Straddle bags

We're in a funny period of the year at present.  Everyone's at sea because the shift from late summer to full-on winter was compressed into about 600 minutes this year.  A little over a week ago, Mrs O and I would spending the evenings in the beer garden of our local, basking in the relative heat.  Now, London resembles a vast grey paddy field, with pools of standing water and a constant gale blowing.  To compensate for the hellish prospect of winter (yeah, another one), the wife and I have a number of mini-breaks planned to lighten the drizzly load.  We visiting several of England's provincial cities.

England is blessed with a good number of fascinating cities, but you'd be hard-pressed to know it.  The county is ridiculously London-centric.  People from the provinces blame Londoners for this, but in my experience, most cockneys just want to be left alone to enjoy their home town.  We don't want the place to be overrun every September by an army of recent graduates intent on making their fortune here.  Most of us would like nothing more than for the streets, tubes, buses and pubs of London to be slightly less frantic than they currently are.

This mania for all-things-London has reached its civil engineering apotheosis with the frankly ludicrous HS2 rail scheme.  For those of you unaware of this stunt, the plan is to build a high-speed railway link from London to Birmingham, and then onwards to the north.  This it's argued will rejuvenate the midlands and north by slightly reducing the time it takes company directors to travel to the capital...on expenses.

HS1, which passes very close to my home, is a wonderful example of elegant white elephantiasis.  It's spectacularly under-subscribed.  This is due to its being eye-wateringly expensive.  Now and again, Mrs O and I will treat ourselves to a jolly to the coast of Kent using it.  But it's really in the same category as a trip over the Malvern Hills in a hot air balloon might be.  I certainly wouldn't use it more than four times a year.  It's just too rich for my blood.

Still, I'm sure the second one will be much better than the first.  They'll have learnt their lessons from the first flawed stab.  Oh, yes.