The cow has stopped in Paris

So...I'm off to Glasgow again, this time to see if First TransPennine Express fancy employing me. I'm on the train right now, enjoying the scenery and the free food. The plan for after the interview is to go over to Edinburgh and meet our friend Colin for a curry before heading back on the Sleeper tonight. This plan was almost scuppered by a planned strike by signalling staff in Scotland, but it was called off late last night, much to my relief.

Much as I'll defend anyone's right to join a union and strike, this was a fairly typical RMT strike on the flimsiest of pretexts and it makes a mockery of what striking should really be about. They've threatened industrial action on Network Rail no less than seventeen times this year.

It seems odd that I can travel 400 miles without going abroad, but Boulogne is only 93 miles away from home and in a whole other country. Well, I thought it was interesting.

Something I meant to comment on this week was an extract published in the Daily Mail from a book by Quentin Letts. He's compiled a list of the fifty people he claims have ruined Britain - it's fairly predictable stuff, including just about anyone who has stood for genuine progress over the last fifty years, but I was shocked and amazed to see Margaret Thatcher in the list. In my opinion, the list would be accurate if you just repeated her name fifty times, but to see it in the Mail was quite shocking, given that she's a massive masturbatory fantasy to their readership. Anyway, even though she got on the list, the criticism of her was extremely mild indeed and effectively amounted to suggesting she might have put a few miners off voting Conservative.

Err, yeah...and the rest...

I think what we're seeing at the moment with the collapse of the financial system can largely be blamed on Thatcher. She massively deregulated the UK economy, paving the way for lots of people to get very rich indeed while a lot more got extremely poor. Labour have attempted the odd fix here and there, but have been far too timid over the last eleven years. Now the whole sorry house of cards is collapsing, and those responsible are still incredibly wealthy while the rest of us suffer. It really angers me that the banks fought off government intervention for years while times were good, but now they're bad, they're running to the Treasury with a begging bowl and stealing money from essential public services. Why should we bail them out for running what amounts to a giant pyramid scheme?

When communism collapsed in Eastern Europe, it really did look like the free market had won, and there was much rejoicing that we'd seen the back of the ugly side of socialism. But now, is hardcore free-market capitalism on the verge of a similar collapse? I really hope it is. I hope we see the emergence of a mixed economy, with essential services run with the interests of the public at the forefront. Capitalism works fine for consumer goods, but the complete deregulation of the things we all need has been a horrific disaster.

The Mail readers are all blaming the current government for the belated after-effects of Thatcher's reign of terror - when the government sells everything in sight, you can't then blame them when things go wrong, and the private owners of just about everything are only accountable to their shareholders, not the little people like you and me.

I'm no economic expert, so I suspect it's possible to pick lots of holes in this, but it's just a few of my thoughts. Just quite why people think the Tories will make everything better is beyond me. It's the mess they created in the first place.

What else? Hmm...well, if you've got access to 4oD, I strongly recommend that you watch a few episodes of "The Adam and Joe Show". It's real classic stuff, and brings back fond memories of late-nineties life when I lived in Oxford. It's pop-culture parody par excellence, and you won't find a better use of soft toys and Star Wars figures anywhere.

I've got two books on the go at the moment, which is probably a bad idea as it'll stop me finishing either of them, but hey...the one I've brought with me to read on the train today is "No Holiday" by Martin Cohen, a guidebook to the 80 grimmest places on Earth that you're very unlikely to want to visit. It includes such wonders as Chernobyl, Bhopal, North Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq...I'd actually like to see some of these places. Just about all the horrors we're looking here are man-made, but the book has an appealing gruesome black humour about it, so it's funny but thought-provoking at the same time.

Thus far it's a gorgeous sunny day, but I suspect we'll have rain in Glasgow. It makes for a nice view out the train window, though. Not much to see at the moment as we're in the industrial north-west, but later on I have the delights of the Lake District and the Lune Valley to look forward to. The East Coast route is nicer, but the on-board service on the West Coast is better and it's a bit quicker for Glasgow.

On that note I shall bid you farewell. Be sure to tune in later for more pointless waffling.