Happiness is The Dandy and Fry’s chocolate
Team GB just reveals how far we’ve declined Bring back BR, not Worst Late Western
THE world would be poorer without comic strips. I learned to read with an ancient Tiger Tim annual, found in an attic. I hungered each week for the Beano and the Dandy and can remember Desperate Dan when he was in black and white – though my favourite strip, for some reason, was one called Jonah, about a sailor whose ships invariably sank with a loud ‘Bloop!’ One of my chief pleasures is re-reading volumes of Calvin And Hobbes, the funniest and cleverest strip cartoon ever drawn.
So to hear that Desperate Dan is doomed is to be tormented with the half-remembered tastes, smells and sounds of the day before yesterday, like George Orwell’s lyrical description of Edwardian boyhood in Coming Up For Air.
I am once again digging (unsuccessfully) for gold on Dartmoor, eating Fry’s Five Boys chocolate, waving at steam trains, or riding my bike helmetless down car-free country roads. If it were now, I’d be hunched in front of a screen slurping at a bucket of sugared water. I’m often falsely accused of nostalgia, but this time I plead guilty. I NEVER thought I would feel sorry for Richard Branson. But it is obviously wrong and stupid to deprive him of the West Coast rail franchise, and give it to Worst Late Western.
Mr Branson may be pretty awful, but I wouldn’t let Worst Late Western operate a supermarket trolley.
They are experts in greedy fare increases and padded timetables that allow them to run trains slower than they were 20 years ago, yet claim to be punctual. They inflict endless futile announcements on passengers who want peace, but resort to total silence when their elderly trains are mysteriously becalmed in the dark.
But that’s railway privatisation for you, which vies with Gordon Brown’s sale of our gold reserves as the stupidest government policy of modern times. Some people claim British Rail was worse. But BR didn’t have anything like the money that was given to the PUZZLED by hearing about ‘Team GB’ during the Olympics, I sought to find out exactly why the entire United Kingdom wasn’t represented at the Games. It turns out to be a very complex subject. ‘Team GB’ as a name dates back to 1999, though the problem is much older.
The International Olympic Committee, that politically correct body, doesn’t seem to recognise the border between the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland. Could that be why the Olympic Torch veered down to Dublin at one point? I’m not sure.
It’s quite well-known that athletes from Northern Ireland can compete in the Irish or British teams, as they wish. The rule was made in 1952 after two Northern-born swimmers were barred from the Irish team in 1948 amid some bitterness.
The gradual departure of Northern Irish athletes from the British team is a sensitive measure of Britain’s diminishing power. The process is not over. I wonder how long it will be before Belfast athletes get into trouble for joining Team GB? private train operators (who siphoned it all out into their own pockets) and also to Failcrack, the people who shamefully neglected what had until then been some of the best maintained lines in the world.
Now the subsidies are being squeezed, and so it is the passengers who suffer.
The Transport Department hates railways and loves roads and airlines, which is why roads are still nationalised (who did you think owned them?), and air travel is still hugely subsidised, thanks to the exemption of aviation fuel from duty and VAT.
I love trains and think they are a great British invention and vital to civilisation. But even if you don’t agree with me, you’d miss them if they weren’t there because of all the goods and cars that would end up on the roads instead.
Any party that promises to bring back BR will get my vote.