I’m rather lucky to be able to listen, on occasion, to my father talking about railways. He knows quite a lot about them, and has been a pleasant counterbalance to the gushing headlines in the Guardian regarding spurious rail projects set out by the government as firebreaks in their forest of public relations shittiness. I’m sure they hardly thought about the schemes, any more than I thought about the previous metaphor. Could you even start a fire in a forest of poo? Would it burn in any kind of interesting way? Anyhow.
It’s time people stopped thinking of Britain as the country that invented railways and started to get the horrible crapness of the ones they have driven into their conciousness with a kind of cultural bedsore or something. I suggest changing the name of the country to the United Kingdom of Great Britain, Northern Ireland and Shite Railways. Stamp that on everyone’s passport so that French people will sneer at us (more) when we visit the continent. So that the Germans will look at us pityingly, and the Italians will push up the service charges for us in their restaurants. That’ll get people going alright. And then we can vow never to change the name of the place back until we get something really awesome and rail-related to expunge the stain on our railway honour. Like a train that cures cancer. Yeah.
That ought to do it.
