What is it about cyclists that attracts such incoherent rage from a normally relatively sane person? Matthew Parris wrote an extraordinary column in The Times a couple of days ago, arguing – I kid you not – for stringing up cyclists on the nearest tree because they throw drinks cans and other litter on the [...]
Archive of December, 2007
Dec
24
The great rail rip off
Passengers struggling on to the railways for the Christmas break are being hit by a double whammy that’s not at all in the spirit of the season. Not only, as the Standard reported recently, are most people having to pay the full whack for their tickets, [...]
The year 2007 should have gone down in history as epoch making, a break with the past offering a new future for the railways. But it won’t. It will be remembered as just another routine year in which the government had the opportunity to show real faith with the industry but, instead, ducked the big [...]
Dec
17
Blog fuel protests failure
Whatever happened to the fuel protests? Or rather didn’t. What a wonderful damp squib they were, attracting fewer people than the average village Women’s Institute annual general meeting. What a contrast with 2000.
Was it the juxtaposition of the protests with the climate change talks in Bali, which made people too embarrassed to come out to [...]
Dec
14
Bali bull
The climate change discussions in Bali are clearly a stitch up. There is a pattern to this – the Europeans and most of the rest of the world put forward radical proposals while the US take a very hard line position. Then ‘negotiations’ take place and we get some sort of feeble compromise that does [...]
Passing through Surbiton station during the evening peak the other day, I was surprised to find the barriers open and no one checking tickets. Walking through non-functioning barriers seems to happen to me most of the time I travel south of the Thames when only being a law abiding citizen leads me to buying tickets [...]