Its a pleasant way to kill time while awaiting the flight. If you don't want to buy something, nobody puts a gun to your head to make you - they couldn't get that past security and this isn't America.
Airport shopping malls strike me as universally seedy. You are literally forced to walk through them to get to your flight, usually along a winding route to maximise boredom. They benefit from tax avoidance by selling fags and booze (which are taxed highly for a reason, not just revenue) free of tax, resulting either in cut-price ways to kill yourself or obscene profit margins or both.
Otherwise, yes, they're fine.
Yes my blood boils as I am forced to meander through some obscene temple to overpriced and undertaxed consumer bullshit, under boiling hot lights and bombarded by the stink of some vile "fragrance" called Tart's Boudoir or something similar, before arriving at the waiting area which invariably has too few seats because so much space has been given over to hawking said consumer bullshit to all the basic leisureware morons at the airport. A good bookshop and somewhere to buy snacks, plug adaptors and tiny tubes of toothpaste is all you need. Everything else is just the monetisation of boredom, late capitalism's most profitable income stream.
It is possible to have a life and never go near an airport. Hunter gatherer communities manage this feat. So do some non- hunter gatherers in the UK. It helps save the planet too.
I rather like airports in general. They are archetypal liminal spaces. So are large railway terminals (and trains themselves for that matter). And ferry ports. But ferry ports are generally not very well appointed or pleasant.
Of all those, my ideal is a large railway terminus with a grand cafe with high ceilings where you can sit and daydream for an hour or so before the overnight express train pulls in. Followed by a very large hub airport with long travelators and the varied peoples of the world wandering about in it, or a smaller European airport with pleasant half-empty lounges like the Eventyr lounge in Copenhagen.
A railway station is infinitely preferable to an airport IMHO, as it usually has some nice Victorian architecture, much more space and fresh air, fewer aggressive attempts to rob you blind, and contains trains, the finest machines ever created. The ideal station is a little delapidated and broken, evoking romantic memories of a vanished age, and contains a grubby caff selling tea, crisps and unappetising sandwiches, with blue clouds of diesel smoke lingering under the canopy.
Numerous ideals are available. Adlestrop, or King's Cross, Rannoch, or ghosts like March. St Pancras with its sense that you can go from there to Vladivostock or Yerevan with a few changes
My favourite is not the terminus but the major intersection where there is activity all the time - literally every minute or two. Preston or Peterborough are good. Leeds is terminus and intersection, so is good too.
I like this conversation. I have often thought this - my favourite station in this regard is York. Which still retains an air of what it must have been like in rail's heyday.
Yes, York is great. The best fun with railways is when you have all day, nowhere you have to get to at any particular time and can train and people watch.
And think of all those people whose first experience of 'It's grim up north' is York Station followed by seeing Durham from the train in winter mist followed by crossing the Tyne into Newcastle. Though I live in north west not north east the memory still moves me.
The ECML gets almost uniformly beautiful from York onwards, with the best views probably on the stretch running up the Northumberland coast, followed by the bit between South Queensferry and Kirkcaldy.
Absolutely and it is vital that you are on the correct (ie right) side of the train as it passes through there and eg Berwick.
It's worth booking on LNER not the Trainline so you can choose your seats.
The thing that does my head in is split tickets which, unbelievably, are still at thing. Trainline is quite good at them (for an extra quid or so) while doing it on the operator's own website is slightly trickier.
I hadn't noticed (because I've never tried to do so) that you can't reserve seats there.
More 'there's nothing wrong with X, it's just that it hasn't been implemented properly yet' news.
When Dixie said last night the conference was a gift to Labour, they hadn't even Godwinned it!
Frseddie Hayward in his Staggers morning email:
'But this is the least of their worries. In his speech yesterday, Kruger railed against the following: paganism, the Bank of England, austerity, open borders, cheap credit, Gnosticism, lockdowns. It reminded me of a recent Reform UK rally, which I sketched over the weekend, where attendees associated finishing Brexit with everything from recycling to Yes Minister. I’m only being partly flippant when I call the “NatCon” conference a group therapy session. The speakers offloaded a deluge of gripes without offering coherent solutions. Even if they did, you don’t hear this list of problems and think, ah yes, the Conservative Party is the answer.'
More 'there's nothing wrong with X, it's just that it hasn't been implemented properly yet' news.
When Dixie said last night the conference was a gift to Labour, they hadn't even Godwinned it!
Frseddie Hayward in his Staggers morning email:
'But this is the least of their worries. In his speech yesterday, Kruger railed against the following: paganism, the Bank of England, austerity, open borders, cheap credit, Gnosticism, lockdowns. It reminded me of a recent Reform UK rally, which I sketched over the weekend, where attendees associated finishing Brexit with everything from recycling to Yes Minister. I’m only being partly flippant when I call the “NatCon” conference a group therapy session. The speakers offloaded a deluge of gripes without offering coherent solutions. Even if they did, you don’t hear this list of problems and think, ah yes, the Conservative Party is the answer.'
This morning on R4's Yesterday in Parliament there were Cons peers declaiming quite conclusively that "the people" voted explicitly to repeal EU laws.
Its a pleasant way to kill time while awaiting the flight. If you don't want to buy something, nobody puts a gun to your head to make you - they couldn't get that past security and this isn't America.
Airport shopping malls strike me as universally seedy. You are literally forced to walk through them to get to your flight, usually along a winding route to maximise boredom. They benefit from tax avoidance by selling fags and booze (which are taxed highly for a reason, not just revenue) free of tax, resulting either in cut-price ways to kill yourself or obscene profit margins or both.
Otherwise, yes, they're fine.
Yes my blood boils as I am forced to meander through some obscene temple to overpriced and undertaxed consumer bullshit, under boiling hot lights and bombarded by the stink of some vile "fragrance" called Tart's Boudoir or something similar, before arriving at the waiting area which invariably has too few seats because so much space has been given over to hawking said consumer bullshit to all the basic leisureware morons at the airport. A good bookshop and somewhere to buy snacks, plug adaptors and tiny tubes of toothpaste is all you need. Everything else is just the monetisation of boredom, late capitalism's most profitable income stream.
Agree. I hate it when the guys come out and force you to buy all that stuff. Then take you under duress to Sloane Street/Westfield and shove you into the Tag Heuer shop to buy a new watch.
Yes; it's all fantastically annoying if you let it annoy. The one virtue of it is that it also allows individuals to get on freely with their own thing and ignore it all.
It's a sort of global version of the honeypot theory of the Lake District. 96% of the people go to 5% of the territory, leaving most of the rest for the 4%. (Sunny Wednesday in June: 8 billion people at Ambleside, Keswick, Scafell, Helvellyn, Grasmere and Windermere; between Zero and 2 people admiring unique sheepfolds by Wiley Gill.)
Trump achieved very little in policy, but that's not really the point, I wouldn't say.
He's too incompetent to carry out much sustained policy, but he's a threat to political, institutional and electoral systems, and so in the end to democratic legitimacy.
Trump achieved very little directly - bar tax cuts for the rich, funded by a massive deficit, the consequences of which are coming home to roost now - but his nominations for the SCOTUS, driven by the conservative right, are having profound impacts on policy, and will likely do so for decades given the conservative majority there now and the ages of the justices.
It's worth noting that one of the reasons Trump achieved so little is because people like Tillerson, Mattis, Kelly, Sessions, even Barr, stopped him from "achieving" before it was too late, and thank God that they did.
More 'there's nothing wrong with X, it's just that it hasn't been implemented properly yet' news.
When Dixie said last night the conference was a gift to Labour, they hadn't even Godwinned it!
Frseddie Hayward in his Staggers morning email:
'But this is the least of their worries. In his speech yesterday, Kruger railed against the following: paganism, the Bank of England, austerity, open borders, cheap credit, Gnosticism, lockdowns. It reminded me of a recent Reform UK rally, which I sketched over the weekend, where attendees associated finishing Brexit with everything from recycling to Yes Minister. I’m only being partly flippant when I call the “NatCon” conference a group therapy session. The speakers offloaded a deluge of gripes without offering coherent solutions. Even if they did, you don’t hear this list of problems and think, ah yes, the Conservative Party is the answer.'
This morning on R4's Yesterday in Parliament there were Cons peers declaiming quite conclusively that "the people" voted explicitly to repeal EU laws.
Its a pleasant way to kill time while awaiting the flight. If you don't want to buy something, nobody puts a gun to your head to make you - they couldn't get that past security and this isn't America.
Airport shopping malls strike me as universally seedy. You are literally forced to walk through them to get to your flight, usually along a winding route to maximise boredom. They benefit from tax avoidance by selling fags and booze (which are taxed highly for a reason, not just revenue) free of tax, resulting either in cut-price ways to kill yourself or obscene profit margins or both.
Otherwise, yes, they're fine.
Yes my blood boils as I am forced to meander through some obscene temple to overpriced and undertaxed consumer bullshit, under boiling hot lights and bombarded by the stink of some vile "fragrance" called Tart's Boudoir or something similar, before arriving at the waiting area which invariably has too few seats because so much space has been given over to hawking said consumer bullshit to all the basic leisureware morons at the airport. A good bookshop and somewhere to buy snacks, plug adaptors and tiny tubes of toothpaste is all you need. Everything else is just the monetisation of boredom, late capitalism's most profitable income stream.
It is possible to have a life and never go near an airport. Hunter gatherer communities manage this feat. So do some non- hunter gatherers in the UK. It helps save the planet too.
I rather like airports in general. They are archetypal liminal spaces. So are large railway terminals (and trains themselves for that matter). And ferry ports. But ferry ports are generally not very well appointed or pleasant.
Of all those, my ideal is a large railway terminus with a grand cafe with high ceilings where you can sit and daydream for an hour or so before the overnight express train pulls in. Followed by a very large hub airport with long travelators and the varied peoples of the world wandering about in it, or a smaller European airport with pleasant half-empty lounges like the Eventyr lounge in Copenhagen.
A railway station is infinitely preferable to an airport IMHO, as it usually has some nice Victorian architecture, much more space and fresh air, fewer aggressive attempts to rob you blind, and contains trains, the finest machines ever created. The ideal station is a little delapidated and broken, evoking romantic memories of a vanished age, and contains a grubby caff selling tea, crisps and unappetising sandwiches, with blue clouds of diesel smoke lingering under the canopy.
Numerous ideals are available. Adlestrop, or King's Cross, Rannoch, or ghosts like March. St Pancras with its sense that you can go from there to Vladivostock or Yerevan with a few changes
My favourite is not the terminus but the major intersection where there is activity all the time - literally every minute or two. Preston or Peterborough are good. Leeds is terminus and intersection, so is good too.
I like this conversation. I have often thought this - my favourite station in this regard is York. Which still retains an air of what it must have been like in rail's heyday.
Yes, York is great. The best fun with railways is when you have all day, nowhere you have to get to at any particular time and can train and people watch.
And think of all those people whose first experience of 'It's grim up north' is York Station followed by seeing Durham from the train in winter mist followed by crossing the Tyne into Newcastle. Though I live in north west not north east the memory still moves me.
The ECML gets almost uniformly beautiful from York onwards, with the best views probably on the stretch running up the Northumberland coast, followed by the bit between South Queensferry and Kirkcaldy.
Absolutely and it is vital that you are on the correct (ie right) side of the train as it passes through there and eg Berwick.
More 'there's nothing wrong with X, it's just that it hasn't been implemented properly yet' news.
When Dixie said last night the conference was a gift to Labour, they hadn't even Godwinned it!
Frseddie Hayward in his Staggers morning email:
'But this is the least of their worries. In his speech yesterday, Kruger railed against the following: paganism, the Bank of England, austerity, open borders, cheap credit, Gnosticism, lockdowns. It reminded me of a recent Reform UK rally, which I sketched over the weekend, where attendees associated finishing Brexit with everything from recycling to Yes Minister. I’m only being partly flippant when I call the “NatCon” conference a group therapy session. The speakers offloaded a deluge of gripes without offering coherent solutions. Even if they did, you don’t hear this list of problems and think, ah yes, the Conservative Party is the answer.'
This morning on R4's Yesterday in Parliament there were Cons peers declaiming quite conclusively that "the people" voted explicitly to repeal EU laws.
I hold no torch for Labour, and do not intend to vote, but the sooner this useless shower are out and have some time in the wilderness to get in touch with reality the better.
There is no enthusiasm for Labour, but there is also a desire to see the back of the Tories and the latter seems stronger than the former.
More 'there's nothing wrong with X, it's just that it hasn't been implemented properly yet' news.
When Dixie said last night the conference was a gift to Labour, they hadn't even Godwinned it!
Frseddie Hayward in his Staggers morning email:
'But this is the least of their worries. In his speech yesterday, Kruger railed against the following: paganism, the Bank of England, austerity, open borders, cheap credit, Gnosticism, lockdowns. It reminded me of a recent Reform UK rally, which I sketched over the weekend, where attendees associated finishing Brexit with everything from recycling to Yes Minister. I’m only being partly flippant when I call the “NatCon” conference a group therapy session. The speakers offloaded a deluge of gripes without offering coherent solutions. Even if they did, you don’t hear this list of problems and think, ah yes, the Conservative Party is the answer.'
This morning on R4's Yesterday in Parliament there were Cons peers declaiming quite conclusively that "the people" voted explicitly to repeal EU laws.
Its a pleasant way to kill time while awaiting the flight. If you don't want to buy something, nobody puts a gun to your head to make you - they couldn't get that past security and this isn't America.
Airport shopping malls strike me as universally seedy. You are literally forced to walk through them to get to your flight, usually along a winding route to maximise boredom. They benefit from tax avoidance by selling fags and booze (which are taxed highly for a reason, not just revenue) free of tax, resulting either in cut-price ways to kill yourself or obscene profit margins or both.
Otherwise, yes, they're fine.
Yes my blood boils as I am forced to meander through some obscene temple to overpriced and undertaxed consumer bullshit, under boiling hot lights and bombarded by the stink of some vile "fragrance" called Tart's Boudoir or something similar, before arriving at the waiting area which invariably has too few seats because so much space has been given over to hawking said consumer bullshit to all the basic leisureware morons at the airport. A good bookshop and somewhere to buy snacks, plug adaptors and tiny tubes of toothpaste is all you need. Everything else is just the monetisation of boredom, late capitalism's most profitable income stream.
It is possible to have a life and never go near an airport. Hunter gatherer communities manage this feat. So do some non- hunter gatherers in the UK. It helps save the planet too.
I rather like airports in general. They are archetypal liminal spaces. So are large railway terminals (and trains themselves for that matter). And ferry ports. But ferry ports are generally not very well appointed or pleasant.
Of all those, my ideal is a large railway terminus with a grand cafe with high ceilings where you can sit and daydream for an hour or so before the overnight express train pulls in. Followed by a very large hub airport with long travelators and the varied peoples of the world wandering about in it, or a smaller European airport with pleasant half-empty lounges like the Eventyr lounge in Copenhagen.
A railway station is infinitely preferable to an airport IMHO, as it usually has some nice Victorian architecture, much more space and fresh air, fewer aggressive attempts to rob you blind, and contains trains, the finest machines ever created. The ideal station is a little delapidated and broken, evoking romantic memories of a vanished age, and contains a grubby caff selling tea, crisps and unappetising sandwiches, with blue clouds of diesel smoke lingering under the canopy.
Numerous ideals are available. Adlestrop, or King's Cross, Rannoch, or ghosts like March. St Pancras with its sense that you can go from there to Vladivostock or Yerevan with a few changes
My favourite is not the terminus but the major intersection where there is activity all the time - literally every minute or two. Preston or Peterborough are good. Leeds is terminus and intersection, so is good too.
I like this conversation. I have often thought this - my favourite station in this regard is York. Which still retains an air of what it must have been like in rail's heyday.
Yes York is a beauty.
Great Malvern with its cast-iron flower column capitals; Stamford with its transport bookshop; and so on.
Once you could sit outside at Bournemouth Airport - admittedly in a cage like Guy the Gorilla to stop you escaping - and (if lucky) watch the heritage jets such as Meteor take off as one waited for one's plane. No idea if people can do that now.
You'd need that cage for those who'd had 5 or 6 Stellas.
TUD only for the weak lily livered wife beaters who cannot hold their drink
More 'there's nothing wrong with X, it's just that it hasn't been implemented properly yet' news.
When Dixie said last night the conference was a gift to Labour, they hadn't even Godwinned it!
Frseddie Hayward in his Staggers morning email:
'But this is the least of their worries. In his speech yesterday, Kruger railed against the following: paganism, the Bank of England, austerity, open borders, cheap credit, Gnosticism, lockdowns. It reminded me of a recent Reform UK rally, which I sketched over the weekend, where attendees associated finishing Brexit with everything from recycling to Yes Minister. I’m only being partly flippant when I call the “NatCon” conference a group therapy session. The speakers offloaded a deluge of gripes without offering coherent solutions. Even if they did, you don’t hear this list of problems and think, ah yes, the Conservative Party is the answer.'
This morning on R4's Yesterday in Parliament there were Cons peers declaiming quite conclusively that "the people" voted explicitly to repeal EU laws.
Eh? I don't remember that bit in the referendum?
Did you turn the question paper over?
At least 1066 and all That told the candidate not to answer more than one question at a time ...
Its a pleasant way to kill time while awaiting the flight. If you don't want to buy something, nobody puts a gun to your head to make you - they couldn't get that past security and this isn't America.
Airport shopping malls strike me as universally seedy. You are literally forced to walk through them to get to your flight, usually along a winding route to maximise boredom. They benefit from tax avoidance by selling fags and booze (which are taxed highly for a reason, not just revenue) free of tax, resulting either in cut-price ways to kill yourself or obscene profit margins or both.
Otherwise, yes, they're fine.
Yes my blood boils as I am forced to meander through some obscene temple to overpriced and undertaxed consumer bullshit, under boiling hot lights and bombarded by the stink of some vile "fragrance" called Tart's Boudoir or something similar, before arriving at the waiting area which invariably has too few seats because so much space has been given over to hawking said consumer bullshit to all the basic leisureware morons at the airport. A good bookshop and somewhere to buy snacks, plug adaptors and tiny tubes of toothpaste is all you need. Everything else is just the monetisation of boredom, late capitalism's most profitable income stream.
It is possible to have a life and never go near an airport. Hunter gatherer communities manage this feat. So do some non- hunter gatherers in the UK. It helps save the planet too.
I rather like airports in general. They are archetypal liminal spaces. So are large railway terminals (and trains themselves for that matter). And ferry ports. But ferry ports are generally not very well appointed or pleasant.
Of all those, my ideal is a large railway terminus with a grand cafe with high ceilings where you can sit and daydream for an hour or so before the overnight express train pulls in. Followed by a very large hub airport with long travelators and the varied peoples of the world wandering about in it, or a smaller European airport with pleasant half-empty lounges like the Eventyr lounge in Copenhagen.
A railway station is infinitely preferable to an airport IMHO, as it usually has some nice Victorian architecture, much more space and fresh air, fewer aggressive attempts to rob you blind, and contains trains, the finest machines ever created. The ideal station is a little delapidated and broken, evoking romantic memories of a vanished age, and contains a grubby caff selling tea, crisps and unappetising sandwiches, with blue clouds of diesel smoke lingering under the canopy.
Numerous ideals are available. Adlestrop, or King's Cross, Rannoch, or ghosts like March. St Pancras with its sense that you can go from there to Vladivostock or Yerevan with a few changes
My favourite is not the terminus but the major intersection where there is activity all the time - literally every minute or two. Preston or Peterborough are good. Leeds is terminus and intersection, so is good too.
I like this conversation. I have often thought this - my favourite station in this regard is York. Which still retains an air of what it must have been like in rail's heyday.
Yes, York is great. The best fun with railways is when you have all day, nowhere you have to get to at any particular time and can train and people watch.
And think of all those people whose first experience of 'It's grim up north' is York Station followed by seeing Durham from the train in winter mist followed by crossing the Tyne into Newcastle. Though I live in north west not north east the memory still moves me.
The ECML gets almost uniformly beautiful from York onwards, with the best views probably on the stretch running up the Northumberland coast, followed by the bit between South Queensferry and Kirkcaldy.
Even Darlo has a nice station.
The view of Durham, either way you go on the train, is spectacular. It is just magnificent. A truly beautiful place.
Until you go into the city centre and its all empty shops, aggressive begging and a bus stations redevelopment that is months overdue.
Its a pleasant way to kill time while awaiting the flight. If you don't want to buy something, nobody puts a gun to your head to make you - they couldn't get that past security and this isn't America.
Airport shopping malls strike me as universally seedy. You are literally forced to walk through them to get to your flight, usually along a winding route to maximise boredom. They benefit from tax avoidance by selling fags and booze (which are taxed highly for a reason, not just revenue) free of tax, resulting either in cut-price ways to kill yourself or obscene profit margins or both.
Otherwise, yes, they're fine.
Yes my blood boils as I am forced to meander through some obscene temple to overpriced and undertaxed consumer bullshit, under boiling hot lights and bombarded by the stink of some vile "fragrance" called Tart's Boudoir or something similar, before arriving at the waiting area which invariably has too few seats because so much space has been given over to hawking said consumer bullshit to all the basic leisureware morons at the airport. A good bookshop and somewhere to buy snacks, plug adaptors and tiny tubes of toothpaste is all you need. Everything else is just the monetisation of boredom, late capitalism's most profitable income stream.
It is possible to have a life and never go near an airport. Hunter gatherer communities manage this feat. So do some non- hunter gatherers in the UK. It helps save the planet too.
I rather like airports in general. They are archetypal liminal spaces. So are large railway terminals (and trains themselves for that matter). And ferry ports. But ferry ports are generally not very well appointed or pleasant.
Of all those, my ideal is a large railway terminus with a grand cafe with high ceilings where you can sit and daydream for an hour or so before the overnight express train pulls in. Followed by a very large hub airport with long travelators and the varied peoples of the world wandering about in it, or a smaller European airport with pleasant half-empty lounges like the Eventyr lounge in Copenhagen.
A railway station is infinitely preferable to an airport IMHO, as it usually has some nice Victorian architecture, much more space and fresh air, fewer aggressive attempts to rob you blind, and contains trains, the finest machines ever created. The ideal station is a little delapidated and broken, evoking romantic memories of a vanished age, and contains a grubby caff selling tea, crisps and unappetising sandwiches, with blue clouds of diesel smoke lingering under the canopy.
Numerous ideals are available. Adlestrop, or King's Cross, Rannoch, or ghosts like March. St Pancras with its sense that you can go from there to Vladivostock or Yerevan with a few changes
My favourite is not the terminus but the major intersection where there is activity all the time - literally every minute or two. Preston or Peterborough are good. Leeds is terminus and intersection, so is good too.
I like this conversation. I have often thought this - my favourite station in this regard is York. Which still retains an air of what it must have been like in rail's heyday.
Yes York is a beauty.
Great Malvern with its cast-iron flower column capitals; Stamford with its transport bookshop; and so on.
Once you could sit outside at Bournemouth Airport - admittedly in a cage like Guy the Gorilla to stop you escaping - and (if lucky) watch the heritage jets such as Meteor take off as one waited for one's plane. No idea if people can do that now.
You'd need that cage for those who'd had 5 or 6 Stellas.
TUD only for the weak lily livered wife beaters who cannot hold their drink
Didn't they drop their ABV content in response to the "wife beater" tag or is that just one of these urban myths ?
Trump achieved very little in policy, but that's not really the point, I wouldn't say.
He's too incompetent to carry out much sustained policy, but he's a threat to political, institutional and electoral systems, and so in the end to democratic legitimacy.
Trump achieved very little directly - bar tax cuts for the rich, funded by a massive deficit, the consequences of which are coming home to roost now - but his nominations for the SCOTUS, driven by the conservative right, are having profound impacts on policy, and will likely do so for decades given the conservative majority there now and the ages of the justices.
It's worth noting that one of the reasons Trump achieved so little is because people like Tillerson, Mattis, Kelly, Sessions, even Barr, stopped him from "achieving" before it was too late, and thank God that they did.
Yes. Don't expect him to make that mistake* again. Providing the GOP have about 53+ senators, he'll get his nominations ratified.
* On his terms. Every appointment will be made on the basis of personal loyalty to Trump.
Its a pleasant way to kill time while awaiting the flight. If you don't want to buy something, nobody puts a gun to your head to make you - they couldn't get that past security and this isn't America.
Airport shopping malls strike me as universally seedy. You are literally forced to walk through them to get to your flight, usually along a winding route to maximise boredom. They benefit from tax avoidance by selling fags and booze (which are taxed highly for a reason, not just revenue) free of tax, resulting either in cut-price ways to kill yourself or obscene profit margins or both.
Otherwise, yes, they're fine.
Yes my blood boils as I am forced to meander through some obscene temple to overpriced and undertaxed consumer bullshit, under boiling hot lights and bombarded by the stink of some vile "fragrance" called Tart's Boudoir or something similar, before arriving at the waiting area which invariably has too few seats because so much space has been given over to hawking said consumer bullshit to all the basic leisureware morons at the airport. A good bookshop and somewhere to buy snacks, plug adaptors and tiny tubes of toothpaste is all you need. Everything else is just the monetisation of boredom, late capitalism's most profitable income stream.
It's the price we pay for living in a free country. I've read reports of people visiting North Korea and saying how much they enjoyed the lack of things like shopping malls and adverts, even though they knew what sort of country it was.
The point is that anyone older than 45 remembers a time before late capitalism…
True and if they had any sense they would prefer today's version to the one 45 years ago.
I appreciate that the PB demographic is one that can afford to reminisce about there being no choice on the shelves (for poor people) or how wonderful it must be in North Korea without all those shops selling ghastly tat but in the real world capitalism develops in line with the majority of its constituents and people want that stuff.
Not refined people like you and me who find the whole "Duty Free" thing quite distasteful, but *those* people. They like it.
I don't mind there being shops as long as I am not forced to go into them*. And if people liked them as much as you claim presumably it wouldn't be necessary to force people to walk through them. * Sainsbury's is fine, I do the family shop every fortnight with no complaints.
I thought it was only "remoaners" who talked down Britain?
Anyone with a functioning nervous system can see that HS2 is a dismal infrastructure omnishambles, and that something has gone badly wrong in UK planning when much poorer countries are able to deliver these trains in half the time it takes us to decide NOT to build a new platform at Euston
Because we're British, we always quibble about the cost and the effect on the view from our windows.
So we end up here.
Actually, Manchester's Metro is quite extensive and privately (non-govt) funded. When the Blair/Brown Labour govt offered to help fund the extension it came with so many strings attached and conditions that Mancunians voted it down and the Metro raised private funding. Within a few years the metro tripled in size...
Manchester has trams - that share their tracks with cars.
Manchester doesn't have a metro in the traditional sense of single purpose tracks.
Well, it's a bit of a hybrid. But it's mostly (80%-ish?) a traditional Metro with singe purpose track.
But it's a tram in the bit (city centre) that really should be underground and where the real benefit would be felt..
Perhaps. But the underground/Metro trade off isn't as one sided as you might think.
Most trips actually go no further than the city centre. The need for fast trips across the city centre - which an underground might serve well - so I can get fast from south of the city to north of the city - is actually relatively small. Even in the city centre, trams don't get stuck in traffic: in almost all cases, the tram is on dedicated lines at street level. This is slower than a hypothetical underground line would be, but the delay is just caused by at-grade crossings - and trams tend to have priority here, so these delays are relatively minor. An underground train could also go more quickly, but given how close stations are to each other, this again is a small benefit (unless we remove stations). Consider also that if I were to get off the tram at a hypothetical St. Peter's Square underground station, I would be a good 90 seconds or so further from my destination than the existing St. Peter's Square tram stop due to the need to funnel up to street level. That time cost has to be offset against any time saving.
In conclusion, the advantages of putting Metrolink underground in central Manchester would be surprisingly modest. I'd take it, if it was offered, but it wouldn't be the massive step change you might imagine.
As against that, the costs of an underground railway in Manchester would also be less than you might think. We have the best rock in the country for tunneling here (Sherwood Sandstone - in common with much of Central and Northern England) - much easier for TBMs to make progress and much less work to shore up afterwards. Far, far easier than tunneling through the clays of London.
My proposal is that Metrolink stay at surface level - although there may be possible advantages for cut-and-covering the Piccadilly Gardens section where progress is particularly slow and station arrangements a tad sub-optimal. I would, however, like a heavy rail tunnel under Central Manchester to address the issues of Central Manchester capacity (originally to be addressed through widening the Castlefield Corridor, though this would now involve so much demolition that it would be as expensive as tunneling): a Manchester equivalent of the St. Pancras-Blackfriars route, and serving the same sort of middle-distance market - though a suburban market or an intercity market could also work. I would go underground south east of Piccadilly and have stops somewhere in Central Manchester, somewhere in Central Salford, and at Salford Quays. This would address the issue of how long it takes to get from one end to the other of the combined central Manchester/Salford/Salford Quays area (known as the regional centre) - the tram is currently quickest, but it's a slow old journey on the tram through Salford Quays, which is more like a bus - and also address the issue of the lack of Central Manchester capacity.
Even outside the city centre, the amount of Metrolink running on street is / looks to be not much - broadly a bit across Droylsden in the east, the odd junction crossing, bits in Oldham and Rochdale that deviate from the rail bed specifically to serve those centres. The rest is dedicated, and even on street a lot of separation is achieved.
The slowness at Salford Quays is more to do with a winding route that serves every nook than a lot of road sharing.
Yes, Metrolink is a bit of a curious hybrid. Some lines are basically suburban rail, some are essentially buses with delusions of grandeur, some fall midway between the two; and average speeds vary greatly across the network.
The one thing I'd change about Manchester trams is, in all seriousness, the horns. A Manchester tram, if it turned up.in Sodor, would experience intolerable bullying at the hands of Thomas and friends for the lame "poop" it issues as a warning. I couldn't work near any junction where there is a "sound horn" instruction for fear of eventually becoming a crazed rampager.
Yes, because to be frank, Thomas and Percy are a bit dickish. The Manchester trams would no doubt hang out with Edward. (For ages when I was growing up I assumed Percy was a girl and therefore Percy a girl's name, and I can't take the name seriously as a result. Not that I come across many Percys.)
But to be clear - you'd be rampaging because the poop is too polite?
I often think motoring could be made rather friendly if cars were fitted with two horns: a polite 'excuse me' and a 'you bloody idiot'. They always sound like the latter but in most cases are only meant as the former.
Its a pleasant way to kill time while awaiting the flight. If you don't want to buy something, nobody puts a gun to your head to make you - they couldn't get that past security and this isn't America.
Airport shopping malls strike me as universally seedy. You are literally forced to walk through them to get to your flight, usually along a winding route to maximise boredom. They benefit from tax avoidance by selling fags and booze (which are taxed highly for a reason, not just revenue) free of tax, resulting either in cut-price ways to kill yourself or obscene profit margins or both.
Otherwise, yes, they're fine.
Yes my blood boils as I am forced to meander through some obscene temple to overpriced and undertaxed consumer bullshit, under boiling hot lights and bombarded by the stink of some vile "fragrance" called Tart's Boudoir or something similar, before arriving at the waiting area which invariably has too few seats because so much space has been given over to hawking said consumer bullshit to all the basic leisureware morons at the airport. A good bookshop and somewhere to buy snacks, plug adaptors and tiny tubes of toothpaste is all you need. Everything else is just the monetisation of boredom, late capitalism's most profitable income stream.
It's the price we pay for living in a free country. I've read reports of people visiting North Korea and saying how much they enjoyed the lack of things like shopping malls and adverts, even though they knew what sort of country it was.
The point is that anyone older than 45 remembers a time before late capitalism…
True and if they had any sense they would prefer today's version to the one 45 years ago.
I appreciate that the PB demographic is one that can afford to reminisce about there being no choice on the shelves (for poor people) or how wonderful it must be in North Korea without all those shops selling ghastly tat but in the real world capitalism develops in line with the majority of its constituents and people want that stuff.
Not refined people like you and me who find the whole "Duty Free" thing quite distasteful, but *those* people. They like it.
Back in the day, Attlee took a very dim view of the first package holidays, organised by Vladimir Raitz, in 1948 in Sardinia. He was very concerned about middle class families (the working classes couldn't afford package holidays at that point) wasting their money on such fripperies.
Trump achieved very little in policy, but that's not really the point, I wouldn't say.
He's too incompetent to carry out much sustained policy, but he's a threat to political, institutional and electoral systems, and so in the end to democratic legitimacy.
Trump achieved very little directly - bar tax cuts for the rich, funded by a massive deficit, the consequences of which are coming home to roost now - but his nominations for the SCOTUS, driven by the conservative right, are having profound impacts on policy, and will likely do so for decades given the conservative majority there now and the ages of the justices.
It's worth noting that one of the reasons Trump achieved so little is because people like Tillerson, Mattis, Kelly, Sessions, even Barr, stopped him from "achieving" before it was too late, and thank God that they did.
The point of Trump wasn't really to achieve anything. It was a signal that something has gone badly wrong in the United States, directed at people who had their head in the sand about it, and who thought everything was fine because they personally were doing okay.
Its a pleasant way to kill time while awaiting the flight. If you don't want to buy something, nobody puts a gun to your head to make you - they couldn't get that past security and this isn't America.
Airport shopping malls strike me as universally seedy. You are literally forced to walk through them to get to your flight, usually along a winding route to maximise boredom. They benefit from tax avoidance by selling fags and booze (which are taxed highly for a reason, not just revenue) free of tax, resulting either in cut-price ways to kill yourself or obscene profit margins or both.
Otherwise, yes, they're fine.
Yes my blood boils as I am forced to meander through some obscene temple to overpriced and undertaxed consumer bullshit, under boiling hot lights and bombarded by the stink of some vile "fragrance" called Tart's Boudoir or something similar, before arriving at the waiting area which invariably has too few seats because so much space has been given over to hawking said consumer bullshit to all the basic leisureware morons at the airport. A good bookshop and somewhere to buy snacks, plug adaptors and tiny tubes of toothpaste is all you need. Everything else is just the monetisation of boredom, late capitalism's most profitable income stream.
It's the price we pay for living in a free country. I've read reports of people visiting North Korea and saying how much they enjoyed the lack of things like shopping malls and adverts, even though they knew what sort of country it was.
The point is that anyone older than 45 remembers a time before late capitalism…
True and if they had any sense they would prefer today's version to the one 45 years ago.
I appreciate that the PB demographic is one that can afford to reminisce about there being no choice on the shelves (for poor people) or how wonderful it must be in North Korea without all those shops selling ghastly tat but in the real world capitalism develops in line with the majority of its constituents and people want that stuff.
Not refined people like you and me who find the whole "Duty Free" thing quite distasteful, but *those* people. They like it.
I don't mind there being shops as long as I am not forced to go into them*. And if people liked them as much as you claim presumably it wouldn't be necessary to force people to walk through them. * Sainsbury's is fine, I do the family shop every fortnight with no complaints.
Luton Airport is pretty grotty, but Gatwick is quite splendid (including the shopping malls.)
I thought it was only "remoaners" who talked down Britain?
Anyone with a functioning nervous system can see that HS2 is a dismal infrastructure omnishambles, and that something has gone badly wrong in UK planning when much poorer countries are able to deliver these trains in half the time it takes us to decide NOT to build a new platform at Euston
Because we're British, we always quibble about the cost and the effect on the view from our windows.
So we end up here.
Actually, Manchester's Metro is quite extensive and privately (non-govt) funded. When the Blair/Brown Labour govt offered to help fund the extension it came with so many strings attached and conditions that Mancunians voted it down and the Metro raised private funding. Within a few years the metro tripled in size...
Manchester has trams - that share their tracks with cars.
Manchester doesn't have a metro in the traditional sense of single purpose tracks.
Well, it's a bit of a hybrid. But it's mostly (80%-ish?) a traditional Metro with singe purpose track.
But it's a tram in the bit (city centre) that really should be underground and where the real benefit would be felt..
Perhaps. But the underground/Metro trade off isn't as one sided as you might think.
Most trips actually go no further than the city centre. The need for fast trips across the city centre - which an underground might serve well - so I can get fast from south of the city to north of the city - is actually relatively small. Even in the city centre, trams don't get stuck in traffic: in almost all cases, the tram is on dedicated lines at street level. This is slower than a hypothetical underground line would be, but the delay is just caused by at-grade crossings - and trams tend to have priority here, so these delays are relatively minor. An underground train could also go more quickly, but given how close stations are to each other, this again is a small benefit (unless we remove stations). Consider also that if I were to get off the tram at a hypothetical St. Peter's Square underground station, I would be a good 90 seconds or so further from my destination than the existing St. Peter's Square tram stop due to the need to funnel up to street level. That time cost has to be offset against any time saving.
In conclusion, the advantages of putting Metrolink underground in central Manchester would be surprisingly modest. I'd take it, if it was offered, but it wouldn't be the massive step change you might imagine.
As against that, the costs of an underground railway in Manchester would also be less than you might think. We have the best rock in the country for tunneling here (Sherwood Sandstone - in common with much of Central and Northern England) - much easier for TBMs to make progress and much less work to shore up afterwards. Far, far easier than tunneling through the clays of London.
My proposal is that Metrolink stay at surface level - although there may be possible advantages for cut-and-covering the Piccadilly Gardens section where progress is particularly slow and station arrangements a tad sub-optimal. I would, however, like a heavy rail tunnel under Central Manchester to address the issues of Central Manchester capacity (originally to be addressed through widening the Castlefield Corridor, though this would now involve so much demolition that it would be as expensive as tunneling): a Manchester equivalent of the St. Pancras-Blackfriars route, and serving the same sort of middle-distance market - though a suburban market or an intercity market could also work. I would go underground south east of Piccadilly and have stops somewhere in Central Manchester, somewhere in Central Salford, and at Salford Quays. This would address the issue of how long it takes to get from one end to the other of the combined central Manchester/Salford/Salford Quays area (known as the regional centre) - the tram is currently quickest, but it's a slow old journey on the tram through Salford Quays, which is more like a bus - and also address the issue of the lack of Central Manchester capacity.
Even outside the city centre, the amount of Metrolink running on street is / looks to be not much - broadly a bit across Droylsden in the east, the odd junction crossing, bits in Oldham and Rochdale that deviate from the rail bed specifically to serve those centres. The rest is dedicated, and even on street a lot of separation is achieved.
The slowness at Salford Quays is more to do with a winding route that serves every nook than a lot of road sharing.
Yes, Metrolink is a bit of a curious hybrid. Some lines are basically suburban rail, some are essentially buses with delusions of grandeur, some fall midway between the two; and average speeds vary greatly across the network.
The one thing I'd change about Manchester trams is, in all seriousness, the horns. A Manchester tram, if it turned up.in Sodor, would experience intolerable bullying at the hands of Thomas and friends for the lame "poop" it issues as a warning. I couldn't work near any junction where there is a "sound horn" instruction for fear of eventually becoming a crazed rampager.
Yes, because to be frank, Thomas and Percy are a bit dickish. The Manchester trams would no doubt hang out with Edward. (For ages when I was growing up I assumed Percy was a girl and therefore Percy a girl's name, and I can't take the name seriously as a result. Not that I come across many Percys.)
But to be clear - you'd be rampaging because the poop is too polite?
I often think motoring could be made rather friendly if cars were fitted with two horns: a polite 'excuse me' and a 'you bloody idiot'. They always sound like the latter but in most cases are only meant as the former.
The horn is only there to be used as a polite excuse me. People who use it to say 'you bloody idiot' are only signalling that in fact they are the bloody idiot, or at least have not read the Highway Code. Probably impatient to get to the nearest Duty Free shop.
On topic, this For me WH2024 looks set to be the most boring one ever with the WH2020 nominees being the ones who fight it out next year.. assumes Trump will be the nominee.
I still think it quite likely he won't be.
It's become a bit of a niche view on PB but I agree. He's the frontrunner for the nomination right now but I can see quite a few scenarios where it doesn't end up that way.
I dream we get Trump running as an independent against a different Republican nominee, with so much down ballot disruption that the Dems take the presidency, the House and 60 seats in the Senate.
Why would he do that? And how?
I said it was a dream, not a prediction.
In the unlikely event that the Republican Party sees sense and dumps Trump, I can readily imagine Trump doing anything he can to attack the GOP, including running as a third-party candidate where he can.
Those places are few and far between. Most states now have sore-loser rules, where someone who enters a primary race is only allowed to compete in the general election under that party's banner.
I agree that he'd react with fury if he were dumped - but that again is another reason to think he won't be, if he's not actively prevented from running.
Indeed. The worst possible scenario for the Republicans is a vengeful Trump (which is why I hope it happens). The second worst scenario is probably Trump as the candidate.
Its a pleasant way to kill time while awaiting the flight. If you don't want to buy something, nobody puts a gun to your head to make you - they couldn't get that past security and this isn't America.
Airport shopping malls strike me as universally seedy. You are literally forced to walk through them to get to your flight, usually along a winding route to maximise boredom. They benefit from tax avoidance by selling fags and booze (which are taxed highly for a reason, not just revenue) free of tax, resulting either in cut-price ways to kill yourself or obscene profit margins or both.
Otherwise, yes, they're fine.
Yes my blood boils as I am forced to meander through some obscene temple to overpriced and undertaxed consumer bullshit, under boiling hot lights and bombarded by the stink of some vile "fragrance" called Tart's Boudoir or something similar, before arriving at the waiting area which invariably has too few seats because so much space has been given over to hawking said consumer bullshit to all the basic leisureware morons at the airport. A good bookshop and somewhere to buy snacks, plug adaptors and tiny tubes of toothpaste is all you need. Everything else is just the monetisation of boredom, late capitalism's most profitable income stream.
It is possible to have a life and never go near an airport. Hunter gatherer communities manage this feat. So do some non- hunter gatherers in the UK. It helps save the planet too.
I rather like airports in general. They are archetypal liminal spaces. So are large railway terminals (and trains themselves for that matter). And ferry ports. But ferry ports are generally not very well appointed or pleasant.
Of all those, my ideal is a large railway terminus with a grand cafe with high ceilings where you can sit and daydream for an hour or so before the overnight express train pulls in. Followed by a very large hub airport with long travelators and the varied peoples of the world wandering about in it, or a smaller European airport with pleasant half-empty lounges like the Eventyr lounge in Copenhagen.
A railway station is infinitely preferable to an airport IMHO, as it usually has some nice Victorian architecture, much more space and fresh air, fewer aggressive attempts to rob you blind, and contains trains, the finest machines ever created. The ideal station is a little delapidated and broken, evoking romantic memories of a vanished age, and contains a grubby caff selling tea, crisps and unappetising sandwiches, with blue clouds of diesel smoke lingering under the canopy.
Numerous ideals are available. Adlestrop, or King's Cross, Rannoch, or ghosts like March. St Pancras with its sense that you can go from there to Vladivostock or Yerevan with a few changes
My favourite is not the terminus but the major intersection where there is activity all the time - literally every minute or two. Preston or Peterborough are good. Leeds is terminus and intersection, so is good too.
I like this conversation. I have often thought this - my favourite station in this regard is York. Which still retains an air of what it must have been like in rail's heyday.
Yes, York is great. The best fun with railways is when you have all day, nowhere you have to get to at any particular time and can train and people watch.
And think of all those people whose first experience of 'It's grim up north' is York Station followed by seeing Durham from the train in winter mist followed by crossing the Tyne into Newcastle. Though I live in north west not north east the memory still moves me.
The ECML gets almost uniformly beautiful from York onwards, with the best views probably on the stretch running up the Northumberland coast, followed by the bit between South Queensferry and Kirkcaldy.
Absolutely and it is vital that you are on the correct (ie right) side of the train as it passes through there and eg Berwick.
It's worth booking on LNER not the Trainline so you can choose your seats.
The thing that does my head in is split tickets which, unbelievably, are still at thing. Trainline is quite good at them (for an extra quid or so) while doing it on the operator's own website is slightly trickier.
I hadn't noticed (because I've never tried to do so) that you can't reserve seats there.
I was reading this recently: apparently there are specialist websites:
Its a pleasant way to kill time while awaiting the flight. If you don't want to buy something, nobody puts a gun to your head to make you - they couldn't get that past security and this isn't America.
Airport shopping malls strike me as universally seedy. You are literally forced to walk through them to get to your flight, usually along a winding route to maximise boredom. They benefit from tax avoidance by selling fags and booze (which are taxed highly for a reason, not just revenue) free of tax, resulting either in cut-price ways to kill yourself or obscene profit margins or both.
Otherwise, yes, they're fine.
Yes my blood boils as I am forced to meander through some obscene temple to overpriced and undertaxed consumer bullshit, under boiling hot lights and bombarded by the stink of some vile "fragrance" called Tart's Boudoir or something similar, before arriving at the waiting area which invariably has too few seats because so much space has been given over to hawking said consumer bullshit to all the basic leisureware morons at the airport. A good bookshop and somewhere to buy snacks, plug adaptors and tiny tubes of toothpaste is all you need. Everything else is just the monetisation of boredom, late capitalism's most profitable income stream.
It is possible to have a life and never go near an airport. Hunter gatherer communities manage this feat. So do some non- hunter gatherers in the UK. It helps save the planet too.
I rather like airports in general. They are archetypal liminal spaces. So are large railway terminals (and trains themselves for that matter). And ferry ports. But ferry ports are generally not very well appointed or pleasant.
Of all those, my ideal is a large railway terminus with a grand cafe with high ceilings where you can sit and daydream for an hour or so before the overnight express train pulls in. Followed by a very large hub airport with long travelators and the varied peoples of the world wandering about in it, or a smaller European airport with pleasant half-empty lounges like the Eventyr lounge in Copenhagen.
A railway station is infinitely preferable to an airport IMHO, as it usually has some nice Victorian architecture, much more space and fresh air, fewer aggressive attempts to rob you blind, and contains trains, the finest machines ever created. The ideal station is a little delapidated and broken, evoking romantic memories of a vanished age, and contains a grubby caff selling tea, crisps and unappetising sandwiches, with blue clouds of diesel smoke lingering under the canopy.
Numerous ideals are available. Adlestrop, or King's Cross, Rannoch, or ghosts like March. St Pancras with its sense that you can go from there to Vladivostock or Yerevan with a few changes
My favourite is not the terminus but the major intersection where there is activity all the time - literally every minute or two. Preston or Peterborough are good. Leeds is terminus and intersection, so is good too.
I like this conversation. I have often thought this - my favourite station in this regard is York. Which still retains an air of what it must have been like in rail's heyday.
Yes York is a beauty.
Great Malvern with its cast-iron flower column capitals; Stamford with its transport bookshop; and so on.
Once you could sit outside at Bournemouth Airport - admittedly in a cage like Guy the Gorilla to stop you escaping - and (if lucky) watch the heritage jets such as Meteor take off as one waited for one's plane. No idea if people can do that now.
You'd need that cage for those who'd had 5 or 6 Stellas.
TUD only for the weak lily livered wife beaters who cannot hold their drink
Didn't they drop their ABV content in response to the "wife beater" tag or is that just one of these urban myths ?
Taz, it used to be 5% , I think it went to 4.8% and is now 4.6% so little difference. Any lower than that and it is getting close to being shandy.
Its a pleasant way to kill time while awaiting the flight. If you don't want to buy something, nobody puts a gun to your head to make you - they couldn't get that past security and this isn't America.
Airport shopping malls strike me as universally seedy. You are literally forced to walk through them to get to your flight, usually along a winding route to maximise boredom. They benefit from tax avoidance by selling fags and booze (which are taxed highly for a reason, not just revenue) free of tax, resulting either in cut-price ways to kill yourself or obscene profit margins or both.
Otherwise, yes, they're fine.
Yes my blood boils as I am forced to meander through some obscene temple to overpriced and undertaxed consumer bullshit, under boiling hot lights and bombarded by the stink of some vile "fragrance" called Tart's Boudoir or something similar, before arriving at the waiting area which invariably has too few seats because so much space has been given over to hawking said consumer bullshit to all the basic leisureware morons at the airport. A good bookshop and somewhere to buy snacks, plug adaptors and tiny tubes of toothpaste is all you need. Everything else is just the monetisation of boredom, late capitalism's most profitable income stream.
It's the price we pay for living in a free country. I've read reports of people visiting North Korea and saying how much they enjoyed the lack of things like shopping malls and adverts, even though they knew what sort of country it was.
The point is that anyone older than 45 remembers a time before late capitalism…
True and if they had any sense they would prefer today's version to the one 45 years ago.
I appreciate that the PB demographic is one that can afford to reminisce about there being no choice on the shelves (for poor people) or how wonderful it must be in North Korea without all those shops selling ghastly tat but in the real world capitalism develops in line with the majority of its constituents and people want that stuff.
Not refined people like you and me who find the whole "Duty Free" thing quite distasteful, but *those* people. They like it.
I don't mind there being shops as long as I am not forced to go into them*. And if people liked them as much as you claim presumably it wouldn't be necessary to force people to walk through them. * Sainsbury's is fine, I do the family shop every fortnight with no complaints.
You are really going to die in a ditch over a design feature of having the route to the departure lounges wind its way through the duty free?
I thought it was only "remoaners" who talked down Britain?
Anyone with a functioning nervous system can see that HS2 is a dismal infrastructure omnishambles, and that something has gone badly wrong in UK planning when much poorer countries are able to deliver these trains in half the time it takes us to decide NOT to build a new platform at Euston
Because we're British, we always quibble about the cost and the effect on the view from our windows.
So we end up here.
Actually, Manchester's Metro is quite extensive and privately (non-govt) funded. When the Blair/Brown Labour govt offered to help fund the extension it came with so many strings attached and conditions that Mancunians voted it down and the Metro raised private funding. Within a few years the metro tripled in size...
Manchester has trams - that share their tracks with cars.
Manchester doesn't have a metro in the traditional sense of single purpose tracks.
Well, it's a bit of a hybrid. But it's mostly (80%-ish?) a traditional Metro with singe purpose track.
But it's a tram in the bit (city centre) that really should be underground and where the real benefit would be felt..
Perhaps. But the underground/Metro trade off isn't as one sided as you might think.
Most trips actually go no further than the city centre. The need for fast trips across the city centre - which an underground might serve well - so I can get fast from south of the city to north of the city - is actually relatively small. Even in the city centre, trams don't get stuck in traffic: in almost all cases, the tram is on dedicated lines at street level. This is slower than a hypothetical underground line would be, but the delay is just caused by at-grade crossings - and trams tend to have priority here, so these delays are relatively minor. An underground train could also go more quickly, but given how close stations are to each other, this again is a small benefit (unless we remove stations). Consider also that if I were to get off the tram at a hypothetical St. Peter's Square underground station, I would be a good 90 seconds or so further from my destination than the existing St. Peter's Square tram stop due to the need to funnel up to street level. That time cost has to be offset against any time saving.
In conclusion, the advantages of putting Metrolink underground in central Manchester would be surprisingly modest. I'd take it, if it was offered, but it wouldn't be the massive step change you might imagine.
As against that, the costs of an underground railway in Manchester would also be less than you might think. We have the best rock in the country for tunneling here (Sherwood Sandstone - in common with much of Central and Northern England) - much easier for TBMs to make progress and much less work to shore up afterwards. Far, far easier than tunneling through the clays of London.
My proposal is that Metrolink stay at surface level - although there may be possible advantages for cut-and-covering the Piccadilly Gardens section where progress is particularly slow and station arrangements a tad sub-optimal. I would, however, like a heavy rail tunnel under Central Manchester to address the issues of Central Manchester capacity (originally to be addressed through widening the Castlefield Corridor, though this would now involve so much demolition that it would be as expensive as tunneling): a Manchester equivalent of the St. Pancras-Blackfriars route, and serving the same sort of middle-distance market - though a suburban market or an intercity market could also work. I would go underground south east of Piccadilly and have stops somewhere in Central Manchester, somewhere in Central Salford, and at Salford Quays. This would address the issue of how long it takes to get from one end to the other of the combined central Manchester/Salford/Salford Quays area (known as the regional centre) - the tram is currently quickest, but it's a slow old journey on the tram through Salford Quays, which is more like a bus - and also address the issue of the lack of Central Manchester capacity.
Even outside the city centre, the amount of Metrolink running on street is / looks to be not much - broadly a bit across Droylsden in the east, the odd junction crossing, bits in Oldham and Rochdale that deviate from the rail bed specifically to serve those centres. The rest is dedicated, and even on street a lot of separation is achieved.
The slowness at Salford Quays is more to do with a winding route that serves every nook than a lot of road sharing.
Yes, Metrolink is a bit of a curious hybrid. Some lines are basically suburban rail, some are essentially buses with delusions of grandeur, some fall midway between the two; and average speeds vary greatly across the network.
The one thing I'd change about Manchester trams is, in all seriousness, the horns. A Manchester tram, if it turned up.in Sodor, would experience intolerable bullying at the hands of Thomas and friends for the lame "poop" it issues as a warning. I couldn't work near any junction where there is a "sound horn" instruction for fear of eventually becoming a crazed rampager.
Yes, because to be frank, Thomas and Percy are a bit dickish. The Manchester trams would no doubt hang out with Edward. (For ages when I was growing up I assumed Percy was a girl and therefore Percy a girl's name, and I can't take the name seriously as a result. Not that I come across many Percys.)
But to be clear - you'd be rampaging because the poop is too polite?
I often think motoring could be made rather friendly if cars were fitted with two horns: a polite 'excuse me' and a 'you bloody idiot'. They always sound like the latter but in most cases are only meant as the former.
I suspect Toby, the tram engine, came to Sodor from the Wisbech and Upwell tramway. His character does not suit an aggressive toot, and his job includes keeping the peace with an officious policeman.
I thought it was only "remoaners" who talked down Britain?
Anyone with a functioning nervous system can see that HS2 is a dismal infrastructure omnishambles, and that something has gone badly wrong in UK planning when much poorer countries are able to deliver these trains in half the time it takes us to decide NOT to build a new platform at Euston
Because we're British, we always quibble about the cost and the effect on the view from our windows.
So we end up here.
Actually, Manchester's Metro is quite extensive and privately (non-govt) funded. When the Blair/Brown Labour govt offered to help fund the extension it came with so many strings attached and conditions that Mancunians voted it down and the Metro raised private funding. Within a few years the metro tripled in size...
Manchester has trams - that share their tracks with cars.
Manchester doesn't have a metro in the traditional sense of single purpose tracks.
Well, it's a bit of a hybrid. But it's mostly (80%-ish?) a traditional Metro with singe purpose track.
But it's a tram in the bit (city centre) that really should be underground and where the real benefit would be felt..
Perhaps. But the underground/Metro trade off isn't as one sided as you might think.
Most trips actually go no further than the city centre. The need for fast trips across the city centre - which an underground might serve well - so I can get fast from south of the city to north of the city - is actually relatively small. Even in the city centre, trams don't get stuck in traffic: in almost all cases, the tram is on dedicated lines at street level. This is slower than a hypothetical underground line would be, but the delay is just caused by at-grade crossings - and trams tend to have priority here, so these delays are relatively minor. An underground train could also go more quickly, but given how close stations are to each other, this again is a small benefit (unless we remove stations). Consider also that if I were to get off the tram at a hypothetical St. Peter's Square underground station, I would be a good 90 seconds or so further from my destination than the existing St. Peter's Square tram stop due to the need to funnel up to street level. That time cost has to be offset against any time saving.
In conclusion, the advantages of putting Metrolink underground in central Manchester would be surprisingly modest. I'd take it, if it was offered, but it wouldn't be the massive step change you might imagine.
As against that, the costs of an underground railway in Manchester would also be less than you might think. We have the best rock in the country for tunneling here (Sherwood Sandstone - in common with much of Central and Northern England) - much easier for TBMs to make progress and much less work to shore up afterwards. Far, far easier than tunneling through the clays of London.
My proposal is that Metrolink stay at surface level - although there may be possible advantages for cut-and-covering the Piccadilly Gardens section where progress is particularly slow and station arrangements a tad sub-optimal. I would, however, like a heavy rail tunnel under Central Manchester to address the issues of Central Manchester capacity (originally to be addressed through widening the Castlefield Corridor, though this would now involve so much demolition that it would be as expensive as tunneling): a Manchester equivalent of the St. Pancras-Blackfriars route, and serving the same sort of middle-distance market - though a suburban market or an intercity market could also work. I would go underground south east of Piccadilly and have stops somewhere in Central Manchester, somewhere in Central Salford, and at Salford Quays. This would address the issue of how long it takes to get from one end to the other of the combined central Manchester/Salford/Salford Quays area (known as the regional centre) - the tram is currently quickest, but it's a slow old journey on the tram through Salford Quays, which is more like a bus - and also address the issue of the lack of Central Manchester capacity.
Even outside the city centre, the amount of Metrolink running on street is / looks to be not much - broadly a bit across Droylsden in the east, the odd junction crossing, bits in Oldham and Rochdale that deviate from the rail bed specifically to serve those centres. The rest is dedicated, and even on street a lot of separation is achieved.
The slowness at Salford Quays is more to do with a winding route that serves every nook than a lot of road sharing.
Yes, Metrolink is a bit of a curious hybrid. Some lines are basically suburban rail, some are essentially buses with delusions of grandeur, some fall midway between the two; and average speeds vary greatly across the network.
The one thing I'd change about Manchester trams is, in all seriousness, the horns. A Manchester tram, if it turned up.in Sodor, would experience intolerable bullying at the hands of Thomas and friends for the lame "poop" it issues as a warning. I couldn't work near any junction where there is a "sound horn" instruction for fear of eventually becoming a crazed rampager.
Yes, because to be frank, Thomas and Percy are a bit dickish. The Manchester trams would no doubt hang out with Edward. (For ages when I was growing up I assumed Percy was a girl and therefore Percy a girl's name, and I can't take the name seriously as a result. Not that I come across many Percys.)
But to be clear - you'd be rampaging because the poop is too polite?
I often think motoring could be made rather friendly if cars were fitted with two horns: a polite 'excuse me' and a 'you bloody idiot'. They always sound like the latter but in most cases are only meant as the former.
Polite is fine. Ineffectual and so has to be overused gets me. Once did a training course off the corner of Piccadilly Gardens for a week, and it drove me mad.
You've reminded me of an old Trade Union TV advert, the little guy / anthropomorphic cartoon kept going excuse me, excuse me repeatedly to no avail, until the Union cartoon comes along and goes 'get out of the way'. I do like the two grade horn idea though.
Its a pleasant way to kill time while awaiting the flight. If you don't want to buy something, nobody puts a gun to your head to make you - they couldn't get that past security and this isn't America.
Airport shopping malls strike me as universally seedy. You are literally forced to walk through them to get to your flight, usually along a winding route to maximise boredom. They benefit from tax avoidance by selling fags and booze (which are taxed highly for a reason, not just revenue) free of tax, resulting either in cut-price ways to kill yourself or obscene profit margins or both.
Otherwise, yes, they're fine.
Yes my blood boils as I am forced to meander through some obscene temple to overpriced and undertaxed consumer bullshit, under boiling hot lights and bombarded by the stink of some vile "fragrance" called Tart's Boudoir or something similar, before arriving at the waiting area which invariably has too few seats because so much space has been given over to hawking said consumer bullshit to all the basic leisureware morons at the airport. A good bookshop and somewhere to buy snacks, plug adaptors and tiny tubes of toothpaste is all you need. Everything else is just the monetisation of boredom, late capitalism's most profitable income stream.
It's the price we pay for living in a free country. I've read reports of people visiting North Korea and saying how much they enjoyed the lack of things like shopping malls and adverts, even though they knew what sort of country it was.
The point is that anyone older than 45 remembers a time before late capitalism…
True and if they had any sense they would prefer today's version to the one 45 years ago.
I appreciate that the PB demographic is one that can afford to reminisce about there being no choice on the shelves (for poor people) or how wonderful it must be in North Korea without all those shops selling ghastly tat but in the real world capitalism develops in line with the majority of its constituents and people want that stuff.
Not refined people like you and me who find the whole "Duty Free" thing quite distasteful, but *those* people. They like it.
The thing is, in a couple of areas, a couple of the range of predictions you're caricaturing there, have in fact come to pass.
Look at media, and public life, for instance. In the late 1980's when I started working for the BBC, there was frequent comparison between British TV, often regarded and also still by some of our European counterparts as the best in the world, and the American "supermarket" approach to broadcasting, then very different to ours, of hundreds of channels of unashamedly much lower quality.
Fast forward thirty-five years, and many of the predictions about British TV, made at the time by those characterised as "stick-in-the- mud", retrograde, or "left-wing elitist", have come to pass. This doesn't only include commercial channels, or ITV and Channel 4, but the far more commercialised ethos, following Birt's market reforns, of the BBC itself ; with the result now that BBC TV often struggles to be sufficiently distinctive, and has in fact weakened itself by doing this, too.
I thought it was only "remoaners" who talked down Britain?
Anyone with a functioning nervous system can see that HS2 is a dismal infrastructure omnishambles, and that something has gone badly wrong in UK planning when much poorer countries are able to deliver these trains in half the time it takes us to decide NOT to build a new platform at Euston
Because we're British, we always quibble about the cost and the effect on the view from our windows.
So we end up here.
Actually, Manchester's Metro is quite extensive and privately (non-govt) funded. When the Blair/Brown Labour govt offered to help fund the extension it came with so many strings attached and conditions that Mancunians voted it down and the Metro raised private funding. Within a few years the metro tripled in size...
Manchester has trams - that share their tracks with cars.
Manchester doesn't have a metro in the traditional sense of single purpose tracks.
Well, it's a bit of a hybrid. But it's mostly (80%-ish?) a traditional Metro with singe purpose track.
But it's a tram in the bit (city centre) that really should be underground and where the real benefit would be felt..
Perhaps. But the underground/Metro trade off isn't as one sided as you might think.
Most trips actually go no further than the city centre. The need for fast trips across the city centre - which an underground might serve well - so I can get fast from south of the city to north of the city - is actually relatively small. Even in the city centre, trams don't get stuck in traffic: in almost all cases, the tram is on dedicated lines at street level. This is slower than a hypothetical underground line would be, but the delay is just caused by at-grade crossings - and trams tend to have priority here, so these delays are relatively minor. An underground train could also go more quickly, but given how close stations are to each other, this again is a small benefit (unless we remove stations). Consider also that if I were to get off the tram at a hypothetical St. Peter's Square underground station, I would be a good 90 seconds or so further from my destination than the existing St. Peter's Square tram stop due to the need to funnel up to street level. That time cost has to be offset against any time saving.
In conclusion, the advantages of putting Metrolink underground in central Manchester would be surprisingly modest. I'd take it, if it was offered, but it wouldn't be the massive step change you might imagine.
As against that, the costs of an underground railway in Manchester would also be less than you might think. We have the best rock in the country for tunneling here (Sherwood Sandstone - in common with much of Central and Northern England) - much easier for TBMs to make progress and much less work to shore up afterwards. Far, far easier than tunneling through the clays of London.
My proposal is that Metrolink stay at surface level - although there may be possible advantages for cut-and-covering the Piccadilly Gardens section where progress is particularly slow and station arrangements a tad sub-optimal. I would, however, like a heavy rail tunnel under Central Manchester to address the issues of Central Manchester capacity (originally to be addressed through widening the Castlefield Corridor, though this would now involve so much demolition that it would be as expensive as tunneling): a Manchester equivalent of the St. Pancras-Blackfriars route, and serving the same sort of middle-distance market - though a suburban market or an intercity market could also work. I would go underground south east of Piccadilly and have stops somewhere in Central Manchester, somewhere in Central Salford, and at Salford Quays. This would address the issue of how long it takes to get from one end to the other of the combined central Manchester/Salford/Salford Quays area (known as the regional centre) - the tram is currently quickest, but it's a slow old journey on the tram through Salford Quays, which is more like a bus - and also address the issue of the lack of Central Manchester capacity.
Even outside the city centre, the amount of Metrolink running on street is / looks to be not much - broadly a bit across Droylsden in the east, the odd junction crossing, bits in Oldham and Rochdale that deviate from the rail bed specifically to serve those centres. The rest is dedicated, and even on street a lot of separation is achieved.
The slowness at Salford Quays is more to do with a winding route that serves every nook than a lot of road sharing.
Yes, Metrolink is a bit of a curious hybrid. Some lines are basically suburban rail, some are essentially buses with delusions of grandeur, some fall midway between the two; and average speeds vary greatly across the network.
The one thing I'd change about Manchester trams is, in all seriousness, the horns. A Manchester tram, if it turned up.in Sodor, would experience intolerable bullying at the hands of Thomas and friends for the lame "poop" it issues as a warning. I couldn't work near any junction where there is a "sound horn" instruction for fear of eventually becoming a crazed rampager.
Yes, because to be frank, Thomas and Percy are a bit dickish. The Manchester trams would no doubt hang out with Edward. (For ages when I was growing up I assumed Percy was a girl and therefore Percy a girl's name, and I can't take the name seriously as a result. Not that I come across many Percys.)
But to be clear - you'd be rampaging because the poop is too polite?
I often think motoring could be made rather friendly if cars were fitted with two horns: a polite 'excuse me' and a 'you bloody idiot'. They always sound like the latter but in most cases are only meant as the former.
I suspect Toby, the tram engine, came to Sodor from the Wisbech and Upwell tramway. His character does not suit an aggressive toot, and his job includes keeping the peace with an officious policeman.
Possibly the Wantage Tramway has to be considered too?
Second cabinet minister to attend the conference. The Nationalkonservative Britische Rentnerpartei have gone mainstream.
Well worth reading their Statement of Principles.
A couple I found particularly funny including:
"Among the causes [of the threats to the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations] are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life."
This has religious fundamentalist preacher condemning homosexuality turning out to be gay written all over it.
The Nottingham tram is elegant and suits the city – the Queen of the Midlands puts its midland rivals to shame. By far the prettiest major city in the region, and the only one with a reasonably extensive metro network (Brum's is - or was – rather linear).
Its a pleasant way to kill time while awaiting the flight. If you don't want to buy something, nobody puts a gun to your head to make you - they couldn't get that past security and this isn't America.
Airport shopping malls strike me as universally seedy. You are literally forced to walk through them to get to your flight, usually along a winding route to maximise boredom. They benefit from tax avoidance by selling fags and booze (which are taxed highly for a reason, not just revenue) free of tax, resulting either in cut-price ways to kill yourself or obscene profit margins or both.
Otherwise, yes, they're fine.
Yes my blood boils as I am forced to meander through some obscene temple to overpriced and undertaxed consumer bullshit, under boiling hot lights and bombarded by the stink of some vile "fragrance" called Tart's Boudoir or something similar, before arriving at the waiting area which invariably has too few seats because so much space has been given over to hawking said consumer bullshit to all the basic leisureware morons at the airport. A good bookshop and somewhere to buy snacks, plug adaptors and tiny tubes of toothpaste is all you need. Everything else is just the monetisation of boredom, late capitalism's most profitable income stream.
It is possible to have a life and never go near an airport. Hunter gatherer communities manage this feat. So do some non- hunter gatherers in the UK. It helps save the planet too.
I rather like airports in general. They are archetypal liminal spaces. So are large railway terminals (and trains themselves for that matter). And ferry ports. But ferry ports are generally not very well appointed or pleasant.
Of all those, my ideal is a large railway terminus with a grand cafe with high ceilings where you can sit and daydream for an hour or so before the overnight express train pulls in. Followed by a very large hub airport with long travelators and the varied peoples of the world wandering about in it, or a smaller European airport with pleasant half-empty lounges like the Eventyr lounge in Copenhagen.
A railway station is infinitely preferable to an airport IMHO, as it usually has some nice Victorian architecture, much more space and fresh air, fewer aggressive attempts to rob you blind, and contains trains, the finest machines ever created. The ideal station is a little delapidated and broken, evoking romantic memories of a vanished age, and contains a grubby caff selling tea, crisps and unappetising sandwiches, with blue clouds of diesel smoke lingering under the canopy.
Numerous ideals are available. Adlestrop, or King's Cross, Rannoch, or ghosts like March. St Pancras with its sense that you can go from there to Vladivostock or Yerevan with a few changes
My favourite is not the terminus but the major intersection where there is activity all the time - literally every minute or two. Preston or Peterborough are good. Leeds is terminus and intersection, so is good too.
I like this conversation. I have often thought this - my favourite station in this regard is York. Which still retains an air of what it must have been like in rail's heyday.
Yes York is a beauty.
Great Malvern with its cast-iron flower column capitals; Stamford with its transport bookshop; and so on.
Once you could sit outside at Bournemouth Airport - admittedly in a cage like Guy the Gorilla to stop you escaping - and (if lucky) watch the heritage jets such as Meteor take off as one waited for one's plane. No idea if people can do that now.
You'd need that cage for those who'd had 5 or 6 Stellas.
TUD only for the weak lily livered wife beaters who cannot hold their drink
Didn't they drop their ABV content in response to the "wife beater" tag or is that just one of these urban myths ?
Taz, it used to be 5% , I think it went to 4.8% and is now 4.6% so little difference. Any lower than that and it is getting close to being shandy.
I think the Unfiltered is still 5%? I was never that big a fan of the original, but the unfiltered tastes quite a lot better to my palate.
Its a pleasant way to kill time while awaiting the flight. If you don't want to buy something, nobody puts a gun to your head to make you - they couldn't get that past security and this isn't America.
Airport shopping malls strike me as universally seedy. You are literally forced to walk through them to get to your flight, usually along a winding route to maximise boredom. They benefit from tax avoidance by selling fags and booze (which are taxed highly for a reason, not just revenue) free of tax, resulting either in cut-price ways to kill yourself or obscene profit margins or both.
Otherwise, yes, they're fine.
Yes my blood boils as I am forced to meander through some obscene temple to overpriced and undertaxed consumer bullshit, under boiling hot lights and bombarded by the stink of some vile "fragrance" called Tart's Boudoir or something similar, before arriving at the waiting area which invariably has too few seats because so much space has been given over to hawking said consumer bullshit to all the basic leisureware morons at the airport. A good bookshop and somewhere to buy snacks, plug adaptors and tiny tubes of toothpaste is all you need. Everything else is just the monetisation of boredom, late capitalism's most profitable income stream.
It's the price we pay for living in a free country. I've read reports of people visiting North Korea and saying how much they enjoyed the lack of things like shopping malls and adverts, even though they knew what sort of country it was.
The point is that anyone older than 45 remembers a time before late capitalism…
True and if they had any sense they would prefer today's version to the one 45 years ago.
I appreciate that the PB demographic is one that can afford to reminisce about there being no choice on the shelves (for poor people) or how wonderful it must be in North Korea without all those shops selling ghastly tat but in the real world capitalism develops in line with the majority of its constituents and people want that stuff.
Not refined people like you and me who find the whole "Duty Free" thing quite distasteful, but *those* people. They like it.
The thing is, in a couple of areas, a couple of the range of predictions you're caricaturing there, have in fact come to pass.
Look at media, and public life, for instance. In the late 1980's when I started working for the BBC, there was frequent comparison between British TV, often regarded and also still by some of our European counterparts as the best in the world, and the American "supermarket" approach to broadcasting, then very different to ours, of hundreds of channels of unashamedly much lower quality.
Fast forward thirty-five years, and many of the predictions about British TV, made at the time by those characterised as "stick-in-the- mud", retrograde, or "left-wing elitist", have come to pass. This doesn't only include commercial channels, or ITV and Channel 4, but the far more commercialised ethos, following Birt's market reforns, of the BBC itself ; with the result now that BBC TV often struggles to be sufficiently distinctive, and has in fact weakened itself by doing this, too.
Eh? I think it is a truth universally acknowledged that some of the best TV on the planet is being made right now. In the UK, the US, France, the Nordics, Israel, you name it.
Its a pleasant way to kill time while awaiting the flight. If you don't want to buy something, nobody puts a gun to your head to make you - they couldn't get that past security and this isn't America.
Airport shopping malls strike me as universally seedy. You are literally forced to walk through them to get to your flight, usually along a winding route to maximise boredom. They benefit from tax avoidance by selling fags and booze (which are taxed highly for a reason, not just revenue) free of tax, resulting either in cut-price ways to kill yourself or obscene profit margins or both.
Otherwise, yes, they're fine.
Yes my blood boils as I am forced to meander through some obscene temple to overpriced and undertaxed consumer bullshit, under boiling hot lights and bombarded by the stink of some vile "fragrance" called Tart's Boudoir or something similar, before arriving at the waiting area which invariably has too few seats because so much space has been given over to hawking said consumer bullshit to all the basic leisureware morons at the airport. A good bookshop and somewhere to buy snacks, plug adaptors and tiny tubes of toothpaste is all you need. Everything else is just the monetisation of boredom, late capitalism's most profitable income stream.
It is possible to have a life and never go near an airport. Hunter gatherer communities manage this feat. So do some non- hunter gatherers in the UK. It helps save the planet too.
I rather like airports in general. They are archetypal liminal spaces. So are large railway terminals (and trains themselves for that matter). And ferry ports. But ferry ports are generally not very well appointed or pleasant.
Of all those, my ideal is a large railway terminus with a grand cafe with high ceilings where you can sit and daydream for an hour or so before the overnight express train pulls in. Followed by a very large hub airport with long travelators and the varied peoples of the world wandering about in it, or a smaller European airport with pleasant half-empty lounges like the Eventyr lounge in Copenhagen.
A railway station is infinitely preferable to an airport IMHO, as it usually has some nice Victorian architecture, much more space and fresh air, fewer aggressive attempts to rob you blind, and contains trains, the finest machines ever created. The ideal station is a little delapidated and broken, evoking romantic memories of a vanished age, and contains a grubby caff selling tea, crisps and unappetising sandwiches, with blue clouds of diesel smoke lingering under the canopy.
Numerous ideals are available. Adlestrop, or King's Cross, Rannoch, or ghosts like March. St Pancras with its sense that you can go from there to Vladivostock or Yerevan with a few changes
My favourite is not the terminus but the major intersection where there is activity all the time - literally every minute or two. Preston or Peterborough are good. Leeds is terminus and intersection, so is good too.
I like this conversation. I have often thought this - my favourite station in this regard is York. Which still retains an air of what it must have been like in rail's heyday.
Yes, York is great. The best fun with railways is when you have all day, nowhere you have to get to at any particular time and can train and people watch.
And think of all those people whose first experience of 'It's grim up north' is York Station followed by seeing Durham from the train in winter mist followed by crossing the Tyne into Newcastle. Though I live in north west not north east the memory still moves me.
The ECML gets almost uniformly beautiful from York onwards, with the best views probably on the stretch running up the Northumberland coast, followed by the bit between South Queensferry and Kirkcaldy.
Absolutely and it is vital that you are on the correct (ie right) side of the train as it passes through there and eg Berwick.
It's worth booking on LNER not the Trainline so you can choose your seats.
The thing that does my head in is split tickets which, unbelievably, are still at thing. Trainline is quite good at them (for an extra quid or so) while doing it on the operator's own website is slightly trickier.
I hadn't noticed (because I've never tried to do so) that you can't reserve seats there.
I was reading this recently: apparently there are specialist websites:
Primary school children in England jump to 4th in international reading ranking. Only Singapore, Hong Kong and Russia had better average primary school literacy results. Northern Irish children also did well coming in 5th https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-65610397
Its a pleasant way to kill time while awaiting the flight. If you don't want to buy something, nobody puts a gun to your head to make you - they couldn't get that past security and this isn't America.
Airport shopping malls strike me as universally seedy. You are literally forced to walk through them to get to your flight, usually along a winding route to maximise boredom. They benefit from tax avoidance by selling fags and booze (which are taxed highly for a reason, not just revenue) free of tax, resulting either in cut-price ways to kill yourself or obscene profit margins or both.
Otherwise, yes, they're fine.
Yes my blood boils as I am forced to meander through some obscene temple to overpriced and undertaxed consumer bullshit, under boiling hot lights and bombarded by the stink of some vile "fragrance" called Tart's Boudoir or something similar, before arriving at the waiting area which invariably has too few seats because so much space has been given over to hawking said consumer bullshit to all the basic leisureware morons at the airport. A good bookshop and somewhere to buy snacks, plug adaptors and tiny tubes of toothpaste is all you need. Everything else is just the monetisation of boredom, late capitalism's most profitable income stream.
It is possible to have a life and never go near an airport. Hunter gatherer communities manage this feat. So do some non- hunter gatherers in the UK. It helps save the planet too.
I rather like airports in general. They are archetypal liminal spaces. So are large railway terminals (and trains themselves for that matter). And ferry ports. But ferry ports are generally not very well appointed or pleasant.
Of all those, my ideal is a large railway terminus with a grand cafe with high ceilings where you can sit and daydream for an hour or so before the overnight express train pulls in. Followed by a very large hub airport with long travelators and the varied peoples of the world wandering about in it, or a smaller European airport with pleasant half-empty lounges like the Eventyr lounge in Copenhagen.
A railway station is infinitely preferable to an airport IMHO, as it usually has some nice Victorian architecture, much more space and fresh air, fewer aggressive attempts to rob you blind, and contains trains, the finest machines ever created. The ideal station is a little delapidated and broken, evoking romantic memories of a vanished age, and contains a grubby caff selling tea, crisps and unappetising sandwiches, with blue clouds of diesel smoke lingering under the canopy.
Numerous ideals are available. Adlestrop, or King's Cross, Rannoch, or ghosts like March. St Pancras with its sense that you can go from there to Vladivostock or Yerevan with a few changes
My favourite is not the terminus but the major intersection where there is activity all the time - literally every minute or two. Preston or Peterborough are good. Leeds is terminus and intersection, so is good too.
I like this conversation. I have often thought this - my favourite station in this regard is York. Which still retains an air of what it must have been like in rail's heyday.
I liked living in York. My granddad had worked for the LNER in York, and then BR after nationalisation, so my grandma got some retirement benefit which was, if memory serves, free or at least heavily discounted First Class travel. When I was there I was able to get to see friends in Edinburgh and London at weekends quickly and stupidly cheaply.
Primary school children in England jump to 4th in international reading ranking. Only Singapore, Hong Kong and Russia had better average primary school literacy results https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-65610397
Now do maths & we can be back to being the best educated nation on earth once again!
Primary school children in England jump to 4th in international reading ranking. Only Singapore, Hong Kong and Russia had better average primary school literacy results https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-65610397
Its a pleasant way to kill time while awaiting the flight. If you don't want to buy something, nobody puts a gun to your head to make you - they couldn't get that past security and this isn't America.
Airport shopping malls strike me as universally seedy. You are literally forced to walk through them to get to your flight, usually along a winding route to maximise boredom. They benefit from tax avoidance by selling fags and booze (which are taxed highly for a reason, not just revenue) free of tax, resulting either in cut-price ways to kill yourself or obscene profit margins or both.
Otherwise, yes, they're fine.
Yes my blood boils as I am forced to meander through some obscene temple to overpriced and undertaxed consumer bullshit, under boiling hot lights and bombarded by the stink of some vile "fragrance" called Tart's Boudoir or something similar, before arriving at the waiting area which invariably has too few seats because so much space has been given over to hawking said consumer bullshit to all the basic leisureware morons at the airport. A good bookshop and somewhere to buy snacks, plug adaptors and tiny tubes of toothpaste is all you need. Everything else is just the monetisation of boredom, late capitalism's most profitable income stream.
It is possible to have a life and never go near an airport. Hunter gatherer communities manage this feat. So do some non- hunter gatherers in the UK. It helps save the planet too.
I rather like airports in general. They are archetypal liminal spaces. So are large railway terminals (and trains themselves for that matter). And ferry ports. But ferry ports are generally not very well appointed or pleasant.
Of all those, my ideal is a large railway terminus with a grand cafe with high ceilings where you can sit and daydream for an hour or so before the overnight express train pulls in. Followed by a very large hub airport with long travelators and the varied peoples of the world wandering about in it, or a smaller European airport with pleasant half-empty lounges like the Eventyr lounge in Copenhagen.
A railway station is infinitely preferable to an airport IMHO, as it usually has some nice Victorian architecture, much more space and fresh air, fewer aggressive attempts to rob you blind, and contains trains, the finest machines ever created. The ideal station is a little delapidated and broken, evoking romantic memories of a vanished age, and contains a grubby caff selling tea, crisps and unappetising sandwiches, with blue clouds of diesel smoke lingering under the canopy.
Numerous ideals are available. Adlestrop, or King's Cross, Rannoch, or ghosts like March. St Pancras with its sense that you can go from there to Vladivostock or Yerevan with a few changes
My favourite is not the terminus but the major intersection where there is activity all the time - literally every minute or two. Preston or Peterborough are good. Leeds is terminus and intersection, so is good too.
I like this conversation. I have often thought this - my favourite station in this regard is York. Which still retains an air of what it must have been like in rail's heyday.
Yes, York is great. The best fun with railways is when you have all day, nowhere you have to get to at any particular time and can train and people watch.
And think of all those people whose first experience of 'It's grim up north' is York Station followed by seeing Durham from the train in winter mist followed by crossing the Tyne into Newcastle. Though I live in north west not north east the memory still moves me.
The ECML gets almost uniformly beautiful from York onwards, with the best views probably on the stretch running up the Northumberland coast, followed by the bit between South Queensferry and Kirkcaldy.
Absolutely and it is vital that you are on the correct (ie right) side of the train as it passes through there and eg Berwick.
It's worth booking on LNER not the Trainline so you can choose your seats.
The thing that does my head in is split tickets which, unbelievably, are still at thing. Trainline is quite good at them (for an extra quid or so) while doing it on the operator's own website is slightly trickier.
I hadn't noticed (because I've never tried to do so) that you can't reserve seats there.
I was reading this recently: apparently there are specialist websites:
Its a pleasant way to kill time while awaiting the flight. If you don't want to buy something, nobody puts a gun to your head to make you - they couldn't get that past security and this isn't America.
Airport shopping malls strike me as universally seedy. You are literally forced to walk through them to get to your flight, usually along a winding route to maximise boredom. They benefit from tax avoidance by selling fags and booze (which are taxed highly for a reason, not just revenue) free of tax, resulting either in cut-price ways to kill yourself or obscene profit margins or both.
Otherwise, yes, they're fine.
Yes my blood boils as I am forced to meander through some obscene temple to overpriced and undertaxed consumer bullshit, under boiling hot lights and bombarded by the stink of some vile "fragrance" called Tart's Boudoir or something similar, before arriving at the waiting area which invariably has too few seats because so much space has been given over to hawking said consumer bullshit to all the basic leisureware morons at the airport. A good bookshop and somewhere to buy snacks, plug adaptors and tiny tubes of toothpaste is all you need. Everything else is just the monetisation of boredom, late capitalism's most profitable income stream.
It is possible to have a life and never go near an airport. Hunter gatherer communities manage this feat. So do some non- hunter gatherers in the UK. It helps save the planet too.
I rather like airports in general. They are archetypal liminal spaces. So are large railway terminals (and trains themselves for that matter). And ferry ports. But ferry ports are generally not very well appointed or pleasant.
Of all those, my ideal is a large railway terminus with a grand cafe with high ceilings where you can sit and daydream for an hour or so before the overnight express train pulls in. Followed by a very large hub airport with long travelators and the varied peoples of the world wandering about in it, or a smaller European airport with pleasant half-empty lounges like the Eventyr lounge in Copenhagen.
A railway station is infinitely preferable to an airport IMHO, as it usually has some nice Victorian architecture, much more space and fresh air, fewer aggressive attempts to rob you blind, and contains trains, the finest machines ever created. The ideal station is a little delapidated and broken, evoking romantic memories of a vanished age, and contains a grubby caff selling tea, crisps and unappetising sandwiches, with blue clouds of diesel smoke lingering under the canopy.
Numerous ideals are available. Adlestrop, or King's Cross, Rannoch, or ghosts like March. St Pancras with its sense that you can go from there to Vladivostock or Yerevan with a few changes
My favourite is not the terminus but the major intersection where there is activity all the time - literally every minute or two. Preston or Peterborough are good. Leeds is terminus and intersection, so is good too.
I like this conversation. I have often thought this - my favourite station in this regard is York. Which still retains an air of what it must have been like in rail's heyday.
Yes, York is great. The best fun with railways is when you have all day, nowhere you have to get to at any particular time and can train and people watch.
And think of all those people whose first experience of 'It's grim up north' is York Station followed by seeing Durham from the train in winter mist followed by crossing the Tyne into Newcastle. Though I live in north west not north east the memory still moves me.
The ECML gets almost uniformly beautiful from York onwards, with the best views probably on the stretch running up the Northumberland coast, followed by the bit between South Queensferry and Kirkcaldy.
Absolutely and it is vital that you are on the correct (ie right) side of the train as it passes through there and eg Berwick.
It's worth booking on LNER not the Trainline so you can choose your seats.
The thing that does my head in is split tickets which, unbelievably, are still at thing. Trainline is quite good at them (for an extra quid or so) while doing it on the operator's own website is slightly trickier.
I hadn't noticed (because I've never tried to do so) that you can't reserve seats there.
I was reading this recently: apparently there are specialist websites:
I thought it was only "remoaners" who talked down Britain?
Anyone with a functioning nervous system can see that HS2 is a dismal infrastructure omnishambles, and that something has gone badly wrong in UK planning when much poorer countries are able to deliver these trains in half the time it takes us to decide NOT to build a new platform at Euston
Because we're British, we always quibble about the cost and the effect on the view from our windows.
So we end up here.
Actually, Manchester's Metro is quite extensive and privately (non-govt) funded. When the Blair/Brown Labour govt offered to help fund the extension it came with so many strings attached and conditions that Mancunians voted it down and the Metro raised private funding. Within a few years the metro tripled in size...
Manchester has trams - that share their tracks with cars.
Manchester doesn't have a metro in the traditional sense of single purpose tracks.
Well, it's a bit of a hybrid. But it's mostly (80%-ish?) a traditional Metro with singe purpose track.
But it's a tram in the bit (city centre) that really should be underground and where the real benefit would be felt..
Perhaps. But the underground/Metro trade off isn't as one sided as you might think.
Most trips actually go no further than the city centre. The need for fast trips across the city centre - which an underground might serve well - so I can get fast from south of the city to north of the city - is actually relatively small. Even in the city centre, trams don't get stuck in traffic: in almost all cases, the tram is on dedicated lines at street level. This is slower than a hypothetical underground line would be, but the delay is just caused by at-grade crossings - and trams tend to have priority here, so these delays are relatively minor. An underground train could also go more quickly, but given how close stations are to each other, this again is a small benefit (unless we remove stations). Consider also that if I were to get off the tram at a hypothetical St. Peter's Square underground station, I would be a good 90 seconds or so further from my destination than the existing St. Peter's Square tram stop due to the need to funnel up to street level. That time cost has to be offset against any time saving.
In conclusion, the advantages of putting Metrolink underground in central Manchester would be surprisingly modest. I'd take it, if it was offered, but it wouldn't be the massive step change you might imagine.
As against that, the costs of an underground railway in Manchester would also be less than you might think. We have the best rock in the country for tunneling here (Sherwood Sandstone - in common with much of Central and Northern England) - much easier for TBMs to make progress and much less work to shore up afterwards. Far, far easier than tunneling through the clays of London.
My proposal is that Metrolink stay at surface level - although there may be possible advantages for cut-and-covering the Piccadilly Gardens section where progress is particularly slow and station arrangements a tad sub-optimal. I would, however, like a heavy rail tunnel under Central Manchester to address the issues of Central Manchester capacity (originally to be addressed through widening the Castlefield Corridor, though this would now involve so much demolition that it would be as expensive as tunneling): a Manchester equivalent of the St. Pancras-Blackfriars route, and serving the same sort of middle-distance market - though a suburban market or an intercity market could also work. I would go underground south east of Piccadilly and have stops somewhere in Central Manchester, somewhere in Central Salford, and at Salford Quays. This would address the issue of how long it takes to get from one end to the other of the combined central Manchester/Salford/Salford Quays area (known as the regional centre) - the tram is currently quickest, but it's a slow old journey on the tram through Salford Quays, which is more like a bus - and also address the issue of the lack of Central Manchester capacity.
Even outside the city centre, the amount of Metrolink running on street is / looks to be not much - broadly a bit across Droylsden in the east, the odd junction crossing, bits in Oldham and Rochdale that deviate from the rail bed specifically to serve those centres. The rest is dedicated, and even on street a lot of separation is achieved.
The slowness at Salford Quays is more to do with a winding route that serves every nook than a lot of road sharing.
Yes, Metrolink is a bit of a curious hybrid. Some lines are basically suburban rail, some are essentially buses with delusions of grandeur, some fall midway between the two; and average speeds vary greatly across the network.
The one thing I'd change about Manchester trams is, in all seriousness, the horns. A Manchester tram, if it turned up.in Sodor, would experience intolerable bullying at the hands of Thomas and friends for the lame "poop" it issues as a warning. I couldn't work near any junction where there is a "sound horn" instruction for fear of eventually becoming a crazed rampager.
Yes, because to be frank, Thomas and Percy are a bit dickish. The Manchester trams would no doubt hang out with Edward. (For ages when I was growing up I assumed Percy was a girl and therefore Percy a girl's name, and I can't take the name seriously as a result. Not that I come across many Percys.)
But to be clear - you'd be rampaging because the poop is too polite?
I often think motoring could be made rather friendly if cars were fitted with two horns: a polite 'excuse me' and a 'you bloody idiot'. They always sound like the latter but in most cases are only meant as the former.
Polite is fine. Ineffectual and so has to be overused gets me. Once did a training course off the corner of Piccadilly Gardens for a week, and it drove me mad.
You've reminded me of an old Trade Union TV advert, the little guy / anthropomorphic cartoon kept going excuse me, excuse me repeatedly to no avail, until the Union cartoon comes along and goes 'get out of the way'. I do like the two grade horn idea though.
And here we are . A loud "excuse me" might well have sufficed.
Its a pleasant way to kill time while awaiting the flight. If you don't want to buy something, nobody puts a gun to your head to make you - they couldn't get that past security and this isn't America.
Airport shopping malls strike me as universally seedy. You are literally forced to walk through them to get to your flight, usually along a winding route to maximise boredom. They benefit from tax avoidance by selling fags and booze (which are taxed highly for a reason, not just revenue) free of tax, resulting either in cut-price ways to kill yourself or obscene profit margins or both.
Otherwise, yes, they're fine.
Yes my blood boils as I am forced to meander through some obscene temple to overpriced and undertaxed consumer bullshit, under boiling hot lights and bombarded by the stink of some vile "fragrance" called Tart's Boudoir or something similar, before arriving at the waiting area which invariably has too few seats because so much space has been given over to hawking said consumer bullshit to all the basic leisureware morons at the airport. A good bookshop and somewhere to buy snacks, plug adaptors and tiny tubes of toothpaste is all you need. Everything else is just the monetisation of boredom, late capitalism's most profitable income stream.
It's the price we pay for living in a free country. I've read reports of people visiting North Korea and saying how much they enjoyed the lack of things like shopping malls and adverts, even though they knew what sort of country it was.
The point is that anyone older than 45 remembers a time before late capitalism…
True and if they had any sense they would prefer today's version to the one 45 years ago.
I appreciate that the PB demographic is one that can afford to reminisce about there being no choice on the shelves (for poor people) or how wonderful it must be in North Korea without all those shops selling ghastly tat but in the real world capitalism develops in line with the majority of its constituents and people want that stuff.
Not refined people like you and me who find the whole "Duty Free" thing quite distasteful, but *those* people. They like it.
I don't mind there being shops as long as I am not forced to go into them*. And if people liked them as much as you claim presumably it wouldn't be necessary to force people to walk through them. * Sainsbury's is fine, I do the family shop every fortnight with no complaints.
You are really going to die in a ditch over a design feature of having the route to the departure lounges wind its way through the duty free?
At what point do we get their friends in to do an intervention?
Yesterday’s proceedings opened with Christopher DeMuth, the chairman, announcing that he had been “communing” with the late Margaret Thatcher and found she was “totally on board”, which is nice.
Its a pleasant way to kill time while awaiting the flight. If you don't want to buy something, nobody puts a gun to your head to make you - they couldn't get that past security and this isn't America.
Airport shopping malls strike me as universally seedy. You are literally forced to walk through them to get to your flight, usually along a winding route to maximise boredom. They benefit from tax avoidance by selling fags and booze (which are taxed highly for a reason, not just revenue) free of tax, resulting either in cut-price ways to kill yourself or obscene profit margins or both.
Otherwise, yes, they're fine.
Yes my blood boils as I am forced to meander through some obscene temple to overpriced and undertaxed consumer bullshit, under boiling hot lights and bombarded by the stink of some vile "fragrance" called Tart's Boudoir or something similar, before arriving at the waiting area which invariably has too few seats because so much space has been given over to hawking said consumer bullshit to all the basic leisureware morons at the airport. A good bookshop and somewhere to buy snacks, plug adaptors and tiny tubes of toothpaste is all you need. Everything else is just the monetisation of boredom, late capitalism's most profitable income stream.
It's the price we pay for living in a free country. I've read reports of people visiting North Korea and saying how much they enjoyed the lack of things like shopping malls and adverts, even though they knew what sort of country it was.
The point is that anyone older than 45 remembers a time before late capitalism…
True and if they had any sense they would prefer today's version to the one 45 years ago.
I appreciate that the PB demographic is one that can afford to reminisce about there being no choice on the shelves (for poor people) or how wonderful it must be in North Korea without all those shops selling ghastly tat but in the real world capitalism develops in line with the majority of its constituents and people want that stuff.
Not refined people like you and me who find the whole "Duty Free" thing quite distasteful, but *those* people. They like it.
The thing is, in a couple of areas, a couple of the range of predictions you're caricaturing there, have in fact come to pass.
Look at media, and public life, for instance. In the late 1980's when I started working for the BBC, there was frequent comparison between British TV, often regarded and also still by some of our European counterparts as the best in the world, and the American "supermarket" approach to broadcasting, then very different to ours, of hundreds of channels of unashamedly much lower quality.
Fast forward thirty-five years, and many of the predictions about British TV, made at the time by those characterised as "stick-in-the- mud", retrograde, or "left-wing elitist", have come to pass. This doesn't only include commercial channels, or ITV and Channel 4, but the far more commercialised ethos, following Birt's market reforns, of the BBC itself ; with the result now that BBC TV often struggles to be sufficiently distinctive, and has in fact weakened itself by doing this, too.
Eh? I think it is a truth universally acknowledged that some of the best TV on the planet is being made right now. In the UK, the US, France, the Nordics, Israel, you name it.
There is still good programming being made at times, but, on the international view, I can only pass on some what people from Continental Europe have said to me ; it's a very long time since British TV was considered the best in the world, and the public broadcasters of France, Germany, Italy and elsewhere regularly broadcast the kind of more challenging material the BBC and Channel 4 have long-ditched.
When I was Greece a couple of years ago, I saw a two-and-a-half-hour programme about John Le Carre, on the national state channel. The two interviewers went to the West Country to interview him, chatting over his life while looking out to sea, and included an exhaustive and challenging section of the political and cultural background of Britain between the 1950's and 1990's, with my friend translating some of it for me. This is the sort of unashamedly in-depth programming that completely disappeared from British TV in the late '90s, because of the ultra-commercialisation of our broadcasting and public culture ; it's still there in parts of the Continent, though, and raises the general cultural level.
Its a pleasant way to kill time while awaiting the flight. If you don't want to buy something, nobody puts a gun to your head to make you - they couldn't get that past security and this isn't America.
Airport shopping malls strike me as universally seedy. You are literally forced to walk through them to get to your flight, usually along a winding route to maximise boredom. They benefit from tax avoidance by selling fags and booze (which are taxed highly for a reason, not just revenue) free of tax, resulting either in cut-price ways to kill yourself or obscene profit margins or both.
Otherwise, yes, they're fine.
Yes my blood boils as I am forced to meander through some obscene temple to overpriced and undertaxed consumer bullshit, under boiling hot lights and bombarded by the stink of some vile "fragrance" called Tart's Boudoir or something similar, before arriving at the waiting area which invariably has too few seats because so much space has been given over to hawking said consumer bullshit to all the basic leisureware morons at the airport. A good bookshop and somewhere to buy snacks, plug adaptors and tiny tubes of toothpaste is all you need. Everything else is just the monetisation of boredom, late capitalism's most profitable income stream.
It is possible to have a life and never go near an airport. Hunter gatherer communities manage this feat. So do some non- hunter gatherers in the UK. It helps save the planet too.
I rather like airports in general. They are archetypal liminal spaces. So are large railway terminals (and trains themselves for that matter). And ferry ports. But ferry ports are generally not very well appointed or pleasant.
Of all those, my ideal is a large railway terminus with a grand cafe with high ceilings where you can sit and daydream for an hour or so before the overnight express train pulls in. Followed by a very large hub airport with long travelators and the varied peoples of the world wandering about in it, or a smaller European airport with pleasant half-empty lounges like the Eventyr lounge in Copenhagen.
A railway station is infinitely preferable to an airport IMHO, as it usually has some nice Victorian architecture, much more space and fresh air, fewer aggressive attempts to rob you blind, and contains trains, the finest machines ever created. The ideal station is a little delapidated and broken, evoking romantic memories of a vanished age, and contains a grubby caff selling tea, crisps and unappetising sandwiches, with blue clouds of diesel smoke lingering under the canopy.
Numerous ideals are available. Adlestrop, or King's Cross, Rannoch, or ghosts like March. St Pancras with its sense that you can go from there to Vladivostock or Yerevan with a few changes
My favourite is not the terminus but the major intersection where there is activity all the time - literally every minute or two. Preston or Peterborough are good. Leeds is terminus and intersection, so is good too.
I like this conversation. I have often thought this - my favourite station in this regard is York. Which still retains an air of what it must have been like in rail's heyday.
Yes, York is great. The best fun with railways is when you have all day, nowhere you have to get to at any particular time and can train and people watch.
And think of all those people whose first experience of 'It's grim up north' is York Station followed by seeing Durham from the train in winter mist followed by crossing the Tyne into Newcastle. Though I live in north west not north east the memory still moves me.
The ECML gets almost uniformly beautiful from York onwards, with the best views probably on the stretch running up the Northumberland coast, followed by the bit between South Queensferry and Kirkcaldy.
Even Darlo has a nice station.
The view of Durham, either way you go on the train, is spectacular. It is just magnificent. A truly beautiful place.
Until you go into the city centre and its all empty shops, aggressive begging and a bus stations redevelopment that is months overdue.
Can I give a shoutout for Edinburgh Waverley? A well-organised station, hidden away in a depression slap-bang in the middle of the historic city; overlooked by the castle and the Scott Monument. I always feel uplifted when I arrive there. Although I love Edinburgh, so I'm perhaps biased.
On topic, this For me WH2024 looks set to be the most boring one ever with the WH2020 nominees being the ones who fight it out next year.. assumes Trump will be the nominee.
I still think it quite likely he won't be.
It's become a bit of a niche view on PB but I agree. He's the frontrunner for the nomination right now but I can see quite a few scenarios where it doesn't end up that way.
I dream we get Trump running as an independent against a different Republican nominee, with so much down ballot disruption that the Dems take the presidency, the House and 60 seats in the Senate.
Why would he do that? And how?
I said it was a dream, not a prediction.
In the unlikely event that the Republican Party sees sense and dumps Trump, I can readily imagine Trump doing anything he can to attack the GOP, including running as a third-party candidate where he can.
Those places are few and far between. Most states now have sore-loser rules, where someone who enters a primary race is only allowed to compete in the general election under that party's banner.
I agree that he'd react with fury if he were dumped - but that again is another reason to think he won't be, if he's not actively prevented from running.
The state "sore loser" laws precluding candidates who lose in primaries from running in general elections, generally do NOT apply to presidential elections.
Note that in 1980, John Anderson ran for POTUS in Republican primaries . . . then when he lost GOP nomination to Ronald Reagan, ran as an Independent in the general election. AND was on the ballot in EVERY state and District of Columbia.
The Nottingham tram is elegant and suits the city – the Queen of the Midlands puts its midland rivals to shame. By far the prettiest major city in the region, and the only one with a reasonably extensive metro network (Brum's is - or was – rather linear).
It's just a pity it doesn't go from Nottingham train station to Trent Bridge cricket ground. The nearest tram stop is roughly the same distance from the ground as the train station.
More 'there's nothing wrong with X, it's just that it hasn't been implemented properly yet' news.
When Dixie said last night the conference was a gift to Labour, they hadn't even Godwinned it!
Freddie Hayward in his Staggers morning email:
'But this is the least of their worries. In his speech yesterday, Kruger railed against the following: paganism, the Bank of England, austerity, open borders, cheap credit, Gnosticism, lockdowns. It reminded me of a recent Reform UK rally, which I sketched over the weekend, where attendees associated finishing Brexit with everything from recycling to Yes Minister. I’m only being partly flippant when I call the “NatCon” conference a group therapy session. The speakers offloaded a deluge of gripes without offering coherent solutions. Even if they did, you don’t hear this list of problems and think, ah yes, the Conservative Party is the answer.'
That seems a rather asinine way of reporting a speech. If the speech lasted 15 minutes or longer, you'd expect a variety of things to come under discussion. Listing them all separated by commas isn't particularly helpful.
St Pancras is the greatest station in the world in the greatest city in the world.
There is really is no comparison.
And the food is great, and good value, and even the shopping is elegant.
Wonderful.
I was really surprised that JK Rowling made the London terminus for the Hogwarts train King Cross. St Pancras seems a much more magical location.
Hogwarts is in Scotland. I appreciate a magical train could technically go anywhere but imagine the flack she’d have got from the trainspotter crowd pointing out you can’t get to Scotland from StP. The trans lot would pale by comparison.
St Pancras is the greatest station in the world in the greatest city in the world.
There is really is no comparison.
And the food is great, and good value, and even the shopping is elegant.
Wonderful.
I was really surprised that JK Rowling made the London terminus for the Hogwarts train King Cross. St Pancras seems a much more magical location.
Hogwarts is in Scotland. I appreciate a magical train could technically go anywhere but imagine the flack she’d have got from the trainspotter crowd pointing out you can’t get to Scotland from StP. The trans lot would pale by comparison.
More 'there's nothing wrong with X, it's just that it hasn't been implemented properly yet' news.
When Dixie said last night the conference was a gift to Labour, they hadn't even Godwinned it!
Freddie Hayward in his Staggers morning email:
'But this is the least of their worries. In his speech yesterday, Kruger railed against the following: paganism, the Bank of England, austerity, open borders, cheap credit, Gnosticism, lockdowns. It reminded me of a recent Reform UK rally, which I sketched over the weekend, where attendees associated finishing Brexit with everything from recycling to Yes Minister. I’m only being partly flippant when I call the “NatCon” conference a group therapy session. The speakers offloaded a deluge of gripes without offering coherent solutions. Even if they did, you don’t hear this list of problems and think, ah yes, the Conservative Party is the answer.'
That seems a rather asinine way of reporting a speech. If the speech lasted 15 minutes or longer, you'd expect a variety of things to come under discussion. Listing them all separated by commas isn't particularly helpful.
It’s the things separated by commas that suggest he’s a nutter. Do you think paganism and Gnosticism are key threats to the UK?
The Nottingham tram is elegant and suits the city – the Queen of the Midlands puts its midland rivals to shame. By far the prettiest major city in the region, and the only one with a reasonably extensive metro network (Brum's is - or was – rather linear).
It's just a pity it doesn't go from Nottingham train station to Trent Bridge cricket ground. The nearest tram stop is roughly the same distance from the ground as the train station.
Indeed. Although I always walk that – you can march it in 20 minutes. It's not as far as you think it is. I also walk from New Street / Snow Hill to Edgbaston. It takes 40 minutes but by the time you have faffed around waiting for a cab, then negotiating traffic, it's probably quicker.
At what point do we get their friends in to do an intervention?
Yesterday’s proceedings opened with Christopher DeMuth, the chairman, announcing that he had been “communing” with the late Margaret Thatcher and found she was “totally on board”, which is nice.
Second cabinet minister to attend the conference. The Nationalkonservative Britische Rentnerpartei have gone mainstream.
Well worth reading their Statement of Principles.
A couple I found particularly funny including:
"Among the causes [of the threats to the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations] are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life."
This has religious fundamentalist preacher condemning homosexuality turning out to be gay written all over it.
"Congregational life" is a new concept in British politics, I think. Is Jacob Rees-Mogg wearing a surplice as he preaches now?
St Pancras is the greatest station in the world in the greatest city in the world.
There is really is no comparison.
And the food is great, and good value, and even the shopping is elegant.
Wonderful.
I was really surprised that JK Rowling made the London terminus for the Hogwarts train King Cross. St Pancras seems a much more magical location.
Hogwarts is in Scotland. I appreciate a magical train could technically go anywhere but imagine the flack she’d have got from the trainspotter crowd pointing out you can’t get to Scotland from StP. The trans lot would pale by comparison.
StP - Sheffield - Leeds - Carlisle - Scotland.
If that’s a direct train it runs incredibly infrequently…
More 'there's nothing wrong with X, it's just that it hasn't been implemented properly yet' news.
When Dixie said last night the conference was a gift to Labour, they hadn't even Godwinned it!
Freddie Hayward in his Staggers morning email:
'But this is the least of their worries. In his speech yesterday, Kruger railed against the following: paganism, the Bank of England, austerity, open borders, cheap credit, Gnosticism, lockdowns. It reminded me of a recent Reform UK rally, which I sketched over the weekend, where attendees associated finishing Brexit with everything from recycling to Yes Minister. I’m only being partly flippant when I call the “NatCon” conference a group therapy session. The speakers offloaded a deluge of gripes without offering coherent solutions. Even if they did, you don’t hear this list of problems and think, ah yes, the Conservative Party is the answer.'
That seems a rather asinine way of reporting a speech. If the speech lasted 15 minutes or longer, you'd expect a variety of things to come under discussion. Listing them all separated by commas isn't particularly helpful.
It’s the things separated by commas that suggest he’s a nutter. Do you think paganism and Gnosticism are key threats to the UK?
Hayward's rather silly report doesn't say that Kruger highlighted these two things as key threats to the UK. I am faintly interested in how they came up, but he doesn't cover that.
Note also the 'hilarity' above over someone saying they've been communing with Thatcher - presumably a joke? Do we really think he came on, looked people in the eye and announced his communing session?
Conservative opponents in don't like people expressing conservative sentiments NON SHOCK.
At what point do we get their friends in to do an intervention?
Yesterday’s proceedings opened with Christopher DeMuth, the chairman, announcing that he had been “communing” with the late Margaret Thatcher and found she was “totally on board”, which is nice.
Second cabinet minister to attend the conference. The Nationalkonservative Britische Rentnerpartei have gone mainstream.
Well worth reading their Statement of Principles.
A couple I found particularly funny including:
"Among the causes [of the threats to the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations] are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life."
This has religious fundamentalist preacher condemning homosexuality turning out to be gay written all over it.
And why have they used the American spelling of 'licence'?
St Pancras is the greatest station in the world in the greatest city in the world.
There is really is no comparison.
And the food is great, and good value, and even the shopping is elegant.
Wonderful.
I was really surprised that JK Rowling made the London terminus for the Hogwarts train King Cross. St Pancras seems a much more magical location.
Hogwarts is in Scotland. I appreciate a magical train could technically go anywhere but imagine the flack she’d have got from the trainspotter crowd pointing out you can’t get to Scotland from StP. The trans lot would pale by comparison.
StP - Sheffield - Leeds - Carlisle - Scotland.
If that’s a direct train it runs incredibly infrequently…
It only needs to run once a term in each direction. And it would run along the Settle and Carlisle line! You can't get more Hogwartsy than that. Not in England, anyway.
Its a pleasant way to kill time while awaiting the flight. If you don't want to buy something, nobody puts a gun to your head to make you - they couldn't get that past security and this isn't America.
Airport shopping malls strike me as universally seedy. You are literally forced to walk through them to get to your flight, usually along a winding route to maximise boredom. They benefit from tax avoidance by selling fags and booze (which are taxed highly for a reason, not just revenue) free of tax, resulting either in cut-price ways to kill yourself or obscene profit margins or both.
Otherwise, yes, they're fine.
Yes my blood boils as I am forced to meander through some obscene temple to overpriced and undertaxed consumer bullshit, under boiling hot lights and bombarded by the stink of some vile "fragrance" called Tart's Boudoir or something similar, before arriving at the waiting area which invariably has too few seats because so much space has been given over to hawking said consumer bullshit to all the basic leisureware morons at the airport. A good bookshop and somewhere to buy snacks, plug adaptors and tiny tubes of toothpaste is all you need. Everything else is just the monetisation of boredom, late capitalism's most profitable income stream.
It's the price we pay for living in a free country. I've read reports of people visiting North Korea and saying how much they enjoyed the lack of things like shopping malls and adverts, even though they knew what sort of country it was.
The point is that anyone older than 45 remembers a time before late capitalism…
True and if they had any sense they would prefer today's version to the one 45 years ago.
I appreciate that the PB demographic is one that can afford to reminisce about there being no choice on the shelves (for poor people) or how wonderful it must be in North Korea without all those shops selling ghastly tat but in the real world capitalism develops in line with the majority of its constituents and people want that stuff.
Not refined people like you and me who find the whole "Duty Free" thing quite distasteful, but *those* people. They like it.
The thing is, in a couple of areas, a couple of the range of predictions you're caricaturing there, have in fact come to pass.
Look at media, and public life, for instance. In the late 1980's when I started working for the BBC, there was frequent comparison between British TV, often regarded and also still by some of our European counterparts as the best in the world, and the American "supermarket" approach to broadcasting, then very different to ours, of hundreds of channels of unashamedly much lower quality.
Fast forward thirty-five years, and many of the predictions about British TV, made at the time by those characterised as "stick-in-the- mud", retrograde, or "left-wing elitist", have come to pass. This doesn't only include commercial channels, or ITV and Channel 4, but the far more commercialised ethos, following Birt's market reforns, of the BBC itself ; with the result now that BBC TV often struggles to be sufficiently distinctive, and has in fact weakened itself by doing this, too.
Eh? I think it is a truth universally acknowledged that some of the best TV on the planet is being made right now. In the UK, the US, France, the Nordics, Israel, you name it.
There is still good programming being made at times, but, on the international view, I can only pass on some what people from Continental Europe have said to me ; it's a very long time since British TV was considered the best in the world, and the public broadcasters of France, Germany, Italy and elsewhere regularly broadcast the kind of more challenging material the BBC and Channel 4 have long-ditched.
When I was Greece a couple of years ago, I saw a two-and-a-half-hour programme about John Le Carre, on the national state channel. The two interviewers went to the West Country to interview him, chatting over his life while looking out to sea, and included an exhaustive and challenging section of the political and cultural background of Britain between the 1950's and 1990's, with my friend translating some of it for me. This is the sort of unashamedly in-depth programming that completely disappeared from British TV in the late '90s, because of the ultra-commercialisation of our broadcasting and public culture ; it's still there in parts of the Continent, though, and raises the general cultural level.
Is this one of those I am a socialist not because I love the poor but because I hate the poor-type posts? I think your big problem is that the lower classes now have the vote and I'm afraid that genie isn't going back in the bottle.
I will say again that the everywhere, including the UK is producing absolutely banging TV right now. You can stick your two and a half hours of John le Carre (whose work is, frankly, "populist", if I may) where the sun don't shine.
St Pancras is the greatest station in the world in the greatest city in the world.
There is really is no comparison.
And the food is great, and good value, and even the shopping is elegant.
Wonderful.
I was really surprised that JK Rowling made the London terminus for the Hogwarts train King Cross. St Pancras seems a much more magical location.
Hogwarts is in Scotland. I appreciate a magical train could technically go anywhere but imagine the flack she’d have got from the trainspotter crowd pointing out you can’t get to Scotland from StP. The trans lot would pale by comparison.
StP - Sheffield - Leeds - Carlisle - Scotland.
If that’s a direct train it runs incredibly infrequently…
The Hogwarts Express is not a scheduled service!!
(Though IIRC, that route to Scotland *was* the Midland's reason for building the Settle-Carlisle line - services did once go that way direct)
St Pancras is the greatest station in the world in the greatest city in the world.
There is really is no comparison.
And the food is great, and good value, and even the shopping is elegant.
Wonderful.
I was really surprised that JK Rowling made the London terminus for the Hogwarts train King Cross. St Pancras seems a much more magical location.
Hogwarts is in Scotland. I appreciate a magical train could technically go anywhere but imagine the flack she’d have got from the trainspotter crowd pointing out you can’t get to Scotland from StP. The trans lot would pale by comparison.
There used to be direct trains to Glasgow from St Pancras.
St Pancras is the greatest station in the world in the greatest city in the world.
There is really is no comparison.
And the food is great, and good value, and even the shopping is elegant.
Wonderful.
I was really surprised that JK Rowling made the London terminus for the Hogwarts train King Cross. St Pancras seems a much more magical location.
Hogwarts is in Scotland. I appreciate a magical train could technically go anywhere but imagine the flack she’d have got from the trainspotter crowd pointing out you can’t get to Scotland from StP. The trans lot would pale by comparison.
There are routes, and as you say, it's a magical train. I haven't heard anyone complain about there not being a Platform 9 3/4 at KX (aside from the photo one).
The crimson GWR Hall class used in the film did cause a few comments. But I just thought it was good that the deaden GWR was looking a bit more like the brilliant LMS...
On topic, this For me WH2024 looks set to be the most boring one ever with the WH2020 nominees being the ones who fight it out next year.. assumes Trump will be the nominee.
I still think it quite likely he won't be.
It's become a bit of a niche view on PB but I agree. He's the frontrunner for the nomination right now but I can see quite a few scenarios where it doesn't end up that way.
I dream we get Trump running as an independent against a different Republican nominee, with so much down ballot disruption that the Dems take the presidency, the House and 60 seats in the Senate.
Why would he do that? And how?
I said it was a dream, not a prediction.
In the unlikely event that the Republican Party sees sense and dumps Trump, I can readily imagine Trump doing anything he can to attack the GOP, including running as a third-party candidate where he can.
Those places are few and far between. Most states now have sore-loser rules, where someone who enters a primary race is only allowed to compete in the general election under that party's banner.
I agree that he'd react with fury if he were dumped - but that again is another reason to think he won't be, if he's not actively prevented from running.
The state "sore loser" laws precluding candidates who lose in primaries from running in general elections, generally do NOT apply to presidential elections.
Note that in 1980, John Anderson ran for POTUS in Republican primaries . . . then when he lost GOP nomination to Ronald Reagan, ran as an Independent in the general election. AND was on the ballot in EVERY state and District of Columbia.
SSI - question for you. The scandal that led to Richard Nixon’s resignation is commonly referred to as “Watergate” which means a scandal about water. Why? Should that term not be reserved for some impropriety over sewerage works or similar? Makes no sense.
Second cabinet minister to attend the conference. The Nationalkonservative Britische Rentnerpartei have gone mainstream.
Well worth reading their Statement of Principles.
A couple I found particularly funny including:
"Among the causes [of the threats to the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations] are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life."
This has religious fundamentalist preacher condemning homosexuality turning out to be gay written all over it.
And why have they used the American spelling of 'licence'?
Second cabinet minister to attend the conference. The Nationalkonservative Britische Rentnerpartei have gone mainstream.
Well worth reading their Statement of Principles.
A couple I found particularly funny including:
"Among the causes [of the threats to the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations] are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life."
This has religious fundamentalist preacher condemning homosexuality turning out to be gay written all over it.
And why have they used the American spelling of 'licence'?
This amused me also:
"The Bible should be read as the first among the sources of a shared Western civilization in schools and universities, and as the rightful inheritance of believers and non-believers alike. Where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private. At the same time, Jews and other religious minorities are to be protected in the observance of their own traditions, in the free governance of their communal institutions, and in all matters pertaining to the rearing and education of their children."
I mean why name check only the Jews? It is just funny/bizarre on so many levels.
St Pancras is the greatest station in the world in the greatest city in the world.
There is really is no comparison.
And the food is great, and good value, and even the shopping is elegant.
Wonderful.
I was really surprised that JK Rowling made the London terminus for the Hogwarts train King Cross. St Pancras seems a much more magical location.
Hogwarts is in Scotland. I appreciate a magical train could technically go anywhere but imagine the flack she’d have got from the trainspotter crowd pointing out you can’t get to Scotland from StP. The trans lot would pale by comparison.
There used to be direct trains to Glasgow from St Pancras.
Second cabinet minister to attend the conference. The Nationalkonservative Britische Rentnerpartei have gone mainstream.
Well worth reading their Statement of Principles.
A couple I found particularly funny including:
"Among the causes [of the threats to the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations] are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life."
This has religious fundamentalist preacher condemning homosexuality turning out to be gay written all over it.
And why have they used the American spelling of 'licence'?
I'm surprised LuckyGuy is defending this stuff, since he's generally one of our more US influence phobic posters. It's fairly blatantly a collection of US right wing memes.
"I see no reason why every other country in the world should be prevented from feeling pride in itself because the Germans mucked up twice in a century."
Second cabinet minister to attend the conference. The Nationalkonservative Britische Rentnerpartei have gone mainstream.
Well worth reading their Statement of Principles.
A couple I found particularly funny including:
"Among the causes [of the threats to the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations] are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life."
This has religious fundamentalist preacher condemning homosexuality turning out to be gay written all over it.
And why have they used the American spelling of 'licence'?
I'm surprised LuckyGuy is defending this stuff, since he's generally one of our more US influence phobic posters. It's fairly blatantly a collection of US right wing memes.
It’s interesting what right wing memes they’ve left out. No Ukraine bashing.
Its a pleasant way to kill time while awaiting the flight. If you don't want to buy something, nobody puts a gun to your head to make you - they couldn't get that past security and this isn't America.
Airport shopping malls strike me as universally seedy. You are literally forced to walk through them to get to your flight, usually along a winding route to maximise boredom. They benefit from tax avoidance by selling fags and booze (which are taxed highly for a reason, not just revenue) free of tax, resulting either in cut-price ways to kill yourself or obscene profit margins or both.
Otherwise, yes, they're fine.
Yes my blood boils as I am forced to meander through some obscene temple to overpriced and undertaxed consumer bullshit, under boiling hot lights and bombarded by the stink of some vile "fragrance" called Tart's Boudoir or something similar, before arriving at the waiting area which invariably has too few seats because so much space has been given over to hawking said consumer bullshit to all the basic leisureware morons at the airport. A good bookshop and somewhere to buy snacks, plug adaptors and tiny tubes of toothpaste is all you need. Everything else is just the monetisation of boredom, late capitalism's most profitable income stream.
It's the price we pay for living in a free country. I've read reports of people visiting North Korea and saying how much they enjoyed the lack of things like shopping malls and adverts, even though they knew what sort of country it was.
The point is that anyone older than 45 remembers a time before late capitalism…
True and if they had any sense they would prefer today's version to the one 45 years ago.
I appreciate that the PB demographic is one that can afford to reminisce about there being no choice on the shelves (for poor people) or how wonderful it must be in North Korea without all those shops selling ghastly tat but in the real world capitalism develops in line with the majority of its constituents and people want that stuff.
Not refined people like you and me who find the whole "Duty Free" thing quite distasteful, but *those* people. They like it.
The thing is, in a couple of areas, a couple of the range of predictions you're caricaturing there, have in fact come to pass.
Look at media, and public life, for instance. In the late 1980's when I started working for the BBC, there was frequent comparison between British TV, often regarded and also still by some of our European counterparts as the best in the world, and the American "supermarket" approach to broadcasting, then very different to ours, of hundreds of channels of unashamedly much lower quality.
Fast forward thirty-five years, and many of the predictions about British TV, made at the time by those characterised as "stick-in-the- mud", retrograde, or "left-wing elitist", have come to pass. This doesn't only include commercial channels, or ITV and Channel 4, but the far more commercialised ethos, following Birt's market reforns, of the BBC itself ; with the result now that BBC TV often struggles to be sufficiently distinctive, and has in fact weakened itself by doing this, too.
Eh? I think it is a truth universally acknowledged that some of the best TV on the planet is being made right now. In the UK, the US, France, the Nordics, Israel, you name it.
There is still good programming being made at times, but, on the international view, I can only pass on some what people from Continental Europe have said to me ; it's a very long time since British TV was considered the best in the world, and the public broadcasters of France, Germany, Italy and elsewhere regularly broadcast the kind of more challenging material the BBC and Channel 4 have long-ditched.
When I was Greece a couple of years ago, I saw a two-and-a-half-hour programme about John Le Carre, on the national state channel. The two interviewers went to the West Country to interview him, chatting over his life while looking out to sea, and included an exhaustive and challenging section of the political and cultural background of Britain between the 1950's and 1990's, with my friend translating some of it for me. This is the sort of unashamedly in-depth programming that completely disappeared from British TV in the late '90s, because of the ultra-commercialisation of our broadcasting and public culture ; it's still there in parts of the Continent, though, and raises the general cultural level.
Is this one of those I am a socialist not because I love the poor but because I hate the poor-type posts? I think your big problem is that the lower classes now have the vote and I'm afraid that genie isn't going back in the bottle.
I will say again that the everywhere, including the UK is producing absolutely banging TV right now. You can stick your two and a half hours of John le Carre (whose work is, frankly, "populist", if I may) where the sun don't shine.
It's not really anything to do with hating the poor. I woulfn't say. The BBC got huge audience throughout the '80s for TV plays and offbeat documentaries, although it was also helped by a lack of multi-channel TV culture at the time.
It's not at all impossible to make things that are both very challenging and very popular ; it's just usually more risky, and more difficult, so the most directly commercial logic tends to steer to both the conceptually familiar and tried-and-tested, and the creatively easier, for those two reasons.
Its a pleasant way to kill time while awaiting the flight. If you don't want to buy something, nobody puts a gun to your head to make you - they couldn't get that past security and this isn't America.
Airport shopping malls strike me as universally seedy. You are literally forced to walk through them to get to your flight, usually along a winding route to maximise boredom. They benefit from tax avoidance by selling fags and booze (which are taxed highly for a reason, not just revenue) free of tax, resulting either in cut-price ways to kill yourself or obscene profit margins or both.
Otherwise, yes, they're fine.
Yes my blood boils as I am forced to meander through some obscene temple to overpriced and undertaxed consumer bullshit, under boiling hot lights and bombarded by the stink of some vile "fragrance" called Tart's Boudoir or something similar, before arriving at the waiting area which invariably has too few seats because so much space has been given over to hawking said consumer bullshit to all the basic leisureware morons at the airport. A good bookshop and somewhere to buy snacks, plug adaptors and tiny tubes of toothpaste is all you need. Everything else is just the monetisation of boredom, late capitalism's most profitable income stream.
It is possible to have a life and never go near an airport. Hunter gatherer communities manage this feat. So do some non- hunter gatherers in the UK. It helps save the planet too.
I rather like airports in general. They are archetypal liminal spaces. So are large railway terminals (and trains themselves for that matter). And ferry ports. But ferry ports are generally not very well appointed or pleasant.
Of all those, my ideal is a large railway terminus with a grand cafe with high ceilings where you can sit and daydream for an hour or so before the overnight express train pulls in. Followed by a very large hub airport with long travelators and the varied peoples of the world wandering about in it, or a smaller European airport with pleasant half-empty lounges like the Eventyr lounge in Copenhagen.
A railway station is infinitely preferable to an airport IMHO, as it usually has some nice Victorian architecture, much more space and fresh air, fewer aggressive attempts to rob you blind, and contains trains, the finest machines ever created. The ideal station is a little delapidated and broken, evoking romantic memories of a vanished age, and contains a grubby caff selling tea, crisps and unappetising sandwiches, with blue clouds of diesel smoke lingering under the canopy.
Numerous ideals are available. Adlestrop, or King's Cross, Rannoch, or ghosts like March. St Pancras with its sense that you can go from there to Vladivostock or Yerevan with a few changes
My favourite is not the terminus but the major intersection where there is activity all the time - literally every minute or two. Preston or Peterborough are good. Leeds is terminus and intersection, so is good too.
I like this conversation. I have often thought this - my favourite station in this regard is York. Which still retains an air of what it must have been like in rail's heyday.
Yes, York is great. The best fun with railways is when you have all day, nowhere you have to get to at any particular time and can train and people watch.
And think of all those people whose first experience of 'It's grim up north' is York Station followed by seeing Durham from the train in winter mist followed by crossing the Tyne into Newcastle. Though I live in north west not north east the memory still moves me.
The ECML gets almost uniformly beautiful from York onwards, with the best views probably on the stretch running up the Northumberland coast, followed by the bit between South Queensferry and Kirkcaldy.
Even Darlo has a nice station.
The view of Durham, either way you go on the train, is spectacular. It is just magnificent. A truly beautiful place.
Until you go into the city centre and its all empty shops, aggressive begging and a bus stations redevelopment that is months overdue.
Can I give a shoutout for Edinburgh Waverley? A well-organised station, hidden away in a depression slap-bang in the middle of the historic city; overlooked by the castle and the Scott Monument. I always feel uplifted when I arrive there. Although I love Edinburgh, so I'm perhaps biased.
Yes, Waverley is lovely - one of the few railway stations right in the middle of its city. Actually midway between the Old Town and the New Town. New Street is also right in the middle of Birmingham, and jolly convenient, but even its mother would be hard pressed to describe it as 'lovely'. It's as if its architect had a list of all the elements which made or could make 'lovely' and decided to see if he could make a station without any of them.
On the subject of loveliness, the loveliness of the ECML is noted above, but I would actually say the WCML north of Wigan - i.e. the equivalent stretch - is lovelier still and weirdly unappreciated.
"I see no reason why every other country in the world should be prevented from feeling pride in itself because the Germans mucked up twice in a century."
Will the Supreme Court declare this unconstitutional ?
The IRS has quietly built its own prototype system to allow Americans to file tax returns digitally and free of charge, according to three current and former agency officials, essentially creating government software that could disrupt the industry. https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/1658154324613013505
Second cabinet minister to attend the conference. The Nationalkonservative Britische Rentnerpartei have gone mainstream.
Well worth reading their Statement of Principles.
A couple I found particularly funny including:
"Among the causes [of the threats to the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations] are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life."
This has religious fundamentalist preacher condemning homosexuality turning out to be gay written all over it.
And why have they used the American spelling of 'licence'?
This amused me also:
"The Bible should be read as the first among the sources of a shared Western civilization in schools and universities, and as the rightful inheritance of believers and non-believers alike. Where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private. At the same time, Jews and other religious minorities are to be protected in the observance of their own traditions, in the free governance of their communal institutions, and in all matters pertaining to the rearing and education of their children."
I mean why name check only the Jews? It is just funny/bizarre on so many levels.
The Jews are the one ethnic minority the hard-Right actually likes (or claims to). Rishi needs to withdraw the whip from any Tory attending this event for political reasons if no other - if the electorate gets wind of the fact that the Tories are now taking their instructions from American fundamentalist religious preachers then it's curtains.
If we want housing to be built and to avoid backlash (at least backlash to a degree that blocks building; there's always someone who'll object to anything, but this would sufficiently marginalise people like that):
- Infrastructure must (just) precede housing. - Considerably greater enforcement powers should be given to Local Authorities when developers fail to provide promised infrastructure or damage a site in any way. - Local Authorities should present housing plans and the areas nominated be given central funding to carry out “pre-approval” to the level of an LDO (or better): Countryside Officer, Archeaological Search, Drainage (and need for balancing ponds or not), SuDS and any sewerage upgrades, transport implications (and any upgrades needed), Environmental Protection issues, contaminated land searches, air quality surveys etc are carried out at this time and remain valid. Many of the main issues would then be then pre-resolved… and small developers can find it MUCH easier. - Supported self-build made available on these sites. - Developments to occur in the places laid out by the Local Plans and not speculative developments outside of them. - Funding for LAs to build social housing. - When planning applications are approved, a monthly Land Value Tax to be levied until the housing is built.
Its a pleasant way to kill time while awaiting the flight. If you don't want to buy something, nobody puts a gun to your head to make you - they couldn't get that past security and this isn't America.
Airport shopping malls strike me as universally seedy. You are literally forced to walk through them to get to your flight, usually along a winding route to maximise boredom. They benefit from tax avoidance by selling fags and booze (which are taxed highly for a reason, not just revenue) free of tax, resulting either in cut-price ways to kill yourself or obscene profit margins or both.
Otherwise, yes, they're fine.
Yes my blood boils as I am forced to meander through some obscene temple to overpriced and undertaxed consumer bullshit, under boiling hot lights and bombarded by the stink of some vile "fragrance" called Tart's Boudoir or something similar, before arriving at the waiting area which invariably has too few seats because so much space has been given over to hawking said consumer bullshit to all the basic leisureware morons at the airport. A good bookshop and somewhere to buy snacks, plug adaptors and tiny tubes of toothpaste is all you need. Everything else is just the monetisation of boredom, late capitalism's most profitable income stream.
Your blood boils simply by walking through a shop?
Some people’s blood boils at the sight of a mosque. Some at the sight of a flag. Some at the sight of a shopping centre. Some at the sight of woke vegan venison.
Some look at things they don’t especially enthuse over and go “meh”. Then order the Bambi chops
Its a pleasant way to kill time while awaiting the flight. If you don't want to buy something, nobody puts a gun to your head to make you - they couldn't get that past security and this isn't America.
Airport shopping malls strike me as universally seedy. You are literally forced to walk through them to get to your flight, usually along a winding route to maximise boredom. They benefit from tax avoidance by selling fags and booze (which are taxed highly for a reason, not just revenue) free of tax, resulting either in cut-price ways to kill yourself or obscene profit margins or both.
Otherwise, yes, they're fine.
Yes my blood boils as I am forced to meander through some obscene temple to overpriced and undertaxed consumer bullshit, under boiling hot lights and bombarded by the stink of some vile "fragrance" called Tart's Boudoir or something similar, before arriving at the waiting area which invariably has too few seats because so much space has been given over to hawking said consumer bullshit to all the basic leisureware morons at the airport. A good bookshop and somewhere to buy snacks, plug adaptors and tiny tubes of toothpaste is all you need. Everything else is just the monetisation of boredom, late capitalism's most profitable income stream.
It's the price we pay for living in a free country. I've read reports of people visiting North Korea and saying how much they enjoyed the lack of things like shopping malls and adverts, even though they knew what sort of country it was.
The point is that anyone older than 45 remembers a time before late capitalism…
True and if they had any sense they would prefer today's version to the one 45 years ago.
I appreciate that the PB demographic is one that can afford to reminisce about there being no choice on the shelves (for poor people) or how wonderful it must be in North Korea without all those shops selling ghastly tat but in the real world capitalism develops in line with the majority of its constituents and people want that stuff.
Not refined people like you and me who find the whole "Duty Free" thing quite distasteful, but *those* people. They like it.
I don't mind there being shops as long as I am not forced to go into them*. And if people liked them as much as you claim presumably it wouldn't be necessary to force people to walk through them. * Sainsbury's is fine, I do the family shop every fortnight with no complaints.
Luton Airport is pretty grotty, but Gatwick is quite splendid (including the shopping malls.)
Luton is much better than Gatwick: Smaller size so easier to navigate You can get through security in 5 minutes even in the peak times Duty Free sells travel-exclusive Whisky for domestic passengers
OK so I would prefer Gatwick if I had to spend any time hanging around, but who wants to do that? In and out as quickly as possible.
"I see no reason why every other country in the world should be prevented from feeling pride in itself because the Germans mucked up twice in a century."
Second cabinet minister to attend the conference. The Nationalkonservative Britische Rentnerpartei have gone mainstream.
Well worth reading their Statement of Principles.
A couple I found particularly funny including:
"Among the causes [of the threats to the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations] are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life."
This has religious fundamentalist preacher condemning homosexuality turning out to be gay written all over it.
And why have they used the American spelling of 'licence'?
This amused me also:
"The Bible should be read as the first among the sources of a shared Western civilization in schools and universities, and as the rightful inheritance of believers and non-believers alike. Where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private. At the same time, Jews and other religious minorities are to be protected in the observance of their own traditions, in the free governance of their communal institutions, and in all matters pertaining to the rearing and education of their children."
I mean why name check only the Jews? It is just funny/bizarre on so many levels.
The Jews are the one ethnic minority the hard-Right actually likes (or claims to). Rishi needs to withdraw the whip from any Tory attending this event for political reasons if no other - if the electorate gets wind of the fact that the Tories are now taking their instructions from American fundamentalist religious preachers then it's curtains.
A proportion of the US hard right is deeply and actively anti-semitic.
Second cabinet minister to attend the conference. The Nationalkonservative Britische Rentnerpartei have gone mainstream.
Well worth reading their Statement of Principles.
A couple I found particularly funny including:
"Among the causes [of the threats to the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations] are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life."
This has religious fundamentalist preacher condemning homosexuality turning out to be gay written all over it.
And why have they used the American spelling of 'licence'?
This amused me also:
"The Bible should be read as the first among the sources of a shared Western civilization in schools and universities, and as the rightful inheritance of believers and non-believers alike. Where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private. At the same time, Jews and other religious minorities are to be protected in the observance of their own traditions, in the free governance of their communal institutions, and in all matters pertaining to the rearing and education of their children."
I mean why name check only the Jews? It is just funny/bizarre on so many levels.
The Jews are the one ethnic minority the hard-Right actually likes (or claims to). Rishi needs to withdraw the whip from any Tory attending this event for political reasons if no other - if the electorate gets wind of the fact that the Tories are now taking their instructions from American fundamentalist religious preachers then it's curtains.
Plus the Hindus, which includes Rishi (plus any from other minorities who hold conservative values). Without the populist and nationalist and socially conservative right as part of his coalition Rishi has no chance of winning another Tory majority and he knows it
Comments
I hadn't noticed (because I've never tried to do so) that you can't reserve seats there.
'But this is the least of their worries. In his speech yesterday, Kruger railed against the following: paganism, the Bank of England, austerity, open borders, cheap credit, Gnosticism, lockdowns. It reminded me of a recent Reform UK rally, which I sketched over the weekend, where attendees associated finishing Brexit with everything from recycling to Yes Minister. I’m only being partly flippant when I call the “NatCon” conference a group therapy session. The speakers offloaded a deluge of gripes without offering coherent solutions. Even if they did, you don’t hear this list of problems and think, ah yes, the Conservative Party is the answer.'
It's a sort of global version of the honeypot theory of the Lake District. 96% of the people go to 5% of the territory, leaving most of the rest for the 4%. (Sunny Wednesday in June: 8 billion people at Ambleside, Keswick, Scafell, Helvellyn, Grasmere and Windermere; between Zero and 2 people admiring unique sheepfolds by Wiley Gill.)
There is no enthusiasm for Labour, but there is also a desire to see the back of the Tories and the latter seems stronger than the former.
The view of Durham, either way you go on the train, is spectacular. It is just magnificent. A truly beautiful place.
Until you go into the city centre and its all empty shops, aggressive begging and a bus stations redevelopment that is months overdue.
* On his terms. Every appointment will be made on the basis of personal loyalty to Trump.
* Sainsbury's is fine, I do the family shop every fortnight with no complaints.
But to be clear - you'd be rampaging because the poop is too polite?
I often think motoring could be made rather friendly if cars were fitted with two horns: a polite 'excuse me' and a 'you bloody idiot'. They always sound like the latter but in most cases are only meant as the former.
https://www.which.co.uk/money/money-saving-tips/getting-a-great-deal/10-tips-for-finding-cheap-train-tickets-aUAHW1i0QIen#split-your-ticket
Maybe they do, and that's the whole point?
Somewhat startling - I did wonder if it is a parody accoutn but apparently not.
You've reminded me of an old Trade Union TV advert, the little guy / anthropomorphic cartoon kept going excuse me, excuse me repeatedly to no avail, until the Union cartoon comes along and goes 'get out of the way'. I do like the two grade horn idea though.
Look at media, and public life, for instance. In the late 1980's when I started working for the BBC, there was frequent comparison between British TV, often regarded and also still by some of our European counterparts as the best in the world, and the American "supermarket" approach to broadcasting, then very different to ours, of hundreds of channels of unashamedly much lower quality.
Fast forward thirty-five years, and many of the predictions about British TV, made at the time by those characterised as "stick-in-the- mud", retrograde, or "left-wing elitist", have come to pass. This doesn't only include commercial channels, or ITV and Channel 4, but the far more commercialised ethos, following Birt's market reforns, of the BBC itself ; with the result now that BBC TV often struggles to be sufficiently distinctive, and has in fact weakened itself by doing this, too.
There is really is no comparison.
And the food is great, and good value, and even the shopping is elegant.
Wonderful.
A couple I found particularly funny including:
"Among the causes [of the threats to the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations] are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life."
This has religious fundamentalist preacher condemning homosexuality turning out to be gay written all over it.
They draw the parallel themselves.
There was nothing wrong with nationalism in Britain. It's just that there was something wrong with nationalism in Germany.
I don't see why no one should be allowed to love their country because the Germans mucked up twice in a century.
@DouglasKMurray at the #NatConUK gala
https://twitter.com/NatConTalk/status/1658222444602179586
Almost literally, "we can make a better job of it than the Nazis".
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-65610397
https://youtu.be/iewSJ6nTEv4
Yesterday’s proceedings opened with Christopher DeMuth, the chairman, announcing that he had been “communing” with the late Margaret Thatcher and found she was “totally on board”, which is nice.
https://twitter.com/JonnElledge/status/1658441465834422272
When I was Greece a couple of years ago, I saw a two-and-a-half-hour programme about John Le Carre, on the national state channel. The two interviewers went to the West Country to interview him, chatting over his life while looking out to sea, and included an exhaustive and challenging section of the political and cultural background of Britain between the 1950's and 1990's, with my friend translating some of it for me. This is the sort of unashamedly in-depth programming that completely disappeared from British TV in the late '90s, because of the ultra-commercialisation of our broadcasting and public culture ; it's still there in parts of the Continent, though, and raises the general cultural level.
Note that in 1980, John Anderson ran for POTUS in Republican primaries . . . then when he lost GOP nomination to Ronald Reagan, ran as an Independent in the general election. AND was on the ballot in EVERY state and District of Columbia.
Federal prosecutors seek to drop charges against Florida’s Gillum
The Democrat was a rising star who narrowly lost to DeSantis in the 2018 governor’s race.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/05/15/prosecutors-charges-florida-governor-gillum-00096960
Note also the 'hilarity' above over someone saying they've been communing with Thatcher - presumably a joke? Do we really think he came on, looked people in the eye and announced his communing session?
Conservative opponents in don't like people expressing conservative sentiments NON SHOCK.
Incidentally, Gove is due to speak there this afternoon. I really thought he had more sense.
I will say again that the everywhere, including the UK is producing absolutely banging TV right now. You can stick your two and a half hours of John le Carre (whose work is, frankly, "populist", if I may) where the sun don't shine.
(Though IIRC, that route to Scotland *was* the Midland's reason for building the Settle-Carlisle line - services did once go that way direct)
The crimson GWR Hall class used in the film did cause a few comments. But I just thought it was good that the deaden GWR was looking a bit more like the brilliant LMS...
"The Bible should be read as the first among the sources of a shared Western civilization in schools and universities, and as the rightful inheritance of believers and non-believers alike. Where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private. At the same time, Jews and other religious minorities are to be protected in the observance of their own traditions, in the free governance of their communal institutions, and in all matters pertaining to the rearing and education of their children."
I mean why name check only the Jews? It is just funny/bizarre on so many levels.
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@DouglasKMurray
at the #NatConUK gala dinner
https://twitter.com/NatConTalk/status/1658404877582712833?s=20
It's not at all impossible to make things that are both very challenging and very popular ; it's just usually more risky, and more difficult, so the most directly commercial logic tends to steer to both the conceptually familiar and tried-and-tested, and the creatively easier, for those two reasons.
New Street is also right in the middle of Birmingham, and jolly convenient, but even its mother would be hard pressed to describe it as 'lovely'. It's as if its architect had a list of all the elements which made or could make 'lovely' and decided to see if he could make a station without any of them.
On the subject of loveliness, the loveliness of the ECML is noted above, but I would actually say the WCML north of Wigan - i.e. the equivalent stretch - is lovelier still and weirdly unappreciated.
The IRS has quietly built its own prototype system to allow Americans to file tax returns digitally and free of charge, according to three current and former agency officials, essentially creating government software that could disrupt the industry.
https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/1658154324613013505
- Infrastructure must (just) precede housing.
- Considerably greater enforcement powers should be given to Local Authorities when developers fail to provide promised infrastructure or damage a site in any way.
- Local Authorities should present housing plans and the areas nominated be given central funding to carry out “pre-approval” to the level of an LDO (or better): Countryside Officer, Archeaological Search, Drainage (and need for balancing ponds or not), SuDS and any sewerage upgrades, transport implications (and any upgrades needed), Environmental Protection issues, contaminated land searches, air quality surveys etc are carried out at this time and remain valid. Many of the main issues would then be then pre-resolved… and small developers can find it MUCH easier.
- Supported self-build made available on these sites.
- Developments to occur in the places laid out by the Local Plans and not speculative developments outside of them.
- Funding for LAs to build social housing.
- When planning applications are approved, a monthly Land Value Tax to be levied until the housing is built.
You'd see the benefit within a year.
Some look at things they don’t especially enthuse over and go “meh”. Then order the Bambi chops
Smaller size so easier to navigate
You can get through security in 5 minutes even in the peak times
Duty Free sells travel-exclusive Whisky for domestic passengers
OK so I would prefer Gatwick if I had to spend any time hanging around, but who wants to do that? In and out as quickly as possible.