Overheating

Scary article in the Sunday Times yesterday. The cover of the magazine featured a photograph of the effect on the United Kigdom if the climate were to heat up by couple of degrees as it's widely predicted to do over the next hundred years. Bristol is underwater. Actually most places are underwater.

I have friends who have taken this seriously for years and I've always had a slightly sceptical view, but the weight of evidence seems to be swinging in the direction of the Doomsday scenario.

So what can I do? Well, holiday in this country, for starters. Or use the train to go into Europe. Anything not to take flights except for those long-anticipated experiences to far-flung places which will be, as they were decades ago, something you do once in a lifetime.

Now governments have got to ensure that they get the pricing right so that people will actually use those trains. At the moment I can fly to Nice for £14, but if I want to get to London at 8.30 in the morning it'll cost me about £90 to hang from a strap for an hour and a half. Ludicrous.

I LOVE trains. I 'eurorailed' when I was a teenager and a student and met the most fantastic people as I cruised through country after country, watching the landscape and the lifestyles roll by before my eyes. The British trains were always the crappiest and the dearest. Czech trains were my favourite; clean, old-fashioned and somehow rather regal. I'm really looking forward to taking the kids and meandering through Europe. I think we'd need to take the car on the train with us. In Britain, naturally, that's completely prohibitive, but I expect Europe is more clued-up.