Thoughts on a 'Brave New World' (2023)

 

While taking a walk in the local woodlands recently, I was surprised to find a sign at the end of a trail with words along the lines of 'People camping. Homeless so the council can find us - no other reason' [sic]. I may be wrong, but I'm guessing this has something to do with there being so few council houses that they are only available for those with absolutely naff all, which you may even think sounds OK until you consider the sky-high rents that private landlords are charging and the kind of salary you need to get a mortgage on even the most basic flat.

It has often been said that if you put a frog in water and gradually turn up the heat it won't notice that the water has become unbearably hot. This seems a great metaphor for the property market to me. In spite of all that has happened in recent years (killer-viruses, megalomaniac invasions...), the result of the drive to keep house prices accelerating above the rate of inflation is surely still the biggest drain on most people's monthly budgets, where the cost of just having a roof over your head is outstripping the kind of wages being paid for jobs that society needs. Since when did a home become a luxury item?

Back here in deepest Kent the only homes being built in my village are priced from approximately half a million upwards. For me, it is impossible not to ask whether or not society is truly being run for the majority. And is any political leader up to the challenge of doing something about it? Er... don't answer that!

I often feel that many who believe that the world is basically fair simply don't want to think about it. Or maybe it's just more comfortable to believe that you are closer to the millionaire class than to homelessness.

At the same time I hear that almost all railway station ticket offices are earmarked for closure due to the majority of tickets now being bought at machines. It is true that younger, more technologically-minded people might choose to use a machine over human interaction, but older people generally don't, yet it feels that they have been coerced into doing so because many ticket offices are now only taking card payments and older people are more likely to use cash. Thus, it does feel as if the rail operators have engineered this situation somewhat. I get a similar feeling in supermarkets where you can choose to use the self-service checkouts or queue up to see a lone cashier.

I am informed that there may still be somebody assisting customers to use the ticket machine and that it is unlikely that a small village station will get to keep its ticket office when even central stations in large cities are earmarked for ticket office closure, and I guess nobody is going to pay somebody to twiddle their thumbs.

However, in a general sense, if the majority of jobs are going to be performed by machines in the future, what will happen to the workers that are laid off? For instance, what will happen to all the driving roles when driverless vehicles finally stop crashing into walls? You can't stop progress, but my concern is that the jobs being phased out generally aren't being replaced with other jobs that the majority of people can do. Politicians seem to only focus upon 'high quality' jobs, which let's face it, only a minority will be able to get. It seems like it's going to be like a game of musical chairs with jobs. And gosh, won't the wealthy kick up about having to pay more tax in order to support the newly jobless masses? As with climate change I guess our leaders will finally start thinking about it when it's too late.

The optimistic logic of TV programmes like BBC's 'Tomorrow's World' in the 1980s was that if machines are going to be doing all the work, we will all have more leisure time and be able to work less. Life was going to be one big holiday with the leisure sector booming. The problem with this is that managers and shareholders rarely want to share the savings. Look at how the water companies have failed to invest in infrastructure in spite of huge profits. It's trickle-up economics, right?

Also in the news, the NHS recently celebrated its 75-year anniversary, but this came with a warning that it will not make a hundred years if we carry on the way we are. At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, it often seems as though things are just being left to slowly fall apart so that anyone who can afford to switch to private healthcare will do just that, but what happens to the rest of us? It seems pretty obvious that most don't have the spare cash kicking around for private healthcare.

It all seems to come back to ideology at the end of the day. The NHS was founded with a view to society looking after its citizens regardless of wealth, whereas today it seems to me that the prevailing view is that if you don't have the bread it's your problem. As establishment figures are often seen in cathedrals for events such as coronations, I wonder how these advocates of the 'modern' view manage to make that fit with their supposed religious beliefs. Anyone would think they're just pretending!

The economist Richard Layard in his book 'Happiness' provides plenty of graphs showing that the greater the gap between rich and poor is in a country, the greater the prevalence of social problems. I no longer have the book but the graphs were plotted for things like illiteracy, violence, homelessness, drug abuse, etc. It was a pretty comprehensive list that sounds like your average episode of 'Eastenders!' I have found that in pointing this out, one can often be taunted as being a 'communist,' a 'Marxist' or worse, but in truth the solution is never black and white. Any system with no restraint generally ends up destroying itself, and unrestrained capitalism is no different. If life gets seriously bad for a large proportion of the population you tend to get a revolution. Do we really want this? Or should we put the brakes on a bit? Business leaders would probably say 'no, we shouldn't,' while those living in a Kentish wood because they have no other option would surely say it's gone too far already.

Closing the debate down by viewing all criticism of our society as heretical is certainly not my idea of freedom. It sounds more like the something George Orwell would have written about. Keep minds open and speech free at the point of use!

Sorry it was a bit heavy this time. I actively try to avoid seeing too much news, and I guess you can now see why!

Dorset Rail Trails - a Cycling Perambulation

 

I’ve taken five months off from writing, heeding the advice of (presumably) a distant relative Charles Caleb Colton, whose quote can often be found in diaries, ‘When you’ve nothing to say, say nothing.’

With all the news about artificial intelligence creating books and art it looks like the whole lot of us will be redundant soon. I guess those who are pushing the boundaries of technology have different kinds of minds to those who write, paint, make music, dance, create films, etc., being unable to imagine the satisfaction / catharsis that people get by creating something and (preferably) having it appreciated by others. I always thought that the idea was to get machines doing the tedious jobs so humans could be free to do the interesting stuff, but society seems to be heading in the opposite direction to me. It often feels like those in charge have read Orwell's '1984' and thought 'That sounds cool!'

It seemed like winter was never going to end this year, but thankfully my rucksack is down from the attic and has been in use for a few trips now. The most eventful of these was a few days cycling around Dorset. Having explored the Christchurch / Bournemouth / Poole conurbation thoroughly in the winter, I immediately set off on my bike upon alighting at Poole after a six-hour train journey along the south coast. The cycle path ran northward beside Holes Bay, an inlet from Poole Harbour which is reputedly the world’s second largest natural harbour.

Beyond Upton Country Park, I picked up the track-bed of a former railway line, now known as the Castleman Trailway, and eventually I came to the pleasant little town of Wimborne Minster after a leafy cutting and a short tunnel / long bridge under the road. I was lured by a pub which claimed to be the smallest pub in Dorset. However, the staff revealed that the claim was a little bit speculative and that, should somebody make a claim to the epithet for another alehouse, the word ‘probably’ would be added to the sign.

One particular local expressed his admiration at my notion of wild camping with a minimum of equipment (whereas closer to home, comments are often of the ‘not my idea of fun’ ilk. My response is of course that I wasn't inviting them!). Then off I set along lanes passing thatched cottages until picking up another disused railway route from Spetisbury to Blandford Forum. The old station at Spetisbury is well cared for and I stopped for a rest there, admiring the half-moon in the evening sunshine and marvelling at the fact that twelve people have actually set foot upon it. Bringing my musings back down to earth, the Somerset and Dorset Joint Railway ran all the way to Bath and was even used by northern tourists on their way to Bournemouth.

The track-bed disappears as one approaches Blandford Forum, where I camped in a copse in Stour Meadows, a large area of common land. The only evidence of the line here are two arches which were an abutment on one side of the rail bridge over the River Stour. It seems that the pronunciation of ‘Stour’ rhymes with ‘shower’ here, whereas I’ve always maintained that our Kentish river of  the same name rhymes with ‘sewer’ - this is not a comment on the water quality I hasten to add.

Whilst the daytime temperatures touched twenty degrees the nights were unseasonably cold for late May and I had no less than five layers on in my sleeping bag. After a hearty breakfast in a café I was on the rail trail once more, plunging deeper northwest into the Dorset countryside. I stopped to look inside the pretty church at Stourpaine, and the hills on either side of the route were extremely picturesque beyond this, even giving my local ‘Stour Valley’ a run for its money.

At Shillingstone I passed a preserved station, complete with a railway carriage which has been utilised as a seating area for the café, and a replica signal box. I was ushered up the steps and given a demonstration of the levers for the points and signals as well as the system where the train driver is given a metal disc 'token' so that the points and signals at the next signal box cannot be released until the token is handed over and put into the machine. Hence, two trains cannot be charging towards each other on the same stretch of single track. It turns out that there are plans to create a short steam line here, so the working signals will once again serve a purpose beyond educating visitors like myself.

And so to Sturminster Newton and the end of the line. The settlement here was smaller than Blandford or Wimborne and the barman at the White Hart pub explained the difference between real ale and craft ale (craft ale can be served at lower temperatures without compromising its flavour). In spite of this I still ordered half a cider by mistake at one point. When in Dorset…

The remainder of my trip took me back to Poole the way I had come. The variation this time was that I used the signed cycle route along an undulating lane beyond Blandford Forum. Pausing by a hedge I spotted what looked like an upside down naked human form. It was pretty clear that this was a discarded item (presumably by somebody ashamed of its ownership) but I still pinched one of its toes to make sure that I hadn't stumbled across a dead body.

Upon crossing the Stour near Spetisbury, I rode the B-road towards Wareham which was both scenic and increasingly challenging as it went on. Wareham is a pleasant little town and young people were jumping into the river near the bridge that marks the beginning of the Isle of Purbeck. Like our Kentish 'isles' of Thanet, Oxney and Grain the word 'isle' is used loosely here and the imposing hills beyond mean that Purbeck can be seen from a good many miles away. Its stone has been used for building for centuries.

After eschewing the epic Sunday night queue for the chip shop in favour of a Chinese takeaway I headed northward to the woods, which appeared to have a mountain biking circuit in them with banked curves and jumps. I wasn't tempted; I just wanted to sleep. The ground didn’t get as cold as the copse near Blandford had done, which usually seems to be the case in evergreen forests, but a flying critter bit me in the night causing my lip to puff up to resemble something between Mick Jagger and the Elephant Man. This deflated as the next day progressed and hopefully the sunglasses nudged the look towards the ‘rock star’ end of the spectrum as I availed myself of three coffees after the eight-mile ride to Poole the next morning.

With a puffy eyelid to boot, I began the long train journey back to Kent, with a beer break at Eastbourne. I was pleased to see that Blue Moon beer was back on the menu at 'Spoons' and it was served, as it should be, with a slice of orange in the glass. However, three pints savoured in the lengthening sunshine streaming through the window still didn't prepare me for the onslaught of head-wind that I encountered when riding along the coast. My aim of camping one final night near the seaside town of Bexhill was soon abandoned in favour of almost completing my journey back on the next train and camping in a familiar wood around four miles from my home.

If you've enjoyed this traveller's tale, you may be interested to read my books 'Mud, Sweat and Beers' and 'Stair-Rods and Stars.' There's still time to catch these before A.I. steals my bike and my ideas to create a blockbuster written purely by algorithm to maximise sales. I guess the body would have to be dead and the lip would have had to have swollen to disfiguring proportions. Who wants the truth these days, hey?