How Hard Can It Be_ - Jeremy Clarkson [2]
Plainly, all this has to stop. We must go back to the closing days of the nineteenth century when, without any heavy lifting gear or automation, 177 miles of broad-gauge railway line from London to Bristol and beyond was converted to narrow gauge in just one weekend. Actually, we don’t even need to go back that far. The M1 was not there one morning and the next it was. Then there was Spaghetti Junction. The 30-acre site was crisscrossed with two railway lines, three canals and two rivers but despite this they had to build a network of slipways that would link eighteen different roads. And they got the whole thing done in thirty months. Which is about as long as it takes these days to build a garden shed, if you do it by the book.
I believe that the time has come to stop the nonsense and last week we were gifted the perfect opportunity. As I’m sure you heard, the Royal Marsden hospital in Chelsea, west London, was severely damaged by a fire and even a partial loss of its facilities is rather more than an inconvenience. A damaged railway line causes people to be late for work. A damaged hospital, which sees 40,000 patients a year and sits at the centre of an already overstretched National Health Service, may well cause people to die. Gordon Brown visited the scene and said that the evacuation of the hospital at the time of the blaze had seen Britain at its best. And that he would do everything in his power to get the place up and running again.
Stirring words and now let’s go for some stirring action. People are already saying that it will take ‘months’, which is government speak for ‘years’, to remove the ruined roof and replace it with a new one. But why can we not aim to do it in ‘weeks’?
Let’s go back to the days when governments – and rail companies for that matter – knew that they existed to serve us and that we weren’t just a nuisance who are told to stay at home if we’re not involved and wrapped up in fluorescent clothes if we are.
Let’s go back to the days when speed was not a dirty word. In 1994 the Santa Monica freeway in California was destroyed by an earthquake. You may remember the scenes of total devastation: crumpled bridges, huge slabs of concrete, twisted steel and rubble. It was a nightmare, but they had traffic running on it again in just eighty-four days.
Let’s aim for the same sort of target with the Marsden. Let’s tear up the rulebook about carbon dioxide and hard hats and no reversing without a banksman. Let’s get the builders in there tomorrow, or now, and let’s allow them to smoke so they don’t have to pop outside every fifteen minutes.
To achieve this, a vast army of busybodies and nitwits will need to be kept at bay as they strut about with their clipboards and their concerns that mice may be nesting in the embers and that they must be taken, in a helicopter, to the countryside and freed humanely before work can start.
Dealing with them is possible, providing the man in charge has a side parting, a small moustache and a fondness for telling everyone who gets in his way to eff off. It’s a job that I would like very much.
Sunday 6 January 2008
This has been my perfect week
A couple of weeks ago, plans for a wonderful new coal-fired power station in Kent were given the green light and I was very pleased. This will reduce our dependency on Vladimir’s gas and Osama’s oil and, as a bonus, new technology being developed to burn the coal more efficiently will be exported to China and exchanged