Is It Really Too Much to Ask? (39 page)

As I see it, there are two clearly defined camps in the debate about the proposed high-speed rail link.

You have those who live more than five miles from the proposed route. They say it will be a wonderful piece of engineering, that it will make the nation proud and that it will bring untold riches to the north. And then you have those who live less than five miles away. They say it is stupid and wrong-headed and a complete waste of money.

Interestingly, both sides are wrong.

I have a great deal of sympathy with people who will soon have trains charging at 225mph through their kitchens. You sign up for a quiet life in the countryside and then you are told that soon your life will be ruined and your house valueless. Nimbyism is much criticized but it is an understandable reaction at times such as this.

Certainly if someone said they were going to locate the town tip in my back garden, or build a footpath right past my bedroom window, I'd fight like a savage dog to make the problem go away.

However, if we'd always put the needs of the few above the needs of the many, we'd still be in smocks, herding oxen. When Isambard Kingdom Brunel announced plans for his Great Western Railway, he faced a staggering level of resistance. But today we thank God he prevailed, or Bristol would still be ten minutes behind London and you'd have to travel between the two on a horse.

It was the same story with the M1. The chief engineer
spent months touring the proposed route, being shouted at by farmers and red-faced lords. But again we are grateful today that he was able to win them round. Or Leeds would be as inaccessible as space.

I like big engineering projects. They make my tummy do backflips. Often, when I'm on my way to Hull – it doesn't happen too often – I'll pull over and spend a few moments admiring the Humber Bridge. When it was proposed, it was considered stupid to spend millions linking Barton and Hessle, two settlements no one had heard of. And it probably was. But we ended up with what, to my mind, is the most beautiful bridge in the world. And that makes me feel all warm and gooey.

Which brings me on to the other side of the argument about HS2. The people who say it's a wonderful piece of engineering. Because is it? Really?

No French or Japanese person I've met lists the railway network as a reason for visiting their country. A big dam, yes. That would be tremendous. Or an elegant viaduct. But some track nailed to some sleepers and laid on a bed of cinders? My boat's unfloated, I'm afraid.

Part of the problem is that trains are a bit Victorian. Tub-thumping and puffing your chest up about a new railway line is like tub-thumping and sticking your chest out about a new steamship. Or a new woollen mill.

We're told that no one can know what life will be like when HS2 opens for business in 2026. Absolutely. But we can make an educated guess that the electronic revolution will have turned our lives completely upside down and that in all probability there will be no need to travel at all.

Which brings us on to the biggest problem with HS2. David Cameron quite rightly acknowledges that the north-south divide in Britain is getting so wide that unless
something is done, we really will end up with two countries. I'm troubled by this as well but I fail to see how a railway line connecting the haves and the have-nots will help.

Last month I climbed on board a train in London and after just two chapters of my Jack Reacher book I was arriving in a northern town where there was some drizzle and a bit of graffiti. One chapter after that, I was in Liverpool. It was seriously quick.

But here's the thing. Even if HS2 shaves an extra thirty or so minutes off the journey, I wonder how many people in Kensington and Chelsea will wake up and say, ‘You know what? Since Liverpool is only ninety minutes away, we shall move to the Wirral.'

It's even more bonkers when you view the situation from the other side of the coin. Because does anyone honestly think that Scousers continue to live and work in Liverpool simply because the current train ride to London takes too long?

At this point politicians tell us that a faster rail link would be good for business. Right. I see. But hang on a minute. What business?

One of the stations will be located at Sheffield's vast out-of-town Meadowhall shopping centre. So are we expected to believe that because Yorkshire is only seventy-five minutes away, people in Notting Hill will decide to forgo a trip to Portobello Road on a Saturday morning and spend all their hard-earned City bonuses up north instead? I'm struggling with that concept, if I'm honest.

And I also struggle to imagine that life will become any easier for those running the BBC's new northern headquarters in Salford. Today, even though staff in London are being offered up to £90,000 to relocate, many are refusing to move away from their friends, their families and their children's
schools. And those who do go are finding that booking guests for their shows is difficult. Tom Cruise, for example, would travel to west London to promote his new film. But Manchester? Not a chance. And I can't see the situation changing just because the journey time is an hour faster.

And in the big scheme of things, what's the journey time got to do with it, anyway? People don't choose to live in Liverpool or Sheffield because of how near they are to London. It's just not relevant.

Most northern people I know hate London and care about its proximity only when their football team are playing Arsenal or Chelsea. If you live in Rotherham, you eat, socialize, drink and mate in Rotherham. What many don't do, however, is work. Because there are very few jobs. And I'm afraid to say that problem won't be solved by a big, noisy Victorian throwback.

3 February 2013

We have been informed by the government that we have three years to microchip our dogs. And that if we fail to comply, we will be fined up to £500. This is normally the sort of bullying nonsense that makes me want to spit tacks and vandalize a bus shelter.

But I've read the details and I'm alarmed to say that the new law seems to make sense.

At present more than 100,000 dogs a year are either dumped or lost, and these days the police are too busy investigating dead disc jockeys to cycle around the parish comparing those out-of-focus ‘missing' posters on lamp posts with the forlorn collection of pooches they have in the station kennels.

We can hardly expect the RSPCA to help out, either. Well, we can, but sadly this once great charity is now little more than a branch of the Communist party, which would rather spend its money prosecuting people for living near David Cameron than help a little girl to find her lost Labrador.

In fact, the RSPCA seems to have rather missed the point of the chipping scheme, with a spokesman saying it will do little to prevent dogs from biting other animals such as hedgehogs, badgers or, horror of horrors, possibly even one of the charity's beloved foxes. This is true. Other things it will not prevent include barking at postmen and urinating.

However, those of us who are not mainly interested in resurrecting the ghost of Stalin can see there is one big advantage. The chip containing your details is inserted into
a small glass cylinder the size of a grain of rice that is then injected into your dog's back.

So, if it's lost, the dog can be scanned in the same way that you scan vegetables at the supermarket and, hey presto, it'll be back in its own bed, drinking warm milk by nightfall. Brilliant. And, at the moment, it can be done free. It's so brilliant, in fact, that I started to wonder why, for instance, you could not insert a similar chip in your laptop and your phone or even your children.

You may argue, of course, that if a lost child is subsequently found, a chip is not necessary, because they are capable of telling their rescuers what their name is and where they live. But what if they're not found?

As we all know, your mobile phone is constantly telling anyone who cares to look where you are. So long as the battery is connected, it's a non-stop homing beacon. So why do Apple and BlackBerry not start selling parents the technology that can do this? Insert it into a child's back and when they wander off at the supermarket you can wave goodbye to the misery of spinning round and round in pointless circles and in just a few moments find out exactly where they've gone.

Naturally, it gets better. Because later in life, when they are sixteen and they say they are popping out to the library to catch up on some physics homework, you can determine whether this is true, or whether, in reality, they are doing 90mph in a mate's Vauxhall Corsa, on their way to the Duck and Sick Bag.

Indeed, as I lay in the bath last night, considering all the advantages of chipping children, I hit upon an even bigger brainwave: chipping myself.

I bet the government has already had many meetings about this. Because if every single person in the country were
chipped, they'd know where we'd been, who we'd been with and how fast we'd driven home. Such a scheme would free up so much police time, they'd be able to investigate even more dead DJs.

But, of course, there's the pesky question of human rights. We don't necessarily want Mr Cameron to know where we were last night, so we may be reluctant to provide him with a means of finding out. And we may remain reluctant right up to the point where we realize the advantages.

For many years boffins have inserted electronic devices into our bodies to regulate the beat of our heart and alter our mood and even bring about orgasm. But this, I feel, is just the start.

Look at that tiny chip in your credit card. Why does it have to be mounted in a bit of plastic that one day, as sure as eggs are eggs, you will lose? Why can it not be sewn into the palm of your hand, which, unless you go shoplifting in Saudi Arabia, you will not?

There are other advantages, too. There's no reason why, when you pick up a product at the supermarket, its sensors cannot read your chip and automatically deduct its cost from your bank account. This would mean no more queuing at the checkout tills.

It's the same story at airports because the electronic chip in a modern passport would easily fit into your earlobe. You just walk past a scanner and – ping. You're in. And, of course, your other earlobe could contain details of your driving licence, which would cut the time it takes to rent a car from the current average of around sixteen hours to just a few seconds.

Pub landlords would also welcome the idea because at present they have to serve a six-year-old child with six double vodkas simply because they have produced a scrap of
ID, written in crayon, that says they're actually eighteen. But with chipping, he'd know.

You could have an electronic ignition key for your car sewn into one thumb and a complex laptop password sewn into the other. And never again would you forget to withdraw your card from the cash dispenser because you wouldn't need one. Simply insert your wedding ring finger into the slot and seconds later bundles of delicious money will pour forth.

You could even have a chip containing your medical records sewn into your genitals so that on one-night stands your partner would be able to determine whether you were suffering from anything they would rather not catch. The possibilities are quite literally endless.

It's been said for many years that your body is a temple. And that's fine. But I'd quite like mine to be a mobile phone and a credit card as well.

10 February 2013

As we know, everything run by the dull, penny-pinching hand of government is a bit rubbish. Walk through Heathrow and when you get to the customs hall, all the equipment is scuffed and the tables are held together with duct tape.

In a hospital the front-of-house staff may be cheery and the shop may sell all kinds of succulent-looking fruit but peep into the spaces where the public are not allowed and it's like peering into Eeyore's Gloomy Place. It's like nobody cares. And that's the trouble, really. Nobody does.

It's the same story with the police. Elsewhere in the world, they get snazzy costumes, flash cars and cool sunglasses. Here they rock up in a Vauxhall Astra, sporting a pair of trousers that have plainly been designed to fit someone else.

You just know that if the government had built the Shard it would have been quite a lot shorter and that the lifts wouldn't work. The government doesn't do fabulous. It does woeful. A point that was well made by the Royal Navy Lynx helicopter that recently came to pick me up in Stavanger in Norway.

To keep this ancient design even vaguely relevant, it has been retro-fitted with all sorts of radar equipment so now it looks like it's caught a terrible warty skin disease. But it took off, nevertheless, and half an hour later deposited me on the navy frigate HMS
Westminster
.

It's a little bit shorter than Roman Abramovich's latest yacht. And cost slightly less to build. And from the outside, it's not hard to see why. There's a bucket for fag ends, and
a principal armament of just one 4.5in artillery piece. Or as a Second World War admiral would say, ‘one peashooter'.

There are, however, several health and safety notices advising crew members on how not to get hurt. Which seemed to be a bit incongruous on a warship. But this is a government vessel. So what do you expect? Four functioning diesels, perhaps? Nope. Sorry. One of them was broken. Oh, and the previous evening it had sprung a leak. It might as well have been called HMS
Vulnerable
.

You could say that of the whole service because, if you exclude training vessels, the minesweepers and various other odds and sods, the number of Royal Navy frontline surface ships stands at eighteen. That's eighteen vessels – frigates and destroyers – you would recognize as a warship.

To put that in perspective, the number of surface ships sent to give the gauchos a thick ear in 1982 – and I'm not including the subs or the transporters or the service vessels, just the main warship flotilla – was twenty-five.

At the outbreak of the Second World War the Royal Navy had 317 surface ships. At the Battle of Jutland in 1916 it lost fourteen warships and 6,784 men in just one encounter. And still came home saying, ‘We won'.

All of which makes you think, with only eighteen ships currently ready for duty, we couldn't even defend ourselves against Belgium. Or could we? Because unlike any other government-run operation, HMS
Westminster
is much better than first appearances would have you believe. First of all, there's the crew. One was just back from a spell with NASA. Another, who had a regional accent, could mend a gas turbine with his eyelashes. Sailors? Yes. But everyone who I spoke to was a top-class engineer as well.

And you should see how they operate on the bridge. Quietly. Like components in a brand-new laptop. Orders are
spoken. They are repeated. Something happens. Have you ever been in a really busy restaurant in Turin? Well, this ship is the exact opposite of that.

And then you have the toys. What you can't see from the outside is the astonishing array of missile launchers. The 4.5in gun is only there to frighten a Somalian pirate. The real hardware is the Sea Wolf and Harpoon missiles, and the torpedoes. It's a smorgasbord of guided ordnance designed to make Johnny Baddie have a surprisingly bad day.

But they are nothing compared with what you find in the bowels of HMS
Westminster
. You go down and then down some more, through tiny hatches that feature standard-issue military-sharp edges, until you arrive in a below-the-waterline room that looks like an air-traffic-control centre. But it's no such thing. Because it's not designed to land planes safely. It's designed to land them quickly and at very high speed in the sea.

Then you move into the submarine-detection area. Same deal. It's a room built specifically to make the enemy submariner all wet and uncomfortable. And yet, like the bridge, it's as quiet down there as a chess tournament. Even at full speed. I know this because we went there. And Holy Mother of God …

Have you ever rented a jet ski while on holiday? Feels fast, doesn't it? Well, the
Westminster
is faster still. And then, as we approached 30 knots and we were playing Moses, the captain ordered a sharp turn to port. You'd imagine a ship this size would respond like an elderly dog. But no. One second we were heading north and then we were heading west and I was standing on the aft deck, wondering out loud how the bloody thing hadn't capsized.

You often see books that tell a man what he must do before he dies. Well, I've landed on a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier
and flown an F-15 and been shot at while flying over Basra but I can tell you that the No. 1 must-have experience is a Type 23 frigate turning hard to port at almost 30 knots. It is absolutely hysterical.

As night began to fall, it was time to make port in Bergen. The sentries put on body armour and manned the machine guns, in case the Norwegians got any silly ideas. And we were nudged to a standstill by a local tug. When you have only eighteen warships in total, you can't risk dinging one in a parking accident.

As I disembarked, I couldn't help turning round for one last look. It may be a government vessel in a government navy. But I can tell you this. It does something no other government operation does: it makes you achingly proud to be British.

17 February 2013