Adonis feature

I've just been watching Lord Adonis (whose name must surely be some sort of joke, right?) telling the Labour Party Conference about his vision for high-speed rail links between London, Birmingham, Leeds and Kircaldy (or something). He got quite worked up about the fact that we're so far behind every other country in Europe (well, France) when it comes to high-speed rail. Strangely enough, he blamed the Tories, despite the fact that it's been, ooh, eleven years since they were last in government, which is just about long enough to get a high-speed rail project off the ground, you'd think. Still, the important thing is, that now there's an election looming, the government have decided that enough is enough. No more excuses, this time it's really happening. High speed rail is roaring up the tracks, and it's going to put all those nasty low-cost airlines (particularly Ryanair) out of business. So yah boo sucks!

Zooming from one end of the country to the other in less time than it takes a Ryanair flight to get on to the runway is all very well, but if when we get to the other end we can't actually move because of gridlock it does rather defeat the point. I took a bus with some colleagues from one end of Baker Street to the other for to get some ice cream (I kid you not - give them a treadmill and they'll run all day long, but actually ask them to walk somewhere and they're struck by an aversion to using their legs). Wouldn't you know it, there were roadworks, and we got stuck at some traffic lights, and then some more roadworks. There was still some ice cream left when we got there, but it was a close run thing.