I'll be able to ramp the posting rate back up again. Until then, there may be some dead air on here for a while, punctuated with the odd musing. Like this one.
The city in question that I've moved to is London. It's not a place that I know a whole heap about; indeed, up until now it's been pretty much "that place you go through on the way to wherever it was you were actually going". (For those of you outside the UK – it's almost impossible to get anywhere in the south of England without going through London at some point.) That means that I've had no chance to get used to it; however, after a week of living in Enfield, I'm just beginning to get a feel for how it works. Here's some of my observations.
First, Greater London is massive. I went right into the centre of the city last Saturday, travelling only on buses (I haven't been paid yet, so I'm travelling cheap right now), and it took the best part of two hours. For the record, that's longer than it took on the train when I lived in Essex. The outer bits of the city are so large, in fact, that they don't feel like a city. Enfield feels very much like it could be Anywheresville, a generic smallish town with all that that usually entails. It's almost as if these small towns are huddling together for warmth, creating a huge conglomerate out of completely different bits.
Bizarrely, given the first fact, central London is tiny. The bus route I was on took me right into Trafalgar Square, from where you can stand on the steps of the National Gallery and see Big Ben (or to be more accurate, the clock tower on the Palace of Westminster that houses Big Ben) and the London Eye without even moving. Walk south for a minute or so, and you can go through Admiralty Arch and find yourself at one end of the Mall, with St. James's Park stretching off to your left and Buckingham Palace staring you right in the face. Go round the edge of the park and you can walk back up Whitehall, poking your nose in at the (extremely heavily-guarded) end of Downing Street to say hello to Gordon Brown, shortly before passing nearly every major building in the political life of the United Kingdom.
You might think, therefore, that with central and Greater London being so different, there's not much tying them together. There is at least one thing, though, and that's the transport. Where most cities seem to put in a public transport network as something of an afterthought, in London it is an incredible achievement. You noticed, I assume, that it was possible for me to travel on buses all the way from Enfield to the middle of the city and back out again? That entire journey cost me £3, and it would have stayed at £3 if I had hopped on and off buses the entire day.
If I'd chosen to take the Tube instead (the oldest and most extensive underground railway network in the world, by the way) that would have cost slightly more, but not a whole lot. And, thanks to the mildly Orwellian but still rather funky Oyster cards, it would have been incredibly easy. London is one of the few places in the UK where having a car is not a convenience, but a downright liability – even outside the congestion charge zones (a good idea in principle, although I'm still uneasy about the civil liberties implications unless they have a seriously good data protection policy) it's much, much cheaper and more convenient to use public transport.
I'm still not in love with London. Walking around it, I came to the conclusion that it is a great city, in the classical sense of "great" – it really has to be, given the amount of history that's taken place here – but it's not a nice city. I don't feel as safe here as I did in Essex (although ironically I'm probably less likely to be mugged here), and I certainly don't feel as safe as I did in Oxford. It'll be a while before I'm used to it. Until then, though, you'll be able to find me, emerging mole-like from an Underground station, blinking in wonderment at the strange things around me and wondering how the hell I'm going to make it back home.
Saturday, 22 September 2007
Which one am I in? That's easy - Currently Not Driving Because Of Far Too Much Rage
In 2004, according to National Statistics Online, three-quarters of households in the UK had access to at least one car. That works out to one heck of a lot of cars - over 26 million, in fact. And, obviously, that means that there's a lot of people driving those cars, all of whom have passed their driving test.
Given how legendarily difficult the driving test is (how many people do you know who passed first time, and how much did it cost them?), it seems entirely bizarre that there's such a wide range of driving abilities and attitudes on Britain's roads today. Luckily for the purposes of bureaucratic pigeonholing, all of these drivers fall into one of several easily-definable categories. Let's look at them here.
The Nervous Driver
Nervous drivers can come from any section of the population, but all have one thing in common - being behind the wheel is a thoroughly terrifying experience for them. Every other driver on the road is a threat to them, every corner a death trap. They can be spotted quite easily - not only by their speed (approximately tractor speed on most roads, increasing to a truly brave 45 mph on dual carriageways), but also by their hands rigidly clasping the steering wheel, eyes wide and staring, and jaws firmly clenched together to try and prevent themselves screaming.
The Office-On-Wheels Driver
Some people are busy. Some are very busy. And some are apparently so busy that they cannot let up from their working day even for a second. This means that while they are driving in to the office, they will be constantly on the phone - sometimes handsfree, but not always - setting up meetings, scheduling brainstorming sessions, dictating reports and very possibly conducting job interviews. All of these people are waiting patiently for that day when speech synthesis and output have advanced so far that they will be able to fit a laptop into their car and carry out any work-related task while on the move. This kind of driver is to be pitied. After all, if they are really this busy, then presumably their every waking hour is spent on their job. Even when little Jimmy wants to play out in the garden, the response must be "no, my poor deprived son. I must finish my fiscal analysis spreadsheets."
The Perfect Driver
Perfect drivers know that they're perfect. They don't speed (much), they don't do too much in the way of showing off on the roads, and they're very aware of their fuel economy and vehicle maintenance. Their only problem is that this makes them painfully aware of the shortcomings of every other driver on the road. Do your best not to be a passenger of this kind of driver, as you will quickly tire of the pitying and weary sighs emitted every time another car creeps too close, or stays in the wrong lane for a microsecond too long.
The Mercy Dash Driver
I wasn't aware that there were so many pregnant/grievously wounded/horribly infectious people in the UK outside the range of the ambulance service, but I suppose there must be. How else can we account for the vast numbers of drivers who have no option but to carve a further half second off their journey time by cutting you up on the motorway, tailgating to within an inch on a country road, and tearing towards green traffic lights in a do-or-die attempt to get through before they turn red? Or perhaps they know something we don't. Maybe the lights are never going to turn green again. You just never know.
The Driver Who Does Know There's A War On
Although there's no age limit for this kind of driver, a suspiciously high percentage of them learned to drive back when rationing was still in force. As such, they feel very uncomfortable using too much of anything, and this includes the road. If they find themselves in the middle lane of the motorway, they will stay there until the Apocalypse, if necessary. No point in using the whole road, is there? That's just greedy.
The Grateful Driver
On the other hand, some drivers are just so thankful to the road designers (or maybe they are the road designers) that they feel they have to use every single feature of the carriageway on every journey. These are the people you'll see changing lanes every 10 seconds in a heavy queue. Don't be angry at them - they're just trying not to insult the people who've made such a nice road for them.
The Driver Who Claims He Likes His Car To Be "Pimped" But Doesn't Apparently Know What It Is That Pimps Actually Do
My goodness, I do like your car. Are those shiny chrome rims on your wheels? And blue neon lights on the underside? Oh, and the sound system. Those speakers...didn't I see those onstage at The Who's last gig? Hmm. I see you've made the gearstick very twinkly as well...oh, sorry, "blinged". And the seats too, which must have taken the best part of an entire cow to cover. So how much are all these modifications worth? Really? And, tell me...how much did you spend on making sure no-one can simply break the window and nick the lot?
The Drunk Driver
Although thankfully a dwindling race, there's still far too many of this type around. The ones who "can handle a drink". The ones who "enjoy their food" (I'm looking at you, people who have half a bottle of wine with their lunch and think it won't affect them at all). Although you wouldn't think it, they actually have a lot in common with the above-mentioned Office-On-Wheels driver, in that they do something that they think won't affect them much because they're used to it. Four times greater chance of an accident, guys. Deal with it. Still, this type of driver isn't as bad as they come. For that, we must enter the lair of...
The Entitled Driver
OK, here we go. This type is, hands down, the most objectionable type of driver you will ever encounter. These are the people who think that, because they paid for their car, the fuel and the road tax, they therefore have a divine right to the road that no-one, no-one, is allowed to infringe. This is the kind of driver you'll find ranting about being caught by a speed camera and blandly asserting that "they're just there to make money". They're definitely the kind who believe that they are the sole effective judge of a safe speed on the road, regardless of the posted speed limit. (Don't believe me? Read some of the...interesting...articles on Safe Speed.) And these are also the type of drivers who treat motorcyclists, cyclists, horse riders and...well, actually, everyone except themselves...as second class road citizens, and will think nothing of roaring straight past them at top speed, regardless of safety. Stay as far away as possible.
Misc.
Everyone else. Oh, you're in this category? Really? Are you sure?
Friday, 24 August 2007
Picture of the Week: #30
[taken during week running from 23/07 to 29/07]
Another Northumberland picture, but this is the last one - then we're back into the wilds of Essex and getting close to catching up. This photo was taken from the top of Linhope Spout, a waterfall that (rather uncharacteristically for the English countryside) tumbles quite a long way down a small valley in the hills. It's a fairly dramatic sight in itself, and this is helped by the fact that it's relatively inaccessible - if you want to get there you have to drive for miles along farm roads, then walk about 2 more miles.
There's really quite a lot of things like this - entirely unexpected, yet very exciting things - hidden around the countryside. Whether it's a waterfall, a prehistoric cave, a burial ground or just a stunning view, you'll frequently find something on the OS map that turns your assumptions of what the countryside should be like on its head. I do enjoy travelling outside this country too - whenever I manage to do so, that is - but really, there's such a lot that you can do while staying right here I'm not sure why so few people do so.
Tuesday, 7 August 2007
Picture of the Week: #28
[taken during week running from 9/07 to 15/07]
Same photographer, different holiday...we're now in Northumberland on the Grand Tour of Catching Up With Photos, and what better way to celebrate the wonder that is Northumberland than with...a large lump of rock?
Ah, but not just any lump of rock. For this, you see, is a cup and ring marked stone. To paraphrase the Wikipedia article I just linked you to (which seems to be based largely on the terrifyingly detailed work done by one Stan Beckensall), these are various...well, large lumps of rock...with a whole bunch of prehistoric carvings on them. No-one has the faintest idea who made them, or for what purpose, or indeed precisely when - Bronze Age is about as close as most people seem to be able to get. This does make one wonder quite how the illustrious Mr. Beckensall has managed to spin the subject out into multiple books without descending into dramatised accounts of druids and so forth. For all I know, that's precisely what he has done.
Beckensall aside, the reason these rocks hold a special place in the hearts of my family is that this is the first time we've ever found one. This state of affairs is not for lack of effort on our part. We've been to Northumberland twice before, and I think both times we've seen the said lumps of rock labelled on the OS map (you can see some of them here if you're really interested) - however, neither of those times did our long searches through waist-deep damp bracken on the sides of gloomy windswept hills ever yield anything that looked remotely cup-and-ring shaped. This time, though, we went prepared, equipped both with a set of walkie-talkies and a printout from this very helpful, not to say obsessive, website.
And find them we did, allowing me to bring you the above photo. I sincerely hope that all those who see this will be grateful that they now also know nothing about why some Bronze Age vandal felt the need to carve circular grooves into a perfectly harmless piece if rock. It's a valuable service that I perform here.
Monday, 6 August 2007
Only vaguely connected, but: Why on earth would anyone name their daughter "Paris Hilton"?
If I were to tell you that there existed an industry in the vast majority of cultures around the globe, one which involved providing temporary homes for people for amounts of time ranging from a few hours up to months or years, and which is entirely dependent on these people being away from their families and friends for reasons which do not involve financial hardship, I suspect you'd probably either laugh at me or at least give me a very strange look. If you knew me, though, you'd probably think I was asking you a trick question, so you'd probably think about it a bit more and realise that I was talking about the hotel industry.
As with so many other aspects of life, it's easy not to notice quite how weird the concept of a hotel really is. It's become less so in relatively recent times - in an age when you can be in almost any city on Earth within 24 hours, it's entirely normal to be away from home for long periods, and since the appearance of the species Businessmanus Jawdroppinglywealthi it's understandable that establishments can charge amounts that would make Solomon weep. But why should hotels (or inns, at any rate) have likewise appeared in mediaeval times, when hardly anyone lived more than a couple of miles away from the rest of their family and acquaintances? How about the inns mentioned in the Bible? Did they really subsist on the trade caused by the odd donkey salesman passing through? The universality of this concept is one that I find really puzzling.
Being one of the huge number of former students without an income, any time I need to experience the services of these establishments I'm forced to go down to the rather cheaper end of the spectrum. In the UK, this largely doesn't exist, but luckily if you go abroad there are more options. For example, the photo below is of Hotel F1 in the town of Beaune in the middle of France.
It's certainly not a beautiful building, and that impression is strengthened once you see the rooms - the overall impression I got was of staying inside an oversized Lego brick. All of the rooms were identical, holding a double bed with a single bunk over the top, a tiny desk in one corner, a TV suspended above it, and a sink in another corner. Toilets and showers were communal, and there weren't very many.
On the positive side, the whole place was kept very clean, and it was incredibly cheap - 27 Euros per room per night, regardless of how many people were in each room. (Within reason.) For real cheapness, though, going to Africa is the way forward. I think the cheapest establishment I found in Uganda when travelling alone cost 7,000 Ugandan shillings a night. In British terms, that's £2. And yet, a certain grubbiness and lack of TV (or any other technology) aside, the facilities were very similar to the Beaune offering.
I think this means that there's some kind of sliding scale of hotels. Within the middle band, paying noticeably more results in noticeably better facilities - maybe by measuring the number and value of complimentary items you get, you could produce some kind of linear relationship. Get near the top of the scale, though, and you'll end up paying vast amounts of money without anything improving all that much. There's only so much training you can give hotel staff - no matter how much emphasis you put on the customer's wellbeing, you just can't turn them into soulless automatons. (I'll resist the temptation to make a joke about McDonald's employees.) Likewise, things like solid silver swimming pools and chlorinated cutlery don't really add to the enjoyment as much as their cost suggests.
Similarly, down at the bottom end of the scale you get limited by the law. Given that you simply cannot put your customers on a bare patch of dirt for the night and charge them for it, there exists a lowest level of service possible, and no matter how little money you pay, you will receive that level. And, given that hotels, like any other business, will set their prices according to what people can pay, all you need do is go somewhere with almost no wealth in the general population, and you'll be paying rock bottom prices for the basic comfort level.
The fact that some people feel that they can't bear a level of comfort quite this low is, I think, their problem...
Friday, 3 August 2007
Picture of the Week: #27
[taken during week running from 2/07 to 8/07]
We're still in France for this retrospective Picture of the Week, but not in Ampus - this one was taken in the town of Grasse, right down by the south coast. The same lazy atmosphere as is experienced in the small villages can be found in the big towns of the south of France, just to a lesser extent. This is probably because the towns have most of the main industries, but can also attract tourism - there's just more going on.
The architecture, though, doesn't reflect that so much. Everywhere you go in Grasse, the buildings tower up to 3 or more stories, the alleyways between them are thin enough to give a claustrophe nightmares for a month, and wooden shutters cover every window - all of these are ways of keeping the streets and houses cool in the ever-present heat. Escaping from the weather, in fact, is such a major concern that it's a wonder anyone ever comes outside. There are ways of getting around that, of course, such as the drinking water fountains (when was the last time you saw one of those on a street in the UK that was actually working?) and the beautiful tree-lined avenues. It's a lovely place to spend an afternoon, and the major industry of the town - perfume manufacture - means that it smells amazing too.
Wednesday, 1 August 2007
Picture of the Week: #26
[taken in week running from 25/06 to 1/07]
For the first of my PotWs...from the past...(cue Twilight Zone theme)...we're in France. Specifically, Provence, and even more specifically, a little village called Ampus, perched on the side of a hill. It's so much your typical south-of-France village that it's just ridiculous - sandy-coloured buildings with terracotta-coloured roofs, wooden louvred shutters on all the windows, and a very strong overall atmosphere of contentment and ease.
No-one runs around here, it's too hot. Neither does anyone seem to get annoyed at anything. Or spend much time doing anything during daylight hours, come to think of it. This is the land where the siesta is king, where the church clock (and I swear I am not making this up) chimes each hour twice, with a break of a couple of minutes in between, presumably to confirm what you thought you heard earlier when it woke you up from your pleasant afternoon snooze.
It's not a place for bright young things with boundless energy and great plans...but then, why would you want that anyway?
Monday, 11 June 2007
Apparently, the "ø" symbol is pronounced "ur"
This car may appear to be entirely innocent. See it sitting there, not doing any harm. Why, you might almost want to get in and drive off. But that would be a grave and terrible mistake. For this car...this car is Dethwägøn.
We're back in Jersey once again with this post (probably for the last time, unless I suddenly remember something vastly important that I feel I must relate), to talk about cars. In Jersey, you see, the automotive laws work differently to in the UK. Specifically, there is no MOT test, meaning that it is perfectly legal to run cars until they drop dead of exhaustion - and, given that this means that cars that could not possibly pass an MOT in the UK can be sold and registered freely on the island, there's quite a few cars like our Wägøn.
This particular car really does deserve its heavy metal accents, as it is surely one of the most effective ways ever devised of confronting yourself with the horrific substance of much of the metal genre - you know, death, terrible injuries, diseases, everything like that. The list of things that were going wrong with it would probably be impossible to definitively set down, as it seemed to be gaining more with every passing minute, but there were a few that were particularly worthy of note.
First, of the fuel inserted into the engine, probably about half actually got burnt in the pistons. The rest, happily vaporised and floating through the air, eventually made its way either into the lungs of the passengers or into the huge cloud of black smoke left hanging in the air every time the engine tried to work remotely hard. This did mean that when driving across the island, the car following us in the large family convoy didn't have any difficulty knowing which way we'd turned, but on the other hand they did have a bit of problem with the quality of the air we left them. We weren't quite sure by the end of the journey whether the hilarity in the car was due to the inherent humour of the situation, and how much was due to excessive carbon monoxide levels.
The second major problem with the Wägøn was that it had quite a bit of difficulty with starting. Well, that's not quite true. The engine started OK - the problem was that we had to do it rather a lot, as every junction, traffic light and slow-moving car ahead of the Wägøn caused it to die pathetically. Due to the above-mentioned clouds of black smoke, pushing the engine at all hard, which was what we had to do when restarting, was to be avoided - we therefore had to take pretty much every possible precaution against having to stop, even for the shortest moment.
This strategy might have worked, had we been located anywhere other than a tiny island with little twisty roads and hills. Our only actions in this regard ended up being frantic hand signals to the car driving in front of us in the convoy - for some reason, manically waving your hands backwards and forwards while bellowing "FASTER! NEED TO GO FASTER!" seems to be an internationally-recognised signal. There was one other practical effect of our inability to stop, but this one was only seen once, in a large car park from which our convoy was just about to depart. The Wägøn was running, and we were fairly dubious about the prospect of trying to start the engine if it failed us again. So in we piled, and then proceeded to drive round and round the car park, shouting through the windows to the other members of the convoy to try and determine where we were supposed to be going next. What the poor patrons of the restaurant whose car park it was must have thought, I can only imagine.
Convoy driving has its own little quirks at the best of time, which are compounded if the vehicles have rather different abilities. We were certain, for example, that if we took the Wägøn down certain hills, we'd never get it back to the top - this frequently necessitated very creative route-finding. The communication between the cars had similar shortcomings, such that there was one point at which we turned one way, found that the car in front of us had stopped for petrol, and turned round and came back. At this point we misunderstood their cheery waves for driving directions, so we turned round again. This time, as we came past the petrol station again, the hand signals definitely meant "wrong way", necessitating another three-point turn (during which the engine, predictably, died again), and another trip along the same strip of road. Whether the petrol station's proprietor had seen us merrily sailing past his establishment four times in as many minutes is something that we shall sadly never know. We certainly didn't see him when we went past yet again, roughly three minutes later.
So, what can we learn from this experience? Well, first (and pretty obviously), no matter how much we moan about it, the MOT test is a very good idea. Secondly, we now know not to drive in convoy if it can possibly be avoided. And lastly, we know that, even if it is dangerously hilarious, you do not try to tame the Dethwägøn.
Saturday, 9 June 2007
Unrealistic Life Ambitions, No. 153: Get an actual, physical valley renamed "The Uncanny Valley"
There's a concept in robotics known as the "Uncanny Valley", which basically states that as humanoid robots get more and more realistic, people will become more and more comfortable with their presence - right up until the point where they are almost perfect. At that point, they are near enough to being human to make it seem like they actually are human, but...slightly "off" in some way. It's this that's supposed to be so uncanny, the feeling that although things seem almost normal, there is something very subtly but very deeply wrong. I think that's been reached in a few cases (see this video for an example of AAAGH GOOD GRIEF IT'S ALIVE), but perhaps more interestingly, the same principle is also applicable to other situations.
The experience of visiting another place, another culture, is one that can often qualify as "uncanny". The only places outside the UK that I've visited for more than a day at a time definitely count, these being Uganda (a former British colony, where everyone drives on the left, the road signs are the same as in the UK, and almost everyone in towns speaks English) and Jersey, where the most obvious cultural ties are to the UK, but things are still...very slightly odd.
The most obvious way you'll see the difference if you visit is in the amount of influence France has had on the island. Being so much nearer to France than to the UK mainland (the French coast is clearly visible from a number of around the island, whereas I don't think England is at all), it's not at all unusual for street names, castle names and geographical features to have French names, or sometimes names in the closely-related dialect of Jèrriais. Less obviously, but arguably more importantly, Jersey Legal French is the official language of legislation and so on, meaning that buying a house on the island involves negotiating in a completely different language to the one that you're used to. Some of the little twisting lanes in the villages even look like they're in France - and yet, everyone's speaking English, the signs are in English, and the general culture is undoubtedly that of Middle England, just with a dash of extra sunshine.
The sunshine, in fact, is another oddity. Being so far south (about 100 miles south of the UK mainland), the climate is generally much more pleasant than what we're used to over here, and your shadow is noticeably smaller. It's also much easier to get sunburnt - I'm still a bit pink, and I was there a whole 2 weeks ago now. But because the sea is always so close, the climate is variable enough that, just as in the UK, the weather is a major topic of conversation, as it can turn horrible very quickly.
The fact that the island is so small - nine miles by five, meaning that it is sadly far too tiny to put the whole world on it - has more effects than just on the weather. Despite the strict speed limits and tiny twisty roads (and often heavy traffic), it is still perfectly possible to get from one side of the island to the other in under half an hour, meaning that all of the kinds of terrain present, beach, cliffs, fields, small hills and towns, are crammed in right next to each other. The ability to walk out of a town and suddenly be in rural countryside, with seagulls wheeling overhead, is downright weird.
The last aspect of out-of-key-ness that you'll find on Jersey, and possibly the msot disturbing one, is the quiet. The island's status as a tax haven means that the population demographics are skewed towards the richer end of the spectrum, and that in turn means that quite a lot of the property is owned by the kind of person who actually lives in, say, the Algarve, and jets in occasionally to check how their cash is getting along. The effect of this is to make the villages into very well-kept and very smart ghost towns - you can walk along the road, with nothing but the odd shiny 4x4 swishing by, and see only other tourists pottering about. In its own way, it's a little sinister. You half expect to see Hercule Poirot strolling down the road, ready to interview the dysfunctional group of suspects who have gathered in the drawing room to discover who has committed the terrifying, gruesome murder. Meanwhile, just down the road, St. Helier (the only town of any note) is pretty much like any other town in the UK.
Jersey's a lovely place, in its own way, but it really is odd. It's not quite Britain, but it's not remotely France - it's just a bit otherworldly, almost outside the normal rules of time and space. It's really not at all surprising that it's a popular tourist destination...but I do find it odd that people from the UK do frequently end up settling there. You'd have thought that they would have had enough weirdness with the state of their home country, really.
Sunday, 3 June 2007
Picture of the Week: #22
Things are a little hectic down my way at the moment - final exams are just around the corner, and any time that I don't spend revising is generally spent far too tired to be doing much else. I'm therefore going to have to mine last weekend's trip to Jersey for a little more material (more will follow, believe me...), by including this picture that I took from the plane on the way home.
If I remember correctly, that's Brighton over in the distance. It's strange, really, that even so close to a fairly large city, the most immediately obvious feature of the landscape is acre upon acre of green fields. You'd never believe that the UK was one of the most crowded countries in the world just to look at it, but in pure population density terms that really is the case. Looks like we've got quite a bit of space left, though.
A few notes for the more technically-inclined: yes, the wing is supposed to be at that angle, as the plane was banking quite sharply when I took the photo. And it is, indeed, legal and apparently safe to take a camera on a plane, despite the fact that I'm sure I could do rather more damage with bits of glass and electronics than I could with a bottle of water. Lastly, I've played around on Photoshop quite a lot to get the colours so bright - it looked rather more drab originally. If you want to see an even more striking result of my experimentation, go behind the cut...
Tuesday, 22 May 2007
By the time you've finished reading this, you may as well have just got out and walked anyway
It looks from the news as though there's going to be a set of pilot schemes set up in the near future, in order to test the viability of by-the-mile road pricing. This is a plan that has been controversial to say the very least - lots of people seem to be regarding it as little more than a thinly-veiled attempt to wring more money out of motorists, and it inspired an enormous petition to Downing Street back in February. As it happens, I did sign that petition, and I did get an email from Mr Blair (or "me mate Tony", as I think I should refer to him - after all, he did email me...)
The weird thing is that today's news story, although it does mention the vast opposition to the road pricing plan, doesn't make much mention of the petition's first objection to the plan, which was that road pricing would involve satellite tracking of every single car so that the system could tell which roads they'd been on. That was definitely my main objection to it, and it looks like it was much the same for many others, but now it seems that the opposition to road pricing is being characterised by people who simply don't like the idea of paying more to drive.
I may as well put my cards on the table immediately as regards this issue - driving around is, regardless of what motorists will tell you, a dangerous, noisy and polluting activity. Within, the UK, 3,201 people died in road accidents in 2005, of whom only 52% were in a car at the time. To put that in perspective, it's an average of over 8 people per day, or one every 3 hours. Cars are responsible for 15% of CO2 emissions within the EU, and car ownership has been steadily increasing throughout the '90s to the point where there are nearly 500 cars per 1000 people. Unless things change, and soon, the roads are going to become even more congested and dangerous - and making driving cost more, provided that money goes back into developing public transport, is a good, market-led way of trying to avoid that.
(I'm aware that there are people for whom driving is the only option - those living right out in the sticks, or little old ladies without any other way of getting around. I'm also aware that it is not impossible to work out discounts and exemptions for special cases. It worked with the London congestion charge.)
Anyway, if it's a good idea to raise the cost of driving, why is it a bad idea to introduce road pricing? After all, surely that's a fairer way of doing it than simply using road tax - it means that those who don't drive much don't have to pay so much. And indeed, I would be fully in favour of road pricing schemes, if only it weren't for the extremely Orwellian concept of every car being satellite-tracked everywhere it goes. This is an incredibly bad idea on pretty much every level. First, the practicalities would be difficult. Would the car be allowed to move unless the tracking box had a satellite fix? Given that GPS units frequently take a minute to get going, or more in difficult terrain, immobilisation this will frustrate drivers who aren't used to having to boot up their cars. How about people who use an underground car park, making it impossible to get a satellite fix? The alternative is to let the car move without the tracker working - but how far? Would it suddenly die half way down the street if it wasn't sure where it was? More to the point, having a critical piece of kit being run by a computer is never a particularly good idea, and there's no such thing as a mechanical backup for a GPS system. (Unless you're planning on having a bloke with an Ordnance Survey map and a megaphone following everyone around.)
The cost is another issue. Satellite technology has got a lot cheaper recently, but a decent consumer-level navigation unit will still cost you over £100. And fitting these to what must be getting close to 30 million vehicles would not come cheap. What's more, the GPS system itself is not cheap to maintain ($750m per year, according to Wikipedia), so what's to stop the US military from charging as much as it likes, once this enormous and guaranteed market opens up?
By far the most important problem with a satellite tracking system, though, is that too much information is generated. In order for the Department for Transport to successfully charge everyone for their road usage, it will need to know which roads people have been on, and when. The implications for this - that the government instantly knows exactly where all of its citizens are (assuming that they drive), and where they have been for goodness knows how long - is simply terrifying. I've heard the argument advanced that this isn't a problem, because those who haven't been engaging in illegal activity have nothing to fear. However, even if you do trust the current government not to do horrible things with this information (for the record, I actually probably do), that's not the question that you should be asking. What you should ask is, "Do I trust the next government with this information? What about the one after that? And the next?" Imagine a situation where a future government, after, say, a major terrorist incident, decides that it needs to seriously clamp down on possible dissent. Do you want them to be able to look up in their database and find out that you drove to a "Troops Out Of Iraq" demonstration 15 years previously? As you can see, there are some very good reasons not to make this kind of information available.
How, then, might a road pricing scheme work without this kind of threat? There's one very simple solution: make the data flow the other way. That's pretty much all you need to change. If, instead of information flowing from the cars to the system, the system told the car what it had just gone past, then privacy problems disappear. How would this work in practice? Well, consider what would happen if every car was fitted with a low-power radio transceiver, with a maximum range of about 20m. The technology for these is already pretty much commonplace, and therefore cheap, and it wouldn't be difficult to fit them all if it became part of the MOT to have one installed. Radio beacons could then be fitted along the nation's roads - for example, every time a speed limit sign was replaced or maintained, a beacon could be added to it. These beacons would broadcast a code for the appropriate type of road; then, whenever a car passed one, the onboard transceiver could record the road type and add an appropriate charge to a running total. At no point would data have to flow to the beacons.
Paying one's charge would likewise be fairly easy to do - if every Post Office, or better yet every petrol station, was equipped with its own transceiver then it would be trivial to make the car's onboard transceiver transmit a unique code, perhaps based on the car's numberplate and current date and time, and the total to be paid whenever a button was pressed. Paying this at the petrol station would authorise a similar code to be broadcast to the car to reset the total; instead of using an immobiliser, it could also be a requirement of the MOT to pay one's total. Notice that no information about where the car has been is ever sent to the central system, only the amount paid.
As you can probably tell, I've put rather more thought into this than is strictly necessary. I do think, though, that with the encroaching invasions of privacy in this culture, it is very much worth looking into alternative ways of dealing with problems that minimise concerns from the outset. The bottom line is that we all need to drive less - if we can manage to do that without Gordon Brown watching our every move, I'd be much happier.
Wednesday, 14 March 2007
But it does look very pretty...
The other day, I was heading up to London (en route to Wales), so I did the usual student thing of taking a stupidly cheap coach. The coach in this case was the Oxford Tube, which is really rather good - £7 student return after 3pm, which is, bizarrely, rather cheaper than buying a single - although it does take quite a while. This isn't a problem, as I can listen to music or audiobooks (of which there are some very entertaining free ones available - try How To Succeed In Evil in bite-sized podcast form).
What's more, the route takes you along the M40. Motorways as a whole aren't very pretty, but there's a couple of bits on this one - the cutting where you will always see at least a couple of red kites soaring overhead, for one - which do look really good. In this case, the sun was low in the sky, and as the coach came out of the low hills and started onto the plains, with more hills in the distance, beautiful farmland all around, and golden light streaming over everything and basically making the whole scene look like a postcard, I sighed inwardly and thought "That really is a beautiful sight."
Which was immediately followed by the thought that I always have in situations like that: "So why did they go and build a thwacking great motorway through the middle of it?"
