AN OUTSIDE VIEW

An initial reading of the Chancellor's Autumn statement reveals that the go-ahead has been given to the TransPennine electrification and the strategic Oxford-Bedford line. These are two of dozens of projects around the country that cumulatively represent excellent value for money. We need a rolling programme of such schemes.

Lenovo X61 repair , a photo by Henry░Law on Flickr. I bought an X61 laptop recently, about four years old with nothing on the disk. These are very good value at around £150 on Ebay. With the small battery and without the docking bay it weighs about 1300 gm which makes it a powerful netbook, with a 1TB hard drive and 4GB RAM. When started to use it I discovered minor damage to the plastic case. There was a split on the left hand side at the very rear, spreading from the corner of the fan ventilator. As a result the screen and lid were opening unevenly. This is a stress point and a design flaw not on the earlier X31 I have. I would not be surprised if many X61 machines have exactly the same damage. I have mended it unobtrusively by cutting a piece of black plastic and super-gluing it over the crack, which reinforces where it is needed. As it would have been easier to do this before the crack had occurred, it might be worth thinking about doing this preventatively.

There is more moaning about tax havens. Professional moaner about tax havens, Richard Murphy, has just published a book on the subject. I am sure it is a fascinating read. Personally I do not give a fig about about tax havens. They are the product of a rotten tax system. If the bucket leaks it is up to the owner of the bucket to fix it. They should not blame the cat for lapping up the spilled milk.

The government's announcement of guarantees for 95% mortgages for house purchase, suppported by both Prime Minister Cameron and Deputy Clegg, demonstrates either an absolute lack of understanding of the nature of the problem, or moral cowardice, or both. The aim, we are told, is to "unstick the housing market", which has stagnated due to the banks' refusal to give mortgages larger than 80% of the value of the property they are lending on. Fanny May = taxpayers will pay This sets the scene for a UK run of the Fannie Mae debacle. It will also pump up the housing bubble for a while. The government is doing the very thing it should not be doing. If the housing market worked as advocates of the free market assure us it does, then the price of houses would drop to market-clearing levels. Some building firms would lose a lot of money, having bought land at the height of the boom and found themselves stuck with it in what they call their "land banks". T...

From next week, for a trial period, our local parish priest has decided to say an Traditional Latin Mass (TLM) every Sunday. This is partly a response to the growing attendance at the weekly Friday evening TLM, and partly as a result of experience with using this liturgy on other occasions. The surprise has been that it is more accessible and inclusive than the 1970 Mass in any of its forms. This is not an experience confined to the local parish, as I have noticed it elsewhere. The future of the Catholic church is with the TLM, accompanied of course by other practices such as regular prayer by the laity and regular confession. The main benefits are, first and foremost, that it is perceived as more prayerful. There are extended and well-defined periods of silence, but it is a silence in which something is happening. With the priest facing in the same direction as the rest of the congregation, there is a stronger sense that everyone is taking part in the action, which is less dominated b...

Chiltern Railways has extended a service to London by an extra carriage; great for easing overcrowding, but less helpful to the commuters stuck at Saunderton station because their platform is too short. Is it beyond the ingenuity of the industry's engineers to devise a system with a detector and locking system so that a door can be opened only if there is a station platform alongside? Article here

Before the electrification of the West Coast Main Line, there were two routes from London to Birmingham, with little to choose between them. The direct Great Western route, which ran through High Wycombe and Bicester, was then more or less abandoned as a through service, with the section from High Wycombe to Aynho Junction being reduced to single track. Since privatisation, the route has been upgraded and converted back to double track. Earlier this year Chiltern Railways introduced a through service from Marylebone to Birmingham, and there is even a suggestion to electrify the route. Unfortunately, further development is going to be limited by restrictions at Marylebone, which in the space of twenty years has been transformed from a sleepy backwater to a very busy station with a large volume of local traffic. There is, however, another route into London which is scarcely used - the former main line into Paddington which branches off the Great Western route to the west at Old Oak Commo...

Electrostar train - cramped seating , originally uploaded by Henry░Law . Electrostars, the EMU originally developed by AdTranz before it was taken over by Bombardier, are a mixed bunch. The first entered service around 2000 and comprise classes 357, 375, 376, 377, 378 and 379. Originally they were quite unreliable but they are now in the same league as the EPB units which they replaced, dating from the 1960s. Variations include alternative seating layouts, sliding or plug doors, full width cabs or half-cabs with gangways (top picture), and AC, DC or dual voltage types. Probably the most successful version is the class 378 for London Overground (second picture), which has sliding doors and longitudinal seating, an ideal layout for the type of service for which they are used. Some versions are very comfortable, for example the end cars in the units operating on the Southern main lines (third picture) have 2+2 seating with tables, all aligned to the windows. Much less satisfactory are the...

The recent decision by the courts, that priests are in effect employees and answerable to their bishops, raises two concerns. These will presumably be considered by the appeal court to whom the matter has now been referred. First, there is the substance of the complaints themselves. Many of these relate to incidents long ago. The principal actors are in many cases long dead and cannot be cross-examined. There is a lot of money at stake. How can genuine victims be distinguished from gold-diggers? Second, in the event of damages being awarded, who should be responsible for paying? Parishioners contribute to the church's funds, and it appears that these are held by trustees under rules set by the Charity Commissioners. Is compensation for actions due to a bishop's negligence a proper use of these funds? There would be a good case to argue that they are not. Most people would not give money to the church if they thought it was going to be used for such a purpose. In effect, it woul...

This is the protest camp that has sprung up in Brighton, in Victoria Gardens. It seems to be dominated by the local anarchists. I have a certain sympathy with their anger as they are the generation that is paying for the decades of mismanagement of the economy. However, a brazier was burning under a large and very old tree, which cannot have been good for it. I suggested that they might like to move it to where there were no tree branches above. I mentioned this to someone there, and she said she accepted the point and would put it to everyone at the meeting. It seems as if there is a democratic structure in which everyone has an equal voice. Perfect democracy, one might say. Except this. It is worrying that nobody had the sense to realise that fires should not be lit under trees. But in situations like this, there are those who know and those who do not, and giving everyone an equal voice could have a bad outcome. It is like trying to run a ship with a committee made up of the entire ...

The Single Tax is not a tax. It is the collection of the rental value of land and its use as public revenue. Were this to be done there would be no need of taxes.

In its report published yesterday, the Select Committee has succeeded in drawing opposite conclusions simultaneously. The headline can be taken as a go-ahead signal - but the qualifications are so many and so significant (see preceding post) that it must be read as a recommendation to stop and reconsider the project. It seems to me that the real question that still needs to be asked is whether, given a decision to spend this amount on transport, high speed rail is the best investment. To get at the cost of an alternative, a comparison is the reconstruction of the line between Edinburgh and Tweedbank, a 49km stretch, at a cost of around £250 million - £5 million per km. The cost of the 200km HS2 line between London and Birmingham is given as £16 billion - £80 million per km. However, HS2 includes some very expensive tunneling at the London end which would have to be constructed regardless if capacity is to be increased, whilst the Edinburgh to Tweedbank route will not of course, be elec...

There is a good case for a high speed rail network, linking London and the major cities of the Midlands, the North and Scotland says the Commons Transport Committee. Report: High Speed Rail Inquiry: High Speed Rail Transport Committee Launching High Speed Rail – the report of the inquiry into high speed rail, including the Government’s proposal for HS2 – committee chair Louise Ellman said, "A high speed rail network, beginning with a line between London and the West Midlands, would provide a step change in the capacity, quality, reliability and frequency of rail services between our major cities. A high speed line offers potential economic and strategic benefits which a conventional line does not, including a dramatic improvement in connectivity between our major cities, Heathrow and other airports, and the rest of Europe. High speed rail may be a catalyst for economic growth, helping to rebalance the economy and bridge the north-south ...

Traditional Latin Mass- Arundel Cathedral , a photo by Henry░Law on Flickr. This would have been a rare sight even ten years ago, but with the publication of Summorum Pontificum in 2007, and the removal of the remaining restrictions on its use, the old rite (Tridentine) Mass is being celebrated quite frequently, at least in some places. When the restrictions were lifted, people seem to have thought that it would be an exception, and hence it was styled the "Extraordinary Form" (EF), as against the Novus Ordo (NO) liturgy now termed the "Ordinary Form". What was perhaps not expected was that it is, though very slowly, becoming mainstream. A couple of parishes have adopted it as the main Sunday sung mass, whilst there is a growing number of Sunday celebrations once a month, and regular Low Masses on weekdays. Also surprising (or perhaps not so surprising), is that attendance is no longer exclusively by the ageing stalwarts who have supported the Latin Mass Society f...

Brompton Oratory , a photo by Henry░Law on Flickr. The design of the London Oratory, seen here on the Feast of Corpus Christi, is what became standard after the Council of Trent. It is clear and logical both from an architectural and theological point of view. There is a linear progression from secular to sacred: nave, then sanctuary, marked by a change in level and altar rails, then further steps leading to the altar, then reredos with the tabernacle in a raised position in the centre, the whole surmounted by, and culminating in, the crucifix and three flanking candles on either side. The sacredness of the sanctuary is further emphasised by a change in flooring materials and rules concerning who is permitted to be there and what clothing they should wear. It would be difficult to think of an architectural form that could more clearly express Catholic theology. This architectural and ceremonial use of differences to present teachings of a profound nature, is, as Claude Lévi-Strauss ex...

I have been receiving emails purporting to come from Paypal and asking for confirmation of my username and password. It seems as if they are being intercepted. This was an obvious fraud but I clicked on the link and was directed to a login page which looked like the official one. But the web address did not begin with https. I entered my email address and a made-up password which logged me in to some site with a form asking for various details, again without the https prefix. If you get one of these, report the fraud to whoever is being imitated. Yahoo, Google, Paypal and the banks have their own email address for this.