This bus depot in the Jesmond area of Newcastle is just seven years shy of celebrating its centenary. It was designed by Marshall and Tweedy, and constructed by T Clements & Sons. Built on a former public park, its distinctive art deco style was intended to fit in with the upmarket surroundings of the suburb: it’s hard not to wonder if we properly value such considerations in new buildings today. It is now Grade II listed.

It was most recently used by Arriva, a subsidiary of Germany’s national rail operator. Arriva sold the building in 2019, but continued to use it on a leased basis. It’s hard not to wonder why the political opposition to nationalisation of public services applies only to services being run by the UK government.

In October 2022, Arriva closed the site where 180 staff members worked. In a statement, Arriva promised to “ensure there would be no impact on services.” In 2023, Arriva decided to stop operating several routes which were “deemed unsustainable following the closure of the operator’s Jesmond depot.” It’s hard not to wonder why that wasn’t foreseeable.

1: I knew a little about Milton Glaser, but I didn’t know how prolific he was.

2: Priority postboxes, for return of completed home swabs for COVID-19, have appeared as if overnight. Or at least, stickers which designate existing post boxes which are already emptied later in the day as “priority post boxes”.

3: Finland’s air force stopped using a swastika in its logo three and a half years ago, and no-one really noticed until now.

4: “These trying months have shown us a government and a prime minister of unique incompetence, deceitful and panicky, often inattentive to essential business (remember those five Cobra meetings that Johnson bunked), and incapable of pursuing a steady policy for more than five minutes. Yet when we emerge from the epidemic, we will be faced with the same government and the same prime minister and the same government demanding more powers, more central control.”

5: I’ve read quite a lot about Concorde over the years and the one parked up in Manchester is still on my “to visit” list. I’ve never read anything that got quite as closely into the financial side of the project as this 2002 article by Francis Spufford which I dredged up today.

6: In one of life’s stranger coincidences, after a few years of using Android phones, I bought my first iPhone since the 4S today—then realised that it is ten years to the day after I wrote about switching to the iPhone the first time round.

7: A mobile phone game can be a surprisingly powerful emotional experience.

8: Goats have rectangular pupils.

9: Someone wasn’t allowed on my bus today because they weren’t wearing a face covering: so I’ve learned that the rules are now being enforced.

10: “Nowhere in Christian scripture is there any description of a kingdom of perpetual cruelty presided over by Satan, as though he were a kind of chthonian god. Hart regards it as a historical tragedy that the early church evolved into an institution of secular power and social domination, too often reinforced by an elaborate mythology of perdition based on the scantest scriptural hints and metaphors. The fear of damnation can serve as a potent means of social control.”

11: Torontonians are without their water fountains during the current heatwave.

12: I learned only recently that it is expected behaviour—and, in some cases, a school rule—for children to make their own way to school from around the age of five in Switzerland. The Swiss government’s response to a five year old being fined last year for travelling on a bus without a ticket is heartwarming sensible: to make public transport free for young children, with the side-effect of further cementing this approach to school transport.

13: Commercial analogue radio is to continue for a further decade (at least).

14: There’s a feeling of change in the air. Yesterday, I felt hopeful that covid-19 may be bringing to an end this brief era of populism: it seemed plausible that the crisis might sweep away the bombast of Trump, Johnson and Bolsanaro in favour of quieter competence. In the UK, witness the poll rating of Sunak and Starmer as examples of senior politicians who can both think and communicate clearly. Today, The New Yorker’s historical review had reminded me that things are rarely so straightforward: things can get worse as well as better.

15: “Andrew Lloyd Webber has sent a cease-and-desist letter to Donald Trump” sounds like the setup for a particularly corny joke, but it turns out that it’s the news these days.

16: We’re at a curious point in the Government’s response to covid-19. The official advice on gov.uk remains “stay at home as much as possible” yet the Government is running a major advertising campaign to convince everyone to do exactly the opposite, presumably for economic reasons.

17: One of the scariest charts I’ve seen in relation to covid-19 in the UK so far:

18: “When the inquiry does begin, the primary target for the Johnson government’s ire is already clear: PHE. One health service official predicted it would be ‘toast’ after the inquiry. One minister says: ‘We haven’t blamed Public Health England — yet.’”

19: “When Carnegie Mellon researchers interrupted college students with text messages while they were taking a test, the students had average test scores that were 20 per cent lower than the scores of those who took the exam with their phones turned off.”

20: “Britain’s health secretary, Matt Hancock, delivered its message to the assembly. He spoke perkily, as if everything in his country was under control. In fact Britain is the country which, given its relative wealth and long warning time, has failed most grievously to protect its people against the first onslaught of the virus. Its failure lay primarily in its neglect of the low-tech, low-cost, labour-intensive public health methods and community mobilisation that successfully prevented disease in low-income countries: universal lockdowns, self-isolation, masking, quarantine and tracing – by people, not apps – of all those whom sick people have been in contact with. Yet in his short video message Hancock was speaking the old language of Americans and Europeans, coming up with a tech solution – in this case, a vaccine that doesn’t yet exist – to the world’s problems. ‘I’m proud that the UK is leading this work,’ he said, ‘that we’re the biggest donor to the global effort to find a vaccine, and that UK research efforts are leading the way.’ Hancock’s wasn’t the only speech at the assembly to prompt the thought that before there can be solidarity, a little humility would help.”

21: This Psyche documentary following actors at The National Theatre in the hour before they go on stage is fascinating.

22: I learned more about the history of Nespresso. I am a heavy Nespresso drinker. I do at least make sure all of my pods are recycled.

23: “Answering emails is hard, and no matter how fancy your email app, that email isn’t going to write itself. There’s no tool smart enough to cure human stupidity, so maybe we should stop looking for it.”

24: Victorian Britain’s relationship with the seaside was complicated.

25: I think I use singular “they” without really thinking about it: it’s not a point of grammar I can get worked up about. I hadn’t previously clocked this common usage: “How do you complete the following sentence: ‘Everyone misplaces ____ keys’? There is no way to do so that is both uncontroversially grammatical and generally liked. Most people, even those who as a rule don’t like it, will be pulled towards the singular ‘they’: ‘Everyone misplaces their keys.’ The problem with ‘their’ is that pronouns should agree with their subjects in both gender and number. ‘Their’ is fine on the first count, because ‘everyone’ is genderless, but fails on the second, since ‘everyone’ is grammatically speaking singular, and ‘they’ is plural.”

26: Meditation is probably associated with a lower prevalence of cardiovascular risks (at least according to this one limited study). All of my psychiatrist friends meditate themselves and tell me it’s the best thing since sliced bread, in much the same was as endocrinologists tend to talk about Vitamin D supplementation. I wonder what public health people are reputed to bang on about?

27: Satire may have finally been killed off. “Boris Johnson has today unveiled plans to curb junk food promotional deals as part of a new government obesity strategy triggered by the pandemic” just seven days before the start of “a government subsidy to offer people 50% off meals in fast food restaurants.”

28: From Walter Isaacson’s outstanding biography of Leonardo da Vinci, I have learned that Leonardo described the mechanism of closure of the aortic valve in 1510, but it didn’t start to gain mainstream currency among cardiologists until Bellhouse’s work confirmed the description in the 1960s.

29: The decline of the landline is changing literary fiction.

30: The teasmade has been reinvented. It doesn’t look like the one my grandparents used to have beside their bed: the new version is much uglier.

31: Unorthodox was a great miniseries.

1: Talking about how to influence politicians, Professor Dame Sally Davies told the HSJ ”You’ve got to think ‘where are they coming from’ and frame the issues so it has salience for them.” When I was lucky enough to work alongside her, I learned a huge amount from just watching how Sally worked. It still strikes me as notable that many doctors take the approach she describes with their patients but don’t do the same in political discussion. 

2: Leaving portfolios until the end of the appraisal/CPD year is a bad idea. This isn’t really a lesson specific to this year, but I never seem to learn it regardless. 

3: Some days are longer and busier than others. 

4: In Grandeur and Greed, Giles Smith refers to Bassano’s painting The Animals Entering Noah’s Ark as having “the worst depiction of an elephant in any exhibited artwork in a major gallery”. It took me a while to spot it, which rather says it all: I think he might be right. 

5: It’s always lovely to reconnect with an old friend. 

6: Just as the first casualty of war is truth, the first casualty of pandemics is common sense. 

7: The more intensely I work, the more I lose perspective. This is a useful trait, great for total immersion in complex projects, for trying to untangle a complicated outbreak or for trying to make a useful and structured text from lots of conflicting ideas. But I’m learning that it’s not a helpful trait when working intensely to others’ plans, because it’s easy to become fixated on the flaws and fault lines of my little corner rather than seeing the bigger picture taking shape. Rest helps to restore perspective. 

8: I’m not sure whether I actually learned anything from it, but David Marchese’s interview with Aaron Sorkin in The New York Times Magazine was brilliant. 

9: I’ve learned what book reviewers think is the point of book reviews. 

10: Being woken in the middle of the night when on call seems to get even less fun each time it happens, and covid-19 means it is happening a lot. 

11: Sleeping for 12-and-a-half hours straight is still a thing that happens when I’m tired enough. 

12: The Electoral Commission recommends postponing the May elections until the autumn, and I’m surprised by how conflicted I feel about that. 

13: Mind-gardening is a thing. Apparently. 

14: I can’t remember the last time a cartoon stopped me in my tracks like this one by Ella Baron. 

15: Philippe Descamps’s article in Le Monde Diplo on cycling in Copenhagen was interesting—particularly the bit about having predictable provision according to the road’s speed limit. The article suggests that only 6% of daily journeys in Copenhagen are on foot, which I suspect is an artefact of the definition of “journey”: almost everyone will walk some distance on foot each day, and on the occasions when I’ve visited Copenhagen, I’ve enjoyed the fact that provision for pedestrians is as thoughtfully considered as the provision for cyclists. 

16: Despite it being (apparently) very commonly taught in schools and universities, it is only at the age of 34 that I’ve first heard of the “five paragraph essay”. 

17: The good people of Newcastle are, it seems, panic-buying chicken. 

18: Snail facials are exactly what they sound like. According to Race Across the World, there are 52 species of hummingbird in Costa Rica. This came as a particular surprise to me as I thought ‘hummingbird’ was a species. I know nothing. 

19: Even a fairly crude “guy walks into a bar joke” can be a delight when it’s well written. 

20: I usually walk to work: it takes a little under an hour, which is only a little longer than it takes by Metro or car. Today I learned that if the rest of the world self-isolates, it actually only takes nine minutes to drive. 

21: Traveling from London to Mallorca by train, foot and ship is easier, but less environmentally efficient, than I’d have guessed. 

22: I’ve never thought before about the fact that escalator machinery on the London Underground wears unevenly because of “the weight of those who dutifully stand on the right”. 

23: This time three months ago, I thought it was extraordinary that a Government would remove the right of citizens to live and work in any country in the EU. Never did I imagine a British Government could remove citizens’ rights to the extent that they have to stay indoors. I’m living in extraordinary times. 

24: Most of the time, letters responding to articles in medical journals add very little. Sometimes, though, they add completely new insights which change my perspective on an issue: pointing out that health improvement interventions that go along with screening tests are usually ignored in analyses of the effectiveness of screening programmes is a great example. 

25: I don’t think I’ve ever seen an episode of Doctors. 

26: There’s a reason why it feels strange to walk on a stopped escalator. 

27: It’s been too long since I last listened to Reply All. 

28: “Self-sacrifice has always been an implicit part of being a doctor. It is a source of both pride and pain, and why, on the whole, doctors and nurses deserve our respect. Rarely has it been so called upon as in the covid-19 crisis.” 

29: It’s tough to be a spy in a country in covid-19 lockdown. 

30: An article by Peter Blegvad in the latest Brixton Review of Books made me think quite a lot about the relative accuracy of each of imagination, observation and memory: a theme explored in quite a few novels I’ve read, but which I don’t think I’d really considered in art before. 

31: “Pineapple is the smell of masculine.” Apparently. 

I usually try to avoid ‘grumpy’ columns in magazines. As a general rule, they are not very interesting and are not nearly as funny as the author intends. Turning a ‘moan’ into interesting writing is a tricky skill to pull off.

All of that aside: In 1843 magazine, Adrian Wooldridge recently wrote about irritating announcements on public transport:

Some companies seem to revel in redundancy. In the railway world Amtrak is the champion of verbosity. Recorded announce­ments on its trains proclaim the arrival of each station with a peroration ending in a request to “please take this time to look about you and collect your bags”, as though the majority of passengers were otherwise likely to canter off the train in a spiritual ecstasy, leaving their material possessions in their wake.

This complaint touched a nerve. When I was commuting to London on a weekly basis a few years ago, there was one particular train guard whose name became lodged in my memory, so annoying were his announcements. His tone tended to convey a weary sense of superiority: it was with some mild irritation that he reminded passengers to check that their tickets were valid for this particular service, as though only a moron could be confused. He spoke extremely slowly, as though he had been told in training not to speak too fast and had overcorrected. And, most irritatingly of all, he seeemed intent on lengthening every announcement to the greatest possible extent by including superfluous words.

Peterborough would never be the ‘next stop’; it would inevitably be ‘the next station stop at which our service will be calling this morning’. Passengers should not merely content themselves with ‘reading the displayed safety instructions’; rather they should ‘be sure to fully familiarise themselves with the safety information cards displayed on the walls of the vestibules at the end of every carriage on board this service’. Customers should not simply ‘have tickets ready for inspection’; they should ‘be aware that a full ticket check will now take place in all coaches, starting from Coach B at the front of the train, and ensure that they have all tickets, travel documents and railcards to hand both at their seat and when moving around the train.’

The verbosity was almost too much to bear. So while I disagree with Adrian’s preference for not knowing the names of service workers and wearing headphones through safety demonstrations on aircraft, I find it hard not to have a little sympathy with his complaints about excessively loquacious train guards.

As an aside, on a recent train journey, the guard issued the typical reminder that passengers should “take all of their personal belongings with them”. Somebody loudly responded that this wasn’t practical, as most of their personal belongings were at home rather than on a train. I’ll laughed quite loudly, despite myself.

The image at the top is of a Virgin train at Brighton station. The full version was posted on Flickr by Matt Davis, and I’ve reproduced a cropped version here under its Creative Commons Licence.

This week, I’ve chosen something that could perhaps more properly be called a weekend gawp than a weekend read. Before reading Sophie’s Travellettes post, I was already aware of City Hall station on New York’s subway, having read about it somewhere else at some dim and distant point in the past. But I’d never seen pictures, and, by golly, does Sophie have some pictures to share! Her post is well worth a look.

Thanks to an on-call that was rather busier than I prefer, I forgot to post a photo last night. So, to make up for that, here’s one from this morning.

According to some plane geeks sat near me, this is the Emirates Boeing 777-300ER, the biggest aircraft to regularly service Newcastle airport. There was quite some fanfare when the 428-seater started running earlier in the year.

In interviews, Emirates pilots describe Newcastle’s as one of the more “challenging” runways on the 777 route, thanks to its short length. To me, 2.3km sounds quite a long runway, but then I’m not trying to comfortably halt a quarter of a million kilos which hits the ground at 150mph, so perhaps I’m not fully appreciating the situation!

On the day of the announcement of the new Archbishop of Canterbury, evidence of a miracle unseen at Newcastle Airport! Praise the Lord!

This is the second photo today, making up the numbers as I forgot on some previous occasion….!

This is Whistlestop. Or to give it its full name, Whistlestop Foodwine. So fast are they moving that they can’t even pause for an “and”.

Whistlestop is the shop right next to the domestic arrivals area at Newcastle airport. It markets itself as ideal for picking up some bread, milk, or other sundries on return from one’s travels. The bizarre thing about this proposition is that in all the time I’ve been a regular user of this airport, I think I’ve only seen it open once. It seems to have absurdly restricted opening hours.

Now forgive me, but I would’ve thought that a shop like this would cash in on, for example, travellers who return on a Sunday night and need supplies for the following morning. Other shops are frequently closed, so this small store could cash in. Except it’s not open.

Which begs the question… what is its market?! It’s been here for years, so it must be doing something right!

Rail fares are going up again. Every time this happens, talking heads on the news suggest that a re-nationalised railway would be cheaper. Is this true?

That is, of course, an impossible question to answer. It is undeniable that private companies now take profits that would otherwise have been returned to the Treasury under a nationalised system. But there is some data to crunch – There’s some data I’ve located with the help of @jrothwell (he blogs here) and @welsh_lisa2 in the House of Commons library.

This sets out rail fare increases in real terms since the late 80s, using the contribution of rail fares to RPI. I don’t think it’s too erroneous to assume that this is an okay proxy for an inflation-corrected comparison of the average change in rail fares. Because it’s based on a comparison of contribution to RPI with a 1987 baseline, the data isn’t in intelligible units – it’s all comparative.

This data shows a 42% increase in the real cost of rail fares from 1987 to 2011: this seems like a bad thing. This graph shows how rail fares increased over time. It shows the percentage increase on the 1987 fare for each year (including the 42% increase over 1987 fares in 2011).

That looks fairly damning! But is it down to privatisation? Privatisation got underway in 1994. The average year-on-year increase in fares between 1987 and 1994 was 2.34%. If we assume that this level of increase would have continued had privatisation not happened, we can plot the new course of history (red) versus the old one (blue):

As the new red line shows, had fare increases continued at the pre-nationalisation level, they would’ve ended up higher: they would be 73% higher than the 1987 equivalent.

However, some people claim that between 1992, when the Conservatives were re-elected with a mandate to privatise the railways, and 1994, when this actually happened, fares were artificially inflated to make the franchises seem more desirable. So, perhaps it’s unfair to include 1993 and 1994 in our calculation of the pre-nationalisation average increase. If we exclude them, the average year-on-year increase drops to 1.73%. The graph then looks like this:

That is, fares still end up higher in real terms than they actually did: in this scenario, the 2011 fare is 53% higher than the 1987 equivalent.

It would be great to have some pre-1987 data to see if that suspicious looking flick up in 1991 is really unusual, or just part of the pattern of the background picture: certainly if the 1987-1990 trend had continued, fares would hardly have increased. Combined with the above data, this answer in Hansard from Norman Baker suggests that the change from 1980 to 1986 was of the order of 6%. If we assume a 1% year-on-year increase, as that figure suggests, then the predicated and actual fare increase from 1987 to 2011 are pretty much equal.

Bearing in mind all of the above, I’m not sure it’s fair to say that privatisation has driven up passenger fares, even if some of the revenue is now siphoned off to private profit rather than being invested in public services.

Add this decrease in the rate of increase of fares to the indisputable data showing that passenger numbers have risen, passengers satisfaction ratings with both trains and stations have risen, and delays have decreased considerably, and suddenly privatisation seems like it might not have been the disaster we’re often lead to believe it was.

Of course, this is an extremely simplified view of things. I’m ignoring the complexities of the timing of various changes, I’m ignoring the government subsidies that have happened even under the privatised system, I’m ignoring the added jeopardy of train operating companies handing back franchises and leaving the government to pick up the pieces, and I’m ignoring the potentially dubious morality of selling off national infrastructure.

I’m not left with an overwhelming sense that privatisation is the best thing since sliced bread – or even that it was the right move – but I think that perhaps the waters are a little muddier than some would have us believe. And I’m going to stop being geeky now, and resume normal service…!

A few days ago, I mentioned the Royal Victoria Docks Bridge – and since I’m in London today, I thought I’d share a picture of it. As I said, it was built with the capability of running as a transporter bridge like the one in Middlesbrough, but this facility hasn’t been used.

Just a little way from that bridge is the new Emirates Airline. The consensus amongst Londoners that I know is that this is far more a tourist attraction than a serious transport proposal. As a tourist of sorts, I didn’t want to buck the trend, so I hopped on here, at the station on the North bank:

And here’s a pretty picture of the venue formerly known as The O2, but which the IOC now insists on us all referring to as the North Greenwich Arena:

But the most pressing question I had after my brief “flight” was: what’s in the box?

I assume it’s some sort of emergency equipment, but it’s a pretty small box. Do any of my well-informed readers know what’s in it? I’m intrigued…