Peter Rhodes on a slow train, a job for Homer and whatever became of the navvies?
A pattern emerges. To get a seat in Donald Trump's cabinet, you don't need to be massively intelligent and if your principles are fairly flexible, so much the better. A comb-over haircut is a positive advantage but above all, you need a huge, instantly-recognisable TV image. Your hour has surely come, Homer Simpson.
And off into the Warwickshire countryside for a few lungfulls (lungsful?) of restorative fresh air. Inevitably, after a couple of miles we came across what the officials call the HS2 construction site and the rest of us call Mordor, a vast, obscene slash of concrete carving through some of the prettiest farmland in Britain. The striking thing is how little work seems to happening. We saw perhaps half-a-dozen HS2 blokes in helmets and hi-viz, mucking around with a couple of big yellow lorries. Yet there seemed no sense of urgency.
You couldn't help contrasting it with Victorian railway construction as described in All Aboard! Scotland's Poshest Train (C4). It told us how tens of thousands of labourers were drafted in to build Britain's rail network in the 19th century. In those “railway fever” days a few thousand burly navvies with wooden spades could throw up an embankment or excavate a cutting in a matter of days. More than 150 years after those heroes dug their way into transport history, we have no idea where HS2 will start or end, how fast it will be or whether we'll ever be able to afford the fares. Ain't progress grand?
