Last night I was on a bit of a high. The Third Half Live had been brilliant, a room full of the great, the good and the bloody brilliant, music and food and cheese and conversations with old friends and new ones, and all the slightly chaotic stuff that makes TTH what it is.
This morning I woke up feeling amazing, if slightly sleepy. Then I got on a train and reality kicked in.
I’m heading from the South East to Scotland today, and instead of cataloguing the woes of my particular journey, it feels like a fairly decent snapshot of something bigger. Problems around Wokingham and Reading meant my train north was late before it had even started. More problems around Wolverhampton, track issues, trespassers, trains and people displaced as one problem seemed to lead another. I suspiciously think they weren’t actually connected, but those infrastructure peeps would like to make you think they are. And all that’s just about getting the train to move.
I’ve barely managed ten minutes of continuous connection all day. Forget 5G. For huge chunks of the journey I can’t even get a usable 4G signal, in 2026, on one of the country’s major inter-city rail corridors. The train Wi-Fi isn’t much use either. The air conditioning in my carriage appears to be attempting cryogenic preservation, and there’s no power at the tables. For the privilege, the train is costing me roughly twice what it would have cost to fly.
I’m deliberately not flying. I’m trying to make the lower-carbon TTH choice when I can. But we’re making that choice remarkably difficult.
None of these things individually is the end of the world - I know that - and that’s the point. We’ve become so ok accepting infrastructure that nearly works. A train that gets there eventually. A mobile network that disappears. Wi-Fi that connects occasionally. A plug socket that may or may not contain electricity. A lower-carbon way of travelling the country that costs twice as much as getting on a plane.
We talk endlessly about productivity, growth, regional connectivity, net zero, getting people out of cars and planes, building a modern economy. But sometimes the grand strategies meet the slightly less glamorous reality of a man (me) trying to get from Berkshire to Scotland, do some work on the way, charge his laptop and remain roughly the same body temperature, without paying twice the price of flying. (I am also of an age that when icily cold, I need to go pee more often - fine if the loos are working, and unusually today, they are…)
If we actually want people to choose the lower-carbon option, it surely can’t be the slower, less reliable, less connected and more expensive one.
Yesterday, surrounded by brilliant people doing brilliant things, the world felt full of possibility. Today British infrastructure would just like to remind me who’s in charge.
Still feeling amazing tho. Just slightly sleepier, and considerably colder…..