PUBLIC AND PRIVATE TRANSPORT

My much-loved Jaguar, sadly not running now

It all went back to Christmas a couple of years ago. I was driving my much-loved Jaguar to some friends on what proved to be a very wet (not a white) Christmas. I drove into a puddle and, to cut a long and painful story short, found my car being flooded. It was a write off and I never got to drive it again. Incidentally, I was impressed by the fact that someone local gave us a lift back to our cottage and another man turned up to rescue us and did not charge extra for working on Christmas day. Would he have done that in Britain? I doubt it.

Anyway, we became a one-car couple after that. I paid something towards our Toyota which Leena uses mostly. She chose it and is driving it to the stables as I write. Meanwhile, I rely on public transport to get around. It takes about two and a half hours to get to London door to door by train so I do not go early in the morning, but travel the night before and stay in my house in Brixton if I do. It is little too far to commute, although I sometimes go back in the afternoon

if I am doing a half-day tour. I usually enjoy going to London for work on the train.

 

However, sometimes the vagaries of public transport let me down both in and outside the capital. Recently, a points failure meant that the Victoria line was out and I had to take a roundabout journey to get back to Brixton. More seriously, a journey to London involved a roundabout trip via Brighton because of – you guessed it – a points failure. Instead of taking a couple of hours it required a whole morning. Fortunately, at neither time was in a hurry. I am all in favour of train travel but it does require the proper functioning of equipment.

 

I am worried that one day I will have to make an apologetic phone call to an operator saying that I cannot be where I am supposed to be at the appointed time. In fact, now I think about it, I had to do that once a year or so ago. The delay was actually caused by a car breaking down in the tunnel towards Heathrow and, although I had left a couple of hours to get to the airport hotel I was due at, I was running late. Fortunately, so was everyone else and the reason for the delay was accepted by the operator and hardly noticed by the clients.

 

I always leave plenty of time to get to the hotel/airport I am expected at as I factor in possible delays in the public transport system. If they do not occur, I arrive early but I do not mind being early and it is better to be early rather than late, If I have to wait at the lobby of the hotel, there are worse places to read the paper as I do so. Being very early is probably a bit naff, not to say naïve, but I have never quite been able to take a colleague seriously who I felt was cutting her arrival at the hotel too fine – a little close for comfort.

 

In an ideal world we would all take public transpor to get around and people would leave their cars at home. I never take my car into central London these days and rely on buses and the underground system. (Actually two thirds of it is above ground but that is a different story to be told another day.) However, we do not live in an ideal world and, frankly, will never will. It was the attempt to do so that caused communism to fail so dramatically. People preferred the occasional and admitted failures of capitalism to the unadmitted failures of communism in the end.

 

An essential part of building a successful society is learning from your mistakes and that means admitting to them in the first place. One thing I most remember from the film The Death of Stalin is the belief, expressed early in the film, that plane crashes never occur in Russia because socialism has made a perfect society where mistakes never happen. Dream on comrades. We all make mistakes and it is important in learning from them to first of all acknowledge them. Lots of fortunes were made by people who slipped up first.

 

Henry Ford is a name that springs to mind here, He had several false starts before he started he successfully started making cars. Ford, by the way, was a notorious antisemite and a far from admirable man but he had a certain knack. He is reported to have said that you can have any colour you want as long as its black. In fact, he later produced cars in several colours, reasoning that his customers would want more of a choice, but in the early days of mass-production black was both the cheapest and quickest drying type of paint available.

 

The fact is that any free society has to draw a balance between public provision and private choice. You have to wait for public transport but can drive your car whenever you want. However, you have to pay for it, both in parking, which is both difficult and expensive in central London, and because of the congestion charge imposed on car drivers or a combination of the two. The mayor of London might have introduced the congestion charge but he would never have done so without government approval.

 

As a result, as I tell clients, I never take the car into central London. This is partly because  I sometimes end a tour at a different place to where I have begun and it would be a pain to go back to collect the car; partly because it is expensive and difficult to park; and partly because I am now old enough to travel for free on public transport with my freedom pass. Maybe, by the way, we give older people too easy a ride but old people tend to vote and no politician wants to upset them – as good an argument for voting as I have ever heard. 

 

Public transport is socialism in practice, private driving is capitalistic. However, allowing or encouraging everyone to drive cars would not only cause much worse air pollution but clog up the roads more than they are already. Making everyone take public transport may seem fairer but it would always have a hint of ‘we know best’ about it and the chaos caused by the inevitable failure of the system on occasions would never work in a free society where disgruntled people could vote four or five years.

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

 

 

LOOKING BACK ON 2025

First woman Archbishop of Canterbury,
the former nurse Dame Sarah Mullally

I was going to write about the aches and pains that come with old age, but I thought that people would not want to hear about my ailments and have decided to write about the advance of women in our society. I have touched on this topic in diaryofatouristguide,blogspot,com - my other blog on what I do for a living. I publish it every Monday, the first day of the week, while I post this blog on the last day of the month. It is about what I think rather than what I do.

As the photo above shows, the new Archbishop of Canterbury is a woman. So too is the Mayor of the City of London. She is not the first to have taken not his role but the third. However, she is the first to have assumed the title of Lady Mayoress instead of Lady Lord Mayor. It seems like a minor change but it probably reflects the growth of feminism in our society. Although the late Bridget Bardot said that 'feminism is not her thing' it has had an effect on what goes on.

You don't have to describe yourself as a feminist to be affected by the movement and what it stands for. The militant outlook often affect others who do not follow the fmeinist movement. No-one publicly argues in favour of automatically lower pay for women and for restricting their opportunities in order to allow men to 'support their families' or some similar trope. People generally accept the principles of gender equality these days.

Do they also accept the practice? In my business, tourist guiding, the question hardly arises because gender equality is more or less ignored rather than fought over. You work as  a tourist guide and get paid and never has it been said that because you are a woman should you be paid less. IN extended tours, the personal skew more to men, while tourist guiding (in which you work on a daily rather than weekly or two-week basis) the workforce is predominantly female.

While writing this piece, I have been half-listening to a conversation on feminism in which John Hunt was taking part. He was a racing commentator whose wife and two of his three daughters was killed by the former partner of one of these daughters. This is where male dominance of women is still prevalent - in the most old-fashioned way, in simple violence towards the female gender. Men are for the most part simply stronger than women and can inflict violence.

This has led to the growth in misogyny against women. No-one publicly supports misogyny but a few people follow the habits of it in private. Men are conditioned more to violence than women and often take out their fury on the female gender in violent ways, which if they gave themselves time to think about it, they would probably not countenance. Time to think.Men often commit atrocious acts of violence (sexual and physical) without thinking.

They often have a lifetime behind bars to regret their impulsiveness. It may have seemed satisfying to take out your violence by one act but it defines you for the rest of your life and I often wonder how many of these locked up behind bars for life would repeat their actions if they had a chance to reconsider them. Most would not, I am sure but it is too late to think again. Once the act is done, a life is lost or changed forever, and the perpetrator has to live with it.

Although I have no doubt that, If I was born a woman, I would be a feminist, speaking as a man, I have reservations about the movement and I would not wear 'I am a feminist' t-shirt. Why not? I suppose I have to think about my personal life here, I was involved in the break-up of my family some years ago and I was more or less forced out of the family home. Although I remained in touch with my children and my relationship with them is good, I feel that I missed out somehow.

There is still the assumption that the man will move out when a relationship ends, even if there are children from it and it is not his 'fault' that it has ended. I put that world in inverted commas because we now have no-fault divorce and the idea of blaming one person for a break-up has been consigned to history. However, my conscience is clear and I cannot help thinking that if he has been willing we could have made it work.

But she was not willing, so I was made to live apart from the children. I suppose she was a perfectionist and I am far from perfect, so she is on her own and I am in another relationship (and quite happy) while she is by herself (and probably also fairly happy). Things have worked out ok in my life. The kids are ok and I have come to terms with separation and family break-up but I still won't wear the t-shirt. 

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com