PETER HITCHENS

A whiff of decay swirls around Britain

I HAVE often predicted that we would soon be applying for full membership of the Third World. But I think we may actually have secretly joined it.

In the last week, my regular railway line, in the throes of a vastly expensive and interminable modernisation, grossly behind time and over budget, was shut down. Why? Because a test train ran along it and managed to pull down 500 yards of newly installed electric cable. But this was just an inventive new sort of mess. Normally it closes, or slows down to the speeds of the 19th Century, every few days for a ‘signal failure’ or because the weather is too hot, too cold or too windy, or because of mysterious disappearances of train crew. Are they being abducted by aliens?

While I endure this, I am unceasingly hectored by automated announcements, the latest being a creepily friendly voice that urges me to hold the handrail as I go up the stairs on the station footbridge.

The fewer and later the trains, the more announcements there are. But when everything goes totally wrong, silence falls, staff disappear and electronic screens go blank.

On my way to the station, I have to pick my way past unending roadworks (I do not think the three-mile journey has been free of these for a single day in the past three years). Most of the time nothing at all is actually happening, and it would take a trained archaeologist to work out what has changed from one week’s end to the next.

At the luxurious cinema in a newly built shopping mall (which took longer to complete than the Pyramids), buckets recently appeared to catch leaks from the ceiling after some moderately heavy rain. Its air-conditioning was overpowered by the summer heatwave, which is surely what it was built to deal with.

And ever and again, as I walk or bicycle down the streets of modern British cities, which are flashy and modern on the surface, my nose picks up the ancient, unmistakable smell of malfunctioning drains, which you might expect to encounter in Baghdad, Cairo or Bombay, but is something new here.

And if it’s not that, it is the equally unwelcome aroma of marijuana, that is now legal here in all but name.

Perhaps the two are connected.