The planned rail link will ruin the Chilterns to get well-to-do people to Birmingham a few minutes earlier
✒ I've been reading a new book, Felling the Ancient Oaks, by John Martin Robinson (Aurum), about the innumerable great houses demolished in Britain over the last century or so, and the breakup of their estates. These were scores of Downton Abbeys, so perhaps we should not mourn them too much; they were destroyed by the two greatest rises in the cost of living: labour and heating. And by the propensity of many owners to spend millions owning horses or betting on them.
But the saddest picture in the book is the one showing the then transport minister, Ernest Marples, admiring the brand new and still almost empty M1. The caption points out that the road sliced through many Midlands estates, and used stone from Nuttall Temple for its foundation.
That's what we're doing in this tiny country: building faster and faster ways of getting to places that no longer exist because we've built faster ways of getting to them.
A classic example is the wholly unnecessary HS2, which will ruin the Chilterns in order to get well-to-do people to Birmingham slightly more quickly. The present rail journey time of one hour and 20 minutes is perfectly reasonable for anyone. Are we next going to destroy the Lake District to knock off an hour from the trip to Glasgow?
The £17bn – estimated – cost of the first 101-mile HS2 is going to work out at an astounding £2,345 per inch.
You could build a solid wall of pound coins 20 feet high from Euston to New Street for the same price. Or use the money to improve our other creaking railways without destroying anything.
✒Things which might have been better expressed: a colleague was invited on to the BBC's Vanessa Feltz radio show on Thursday. At the last moment a researcher rang in high excitement to say the slot had been cancelled – "because the breast implant story has just exploded!"
✒I met the late Bob Holness once or twice, when he chaired Call My Bluff on BBC2. One time, another panellist was Dennis Taylor, the former snooker champion famous for wearing weird, upside-down glasses that enabled him to peer at table level. Holness put his own glasses on upside-down and came towards us, grinning. I said to Taylor – who is one of the nicest men you could ever meet – "I bet that is the 379th time that's been done to you today," and he replied, "Yes, it probably is. But I know if it ever stops, it'll all be over for me."
✒Like everyone else who's seen it, I greatly enjoyed the French silent film, The Artist. But afterwards I got to wondering if it would be anything like such a hit if it had been a real silent film from the 1920s. Possibly not, because the plot creaked like a cheap balsawood set.
How is it that the hero, George Valentin, is the biggest star in Hollywood, but when the talkies arrive, he is immediately thrown into penury? Hadn't he saved anything? And how can his estranged wife evict him from the mansion which was, presumably, bought with his money?
And why were we not told that he is a brilliant tap dancer, until the very end? The woman behind us in the cinema said excitedly that her friend had called it "the best film ever made". Not quite.
✒Thanks for the round robins, which continue to pour in. It's a mistake to assume that they are all boasting and gloating. Some consist entirely of misery, for if a sorrow shared is a sorrow halved, then by the same token a sorrow passed on to 100 people is reduced to 1%.
One letter consists entirely of horrible events, relieved only by the departure of a much-detested husband. One of the writer's dogs has to be put down, and another, Rupert, is going blind. Her brother has cancer for the third time, this one being prostate. His house sale has fallen through leaving him nearly penniless.
But life has its brighter spots. "I have only missed walking the dogs twice, once when I cut off the top corner of my thumb." She does know how to console herself, though. "I treated myself to a new fish tank," we learn.
"Meanwhile, I have not shed one tear over the departure of Geoff. I now have Rupert to sleep with, a big improvement, since he neither snores nor farts … I shall be having Thai food for Christmas dinner."
✒The campaign over Scottish independence has not started, yet it is already completely mad, with George Osborne, that man of the people, threatening the Scots with the euro if they break away. Mind you, if the euro still exists, that might be preferable to staying inside sterling, with interest rates fixed by the Bank of England for the benefit of only the English, Welsh and Northern Irish economy.
Still, as Alex Salmond used to tell us, Scotland is part of the "arc of prosperity", in which he included Ireland and Iceland, so we haven't heard much about that lately. But since independent Scotland is going to be such a runaway success, they should insist on their own currency. They could call it the "poond", divided into 100 "bawbees".
✒Labels: Geoffrey Randall acquired a mirror at Argos. He was grateful to be given "safety information: do not strike the glass with hard or pointed items".
Martin Knight noticed that water tankers belonging to Yorkshire Water are labelled "non-hazardous product". He appreciates that people might need to know they aren't dealing with, say, nitric acid, but since when was water a "product"?
And Bernie Batchelor bought a Pentel gel pen, "quick drying ink suitable for right and left-handed writers".