The wrong train tickets – and the wrong sort of signalling
Somehow, this story is both unbelievable and all too believable. The other week, a football fan from Newcastle was planning to take his girlfriend to watch his team play at Oxford. To save money, he decided that, rather than buy return tickets, he would buy a sequence of discounted tickets for individual stages of the journey.
He managed it, too. Know how many tickets he ordered? Fifty-six.
That’s how barmy train ticketing is in this country. This man sat on the same trains from Newcastle to Oxford, and from Oxford to Newcastle, as the passengers who’d bought a normal return. But he paid less than they did. The only catch: he had to carry a pile of tickets thicker than a pack of playing cards.
Little wonder, then, that the Office of Rail and Road – the rail regulator – has now found that a fifth of people buy the wrong ticket from station ticket machines. There’s so much unnecessary choice, so many bewilderingly named tickets at bewilderingly different prices, that passengers don’t know which to pick. This is a pain not only for the confused, but for the non-confused who are having to queue, at frustrating length, behind them.
There’s nothing else for it. We’re going to have to make the use of train ticket machines a compulsory subject in schools.
It should be a branch of advanced mathematics. When it was coined, two years ago, the term “virtue signalling” seemed a useful addition to the language. Such a concise and effective little label for sanctimonious showing-off; a way to highlight selfrighteousness and dishonesty.
Now, though, its use is out of control. Often we see it deployed to undermine those who say anything remotely charitable. Think the Government shouldn’t abandon its promise to child refugees? You’re a virtue-signaller. Disagree with Donald Trump’s unfair and unlawful travel ban? You’re a virtue-signaller.
Perhaps by October, those wearing Remembrance poppies will be mocked as virtuesignallers, too. And were He to return to Earth tomorrow, preaching compassion, forgiveness and love, I fear we know what Jesus would be dismissed as. Increasingly, the insult of “virtue signalling” says more about those flinging it than those they seek to belittle. To me, it suggests fear. Deep down, the people shouting “Virtuesignaller!” are scared. Since they feel no sympathy for those less fortunate than themselves, they refuse to believe anyone else feels sympathy, either. Those expressing sympathy, therefore, must be lying; they must just be saying it to earn brownie points and look superior. The people who shout “Virtue signaller!” need to believe that. Because the alternative – that they themselves are simply selfish, small-minded and emotionally shrivelled – is one they can’t bear to contemplate.
board, I don’t envy the people currently making a film about the 2015 Hatton Garden heist. How can its script possibly live up to the stupendous reality?
Never have I so thoroughly enjoyed reading about a trial. The court reports teemed with wonderful comic details. The gang who carried out the heist was composed largely of elderly men, and the whole ill-fated farce read like a Cockney version of Last of the Summer Wine.
Among the gang was John Collins, 76, who fell asleep while acting as lookout. Also: Brian Reader, 77, who was identified by police because he’d travelled to the scene of the crime by bus using his pensioners’ Oyster card.
Then there was William “Billy” Lincoln, 61, whose neighbours struggled to believe he could have been involved in such an extraordinary crime. For one thing, it all sounded much too strenuous.
“He’s had a hip done,” said one neighbour, “and he’s waiting for the other hip to be done. He’s had sleep apnoea. You name it, Billy’s had it. He wouldn’t be sliding down the old lift shaft.”
Personally, I couldn’t help feeling a bit sorry for Billy and the gang. They’d tried so hard. They’d even attempted to cover their tracks using the help of a book titled Forensics for Dummies.
These men were guilty. And yet, at the same time, so endearingly innocent. Donald Trump boasts to Americans about how he’s going to “bring back our jobs”. He plans to do this, apparently, by imposing a thumping great border tax on the wares of manufacturers that move abroad. I wonder whether he’s considered the following possibility.
Lord Baker of Dorking – otherwise known as Kenneth Baker, education secretary under Margaret Thatcher – recently published a report titled The
Digital Revolution. In it, he analyses the potential problems caused by workplace automation: in other words, replacing human employees with robots and computer programmes.
“I have believed up to now that technical revolutions create more jobs than they destroy,” Lord Baker writes. “The Digital Revolution – the Fourth Industrial Revolution – will not follow this pattern.”
His report cites a study by two Oxford dons, who concluded that “about 47 per cent of total US employment is at risk”. That isn’t a misprint. It really does say 47 per cent.
It’s all very well for Trump to force businesses to keep their factories in America. It won’t be much use to the “economically left behind” who voted for him, though, if those factories are all soon staffed by robots.
Trump, as we’ve already seen, doesn’t think twice about imposing bans, nor about threatening businesses that displease him. Will he try to ban the replacement of people with machines?