Tom Roper's Weblog

Travel in the 21st century

I read Simon Jenkins in the Guardian, Don't blame the system for winter travel chaos. Stay put, as I sat on a train hoping to get to work, and itemising the claims I need to make to Southern for disrupted journeys. I have stopped bothering to tweet the daily annoyances of my commute from Seaford to Wandsworth and back. On a good day I leave my house at 6.30 in the morning and return at about 7 at night. There have been few good days lately. As I leave, especially on fine days, I wonder what it would be like to stay put, to walk or run on the hills for the day, or watch the seascape from the beach. Jenkins starts from the premise that travel is undertaken frivolously, for pleasure. On the contrary. Modern capitalism is unable to offer work to many of the population. And for those of us who do have jobs, we cannot work where we live, but are required to make complex and lengthy journeys to workplaces far away. There are many organisations nearer home where I could use my skills and talents, universities, colleges, public libraries, government departments, cultural organisations of all sorts, but none of them are recruiting; indeed most have frozen recruitment, or are, like the University of Sussex, making people redundant. Yet, having required us to travel these long distance to work, capitalism is incapable of organising an efficient transport system to get us there.  When there is snow or ice, they pack up altogether. On the day I read Jenkins, with no snowfall, Southern offered only an emergency service.  The railway system is now largely foreign-owned and, as far as I can see, Southern does not give a fig whether I get to work in the morning or home in the evening. It has over £4,000 of my money for my season ticket and, for them, there the matter ends.

On the buses

I am indebted to Karen Blakeman who discovered that Brighton and Hove bus information may now be had through an iPhone app. My iPhone having settled down after the excitement of the upgrade to 3.1, I downloaded the app. My first impressions: it's very good. It works on data from the GPS gadgets on each bus, information that feed the displays at bus stops and a web page that has existed for several years. The routes and stops lend themselves well to the iPhone's touch-scrolling lists. Above all, it's free. I don't use buses so frequently now, as Brighton and Hove offer no Seaford to Wandsworth service, but at weekends it will be invaluable. I used buses regularly when I worked at BSMS, but then the bus data was only available on the web. There was a considerable delay between checking the bus times on my desktop machine, and arriving at the bus-stop, involving shutting down the computer, packing my bag, shutting the office and walking to the stop, in which time the situation could easily change.

A nostalgic aside: Karen discovered this in the Local Government Chronicle. Long ago it was my job to scan the LGC, and its rival the Municipal Journal, for references to Barnet council, for whom I then worked in the Hendon reference library. How I enjoyed browsing countless pictures of identical men in identical suits, recently appointed Head of Sanitary Services for Loamshire County Council or Director of Photocopiers at Slagtown District.

Off to Tolpuddle

We're off to Tolpuddle for the weekend. Not sure what this means for blogging: the infrastructure in a Dorset field is not very sophisticated.
But it should be good. I see there so far no Flickr photos tagged with Tolpuddle, so I claim the honour of being the first with last year's; more to come. A Technorati search on Tolpuddle finds a surprising number of posts.

The frustrations of the 21st century

Here I am on a train, and my PowerBook has picked up a strong wifi signal. But can I use it? Of course not, though I'd happily pay a reasonable fee, if only to be able to blog that I'm "on the train".
It's the same network I encountered once before, Nomad, but whereas first time round I didn't care that I couldn't use it, I was excited to see that it was there, now I'm just annoyed that there's no way of using it.
I contacted them last time and was told that it was experimental, and asked if I would like to test it. I replied that I would, but never heard any more.
Postscript: on the way home I had time to kill at Victoria so logged on to the BT OpenZone network in the bar, surrounded by drunks, bought some more time, then the battery went.

American notes

Poor Dickens, Dylan Thomas and Malcolm Bradbury, and all the other Englishmen who have written about visits to the USA, for now I follow feebly after them.
And much of what I say has been said before, and I suspect in more elegant style by many others. But the great thing about blogging is that, since I don’t give a fig for the world’s good opinion, I can inflict unoriginal and hackneyed reflections on the American counter-revolution on the world. These are little to do with the MLA conference and I must make clear no criticism of my hosts, who were the soul of grace and hospitality.