Last week I caught a glimpse of a future without fossil fuels, and I do not wish to go there. Yet, despite its President claiming there was no science behind calls to abandon fossil fuels, that is precisely what the COP28, which met recently in Dubai, has called for.
My story starts with the Editor-in-Chief of the Daily Sceptic who, despite his manifest qualities, is an ardent supporter of Queen’s Park Rangers (QPR). The fortunes and misfortunes of his local team are recorded in his Pride of West London Substack. Having lived in Kingston-upon-Hull for nearly 25 years, I long ago adopted Hull City, ‘The Tigers’, as my team, and my sons and grandsons have followed suit.
Since lockdown ended and football fans returned to the terraces, Toby and I have developed the habit of buying each other, and whatever assortment of our descendants come with us, lunch or dinner near our home grounds before our teams, both in the Championship (old Second Division), meet.
Thus it was that I found myself at Hull Paragon Station at 7am with my son Tom and four of my grandchildren, the youngest only eight years old, waiting for the train to London. We got to London, we got to Uxbridge Road, we met Toby and family and had lunch. This was not without its own difficulties as explained by Toby in his Substack column last week.
Thereupon, things went downhill quickly. QPR had not won two games in succession this season. In fact, they had barely won any games and we had not lost two games in succession. However, all that changed in favour of QPR who thumped us 2-0 and we deserved both goals and possibly more. For an alternative view of the match, from the losing side, see my grandson Jack Watson’s entry in his Ten Foot Tigers Substack.
With the long journey home to contemplate, things could hardly get worse. But they did. We struggled to get a seat in a crowded Pizza Express. I had made a reservation online, but it had not registered. We were accommodated by a kind and well tipped receptionist but had to rush somewhat to catch the train home, which is when it got much worse.
King’s Cross was packed with people staring at the departure screen on which it was indicated that all trains out of the station were “Delayed”. The delay was due to a storm that evening which had taken down overhead electrification at Peterborough. Hull is not on an electrified line, but we were catching an LNER to Doncaster intending to change to Hull. The line to Doncaster is electrified.
With six of us to find rooms for, all that was running through my mind was “what if the trains are cancelled?” And I soon found out. They were all cancelled. Immediately, like angry bees flowing from a hive, Euston Road was engulfed by hordes of northerners in search of hotel rooms. We ran to the nearest Premier Inn, but it was already fully booked. It was pointless trying to find anywhere else nearby as the streets outside looked like a Viking invasion was underway as people ran here and there, prepared to kill if necessary for a hotel room.
Via the Booking.com app on my phone I found us a place off Tottenham Court Road, near Oxford Street and, £600-plus poorer, we made our way to the Zedwell Underground Hotel which is, indeed, under the ground four storeys down. It deserves an article of its own. We scoured the local shops for toothbrushes, toothpaste, deodorant and phone chargers and settled down for the night, dreaming of clean underwear.
Up like a bunch of larks we trotted off to King’s Cross in search of a train. We knew our tickets were still valid, but hope turned to despair when we saw the crowds and the departures board with a row of “Delayed” displayed. The problem at Peterborough had not been resolved.
The information desk was giving out conflicting stories about alternative stations and routes such as the train to Sheffield from St. Pancras and that, of course, our tickets would still be valid. I went over to St. Pancras, grandchildren in tow, to ask. I think the chaps at the barrier are still laughing a week later.
Meantime, back in Kings Cross, two trains north were bucking the trend and displaying “On time”. They were both for Aberdeen and the story at the information desk was that they “might be running”. It struck me that these must be diesel trains and I positioned myself, surrounded by grandchildren, at the barrier and dared anyone to move. My tactic was to keep an eye out for activity at the ends of the platforms and any shuffling of the barriers by the copious LNER operatives who were barring our way.
It worked and when we were told that the Aberdeen train at Platform 5 was ready to board, we ignored the “do not run” cries from said LNER operatives and hoofed it to the train where we all got a seat. Many had to stand.
The train was, indeed, a diesel and even though it could not go via Peterborough it was able to make a lengthy but picturesque diversion via Lincoln. We made a swift connection at Doncaster and, over 12 hours late, we were all in the bosoms of our families in Hull once again. There is a moral to this story which I hope there is no need to explain.
Dr. Roger Watson is Academic Dean of Nursing at Southwest Medical University, China. He has a PhD in biochemistry. He writes in a personal capacity.
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A more in depth moral is “don’t do things on the cheap”, if you consider the history of the East Coast electrification, back in the 1990s!
Very true.
I daily drove the 30 minute journey from E. Yorks to Doncaster railway station to catch the 0700 to Kings cross and thence onto a no 77 bus to Whitehall. Did that for 18 months in 1983/4. Diesel days with virtually no delays. Home journey after a day’s work dragged a bit. One guy on the platform at Donny for the King’s X train commuted from Hull every day.
From the level of spiritual science it is important to remember that the earth is past its most vtal and abundant point and has been decaying for a very long time. There are times when you have to burn some wood to stay alive. There was a time where we used to loll about naked and bask in the purple haze of the Saturn dawn. Food was plentiful and just picked ripe off the trees. Our times will require more and more burning and excavation on many levels. It is nothing to be ashamed of. Just like eating insects is nothing to be ashamed of when you’re starving to death.
WTF?
Actually we have only used about one tenth of the fossil fuels in the ground. —–Those utopian times you speak off where we lay around naked and picked abundant fruit from trees was not so utopian at all as we all died young of preventable diseases and after a very short life of back breaking labour. Then along came fossil fuels to give us prosperity ,good health and much longer lifespans. We can still pluck the fruit, but we are much more organised these days and pluck it from the supermarket instead of the tree, where a pack of hyena’s were lying in wait to pluck us.
Fossil fuel, or more specifically oil, interests are what decimated the railways in Britain in the first place: oil, car manufacture and road construction interests (who had also been key supporters of Nazi Germany) ensured that large swathes of the country were left without a rail connection whilst the rest was doomed to suffer unreliable services in perpetuity as diversionary routes were removed and motorways cut through historic town centres and beautiful countryside with an every-obliging Imperial College academic in the person of Dr Beeching (also not a fan of electrification) gave a ‘scientific’ veneer to the wanton destruction and flagrant corruption as ordinary people were told that the small fortune they handed over in taxes and to buy their, now desperately needed, new cars was ‘freedom.’
There seems to be an irresolvable issue in the British mythos that persisted from classical times into the medieval and then was just mindlessly transmitted ever since and that is the distinction in Greek terms between art, science and technology.The historian Richard Starkey has a lecture on Youtube on this subject. The rarefied mind, the mind made to measure things were extolled this way and that and the real art which is the art of producing things was relegated. If this country could get over this neurosis it could easily become very strong. Obvious natural advantages like English being the international language of business. If you could combine that with the intelligence and energy of the natives it would be a potent force but it is very stifled at the moment.
Moderator: might that be David Starkey, as opposed to Richard?
Sounds more like Richard – musing in his Hashish days on an Ashram,
“The rarefied mind, the mind made to measure things were extolled this way and that and the real art which is the art of producing things was relegated.”
Eh?
It is all a distectionary conversation anyway in terms of the sort of civic infrastructure that we might have. I speak to Scottish people all day and English people and there is definitely a yearning for something else. Nobody likes being skanked by some foreign electricity company. I don’t care I float all boats I would just tell you that when things go down big time internationally then England and Scotlane will take on a more life and death situation.I wish it didn’t have to come to that but it will. You will have all sorts of needy people wanting your help. And it could all have been avoided.
Are you getting enough sleep? What on earth does “distectionary” mean?
Would those by the Scottish people who keep voting in an SNP Govt because Braveheart and the evil Thatcher?
A very light hearted look at a good example of why fossil fuels are essential and will be around for a very long time. Because they do what it says on the tin, and Renewables do NOT.
Back when Private Eye was good, the Rev Tawdry would have done a piece on this, illustrated by a Ken Pyne cartoon of Thomas the Electrified Tank Engine looking glum as a smirking diesel train chugs past.
I think I’d have given up and hired a large car ….. a petrol one, natch.
Or a taxi – would have been cheaper than £600 overnight stay.
“Last week I caught a glimpse of a future without fossil fuels…”
Those of us old enough experienced it in the early 1970s – rolling power cuts, three day week, reduced food in shops, petrol ration coupons printed by the ‘crisis’ coming to an end. (Grocer Heath given the electoral elbow by the Nation preferring electricity to him. Sunak & Starmer Comedy Duo should note.)
The diesel would be a diesel-electric as electric motors are more efficient and don’t need mechanical gears. And don’t need power lines and are less weather affected.
Whilst there are some battery trains, travelling short distances with relatively light loads, main-line trains aren’t. I wonder why not?