Two Wheels, One Last Sensible Decision

Readers may recall that the proposed balcony extension to the house briefly developed into a glass-fronted Art Space containing a Triumph Rocket 3, a motorcycle with the dimensions, mass and turning circle of a harbour tug. That was architecture. This is transport, although the distinction has become less secure than it once was.

The Rocket 3 was never a serious proposition. It was too large, too heavy, too expensive and altogether too likely to require a small crane if it leaned beyond the point at which optimism ceased to be useful. It would have looked magnificent behind glass, but rather less amusing when attempting to reverse it out of a gravel lay-by.

What I actually wanted was something much more modest: low enough to manage comfortably, light enough not to require dockyard equipment, capable of 70 mph without every internal component submitting a grievance, and cheap enough not to become a major financial event. It also had to be comfortable enough for A-roads, occasional motorway use and the sort of summer riding that does not involve proving anything to anybody.

This narrowed the field considerably. Elderly British classics offered charm, history and the prospect of spending Sunday mornings adjusting parts which had moved despite having no obvious reason to do so. Sports bikes were designed around the assumption that the rider still had knees capable of folding neatly beneath his ears. Enormous touring machines weighed much the same as a small family car, while scooters that would fit neatly with the motorhome often appeared to rely on wind direction, gradient and prayer to maintain motorway speed.

There were cheap Japanese machines, expensive British machines, obscure Soviet machines and several motorcycles described as easy projects by owners who clearly had a highly developed sense of humour. Some were advertised with the reassuring phrase, It ran last year, which in motorcycle sales language generally means that it does not run now and the intervening deterioration has been transferred to the next owner. The budget was never going to exceed £2,000 and, ideally, would be nearer £1,000. That alone ruled out much of the market, particularly those sellers who had confused owning an old motorcycle with holding a rapidly appreciating asset.

The style gradually became clear. I wanted a cruiser, but not a vast chrome barge covered in tassels, skulls and equipment borrowed from a Wild West saloon. I wanted something low, relaxed and capable of travelling at ordinary road speeds without turning the rider into a windsock.

The Yamaha Virago 535 began to make increasing sense. This required a small adjustment in attitude because I grew up in a world where proper motorcycles were Triumphs, BSAs and Ariels, while Japanese motorcycles were regarded with the suspicion normally reserved for powdered coffee. Unfortunately, the Japanese then spent several decades making motorcycles which started, stopped and retained their oil. It was unsporting of them.

The Virago is low, manageable, shaft-driven and powerful enough for real roads. Its low centre of gravity matters as much as the headline weight. If it falls over, it should be easier to lift than a taller motorcycle of similar mass, because less of that weight is perched high above the ground conspiring against you. It is not a performance machine and does not demand leather racing overalls, a chiropractor or an urgent discussion with the magistrates. It simply goes.

The first one I found was £895. It looked attractive in the advert, although further photographs revealed that a previous owner had bobbered it, removed the pillion seat and decorated it with a level of skull-based enthusiasm usually associated with teenage bedrooms. At that price, it was tempting. The frame appeared intact, it had a long MOT and the basic bike looked sound, but converting it back to carry a passenger properly would have cost several hundred pounds, the exhausts were wrapped, and the modifications introduced the sort of uncertainty best examined before money changes hands.

Somebody else paid a deposit before I could see it. This was irritating, particularly because when we sell anything on Facebook Marketplace, we allow the first serious enquirer the chance to view it before entertaining others. Facebook Marketplace, however, operates under a simpler legal code in which money talks and courtesy may submit written representations.

In retrospect, it may have been fortunate. The £895 bargain might easily have become a £1,500 motorcycle after undoing the improvements and reconstructing the parts Yamaha had fitted before somebody decided they knew better.

The next Virago was a 1999 model with about 18,000 miles, standard seats, a screen, backrest and luggage rack. The price was £1,750. It was not cheap, but neither was it absurd. It was complete, looked presentable and had the sort of minor corrosion one expects on a 26-year-old motorcycle rather than the sort that suggests archaeology. It was also half the mileage of the one I'd missed.

The lower engine casing had been painted silver. Not disastrously, but with enough overspray on the gasket edges to show that masking had been regarded as a philosophical rather than practical requirement. The front header pipes were wrapped close to the exhaust ports, which may be cosmetic or may be concealing corrosion. Exhaust wrap is the motorcycle equivalent of wallpaper over damp. Sometimes it is harmless and sometimes it is evidence.

The electrical reserve switch also does not work. On the Virago, the reserve is electrically operated rather than controlled by a conventional tap. The fault may be trivial, perhaps a dirty switch or a poor connection, but it needs sorting. Running out of petrol is inconvenient enough without discovering that the emergency supply has gone on strike.

One big advantage - it's shaft driven.

The MOT was due the following month. The seller initially offered to arrange one at my expense, but I proposed a slightly different arrangement. I would pay the full £1,750, provided it came with a fresh MOT. The risk to him is £30 or £40. The risk to me, without the test, could be several hundred pounds in tyres, brakes, bearings or exhaust work. At this end of the market, a full year’s MOT also provides a useful minimum return: even if the whole enterprise subsequently goes tits up, I should at least have had 12 months of motorcycling for comparatively little money.

He suggested that I pay the MOT fee as a deposit, refundable if it failed, and I agreed. It protects him from spending money on a test only for me to vanish, and protects me from buying a 26-year-old motorcycle on optimism alone. It is booked for its MOT at 2 pm today.

With the deal agreed, subject to the MOT, I went into the workshop and tried on my old helmet. At some point it dislodged one of my hearing aids, although I did not notice until I went back into the house and wondered why the television had suddenly developed an audio fault. A search of the workshop followed. Thank God for Bluetooth-enabled hearing aids: my phone managed to locate it among the tools, dust and assorted fragments of Triumph. The motorcycle had not yet arrived, and age had already introduced a complication Yamaha omitted from the handbook.

Assuming it passes without anything serious, I will collect it on Friday or Saturday. We can take the motorhome, stay locally and visit friends in Stourport-on-Severn, so the motorcycle has already generated a small touring expedition before I have even ridden it home.

Once I have it, the first task will not be polishing. It will be finding out what I have actually bought. The reserve system needs fixing, the wrapped exhaust sections need inspecting, the tyres need checking for age as well as tread, and the charging voltage needs confirming. Unless there is persuasive evidence of a recent service, it will get oil, filters, plugs and fluids. Consumables are cheaper than mysteries.

After that comes the cosmetic work. The painted lower casing could be flatted and repainted properly, or the removable covers could be replaced with polished alloy ones. I can have the tank colour matched by spectrometer, although a colour-matched engine risks looking less like engineering and more like knitwear. The sensible solution will probably be polished covers, a neatly refinished central casing and no attempt to turn every inaccessible crevice into a mirror.

I also want proper heat protection from the exhaust. Not a perforated universal shield fastened with exposed Jubilee clips, which would make the motorcycle look as though it had been repaired by a plumber during his lunch break, but something discreet, polished and professionally mounted. The windscreen can stay. It may cost a few miles per hour at the very top end, but the purpose is to travel comfortably at 60 or 70, not establish a land-speed record on a 535 cc cruiser.

The whole process has clarified something fairly obvious. The cheapest motorcycle is not necessarily the cheapest way to own one. A modified Virago at £895 could easily have become a more expensive bike after repairs, reversals and reconstruction, while a standard one at £1,750 may prove better value because it already possesses seats, mudguards, lights and the other tedious items manufacturers generally include before owners start improving them.

So, after considering classics, cruisers, scooters, sports bikes and motorcycles of sufficient mass to affect local tides, I appear to have settled on a modest Japanese V-twin. It is low, comfortable, mechanically straightforward and fast enough. In other words, the sensible choice was there all along. It merely required the elimination of almost everything else before I was prepared to admit it.

Year 1 Wasn't Humanity's Year 1

The phrase "the 21st century" is one of those expressions we use without thinking. It sounds weighty, as though the universe itself paused, drew breath and ushered in a new age.

It didn't.

At one second before midnight on 31 December 2000, humanity was exactly the same species as it was one second after. No law of physics changed. No new scientific principle emerged. No civilisation crossed a threshold. The only thing that happened was that a calendar ticked over.

Even that calendar is arbitrary. The Gregorian calendar counts years from the supposed birth of Jesus, a date calculated centuries later and almost certainly inaccurate by several years. It's an entirely reasonable system for organising diaries, birthdays and tax returns, but an oddly parochial way of measuring the history of our species.

After all, modern humans have been around for roughly 300,000 years. Agriculture began about 12,000 years ago. The first cities emerged around 5,000 years ago, followed by writing. Everything we call recorded history fits into a tiny sliver of human existence, and the Common Era occupies an even smaller slice. Most of humanity's story happened before Year 1.

If we were inventing a calendar today, would we really choose the same starting point?

Perhaps we'd begin with agriculture, when humans stopped wandering and started building permanent settlements. Perhaps with writing, when knowledge could survive its author. Or perhaps with the first civilisation.

My choice would be different. I'd start the clock when humanity first harnessed atomic energy.

That wasn't merely another invention. It was a fundamental change in our relationship with nature. Until then, every civilisation had lived by burning what the sun had recently grown, or by exploiting energy stored over millions of years in coal, oil and gas. Then, in a laboratory in Chicago, we unlocked the energy inside the atom itself.

For the first time in Earth's history, one species possessed the knowledge to release the forces that power the stars.

That achievement gave us extraordinary possibilities. Tiny amounts of fuel could power cities. Medical science gained new tools. Space exploration became more plausible. At the same time, humanity acquired the ability to destroy itself in a single afternoon. That seems a rather more significant milestone than a monk getting a date slightly wrong fifteen centuries earlier.

Perhaps future historians, assuming we leave any behind, won't think in terms of the 20th and 21st centuries at all. They may see everything before 1945 as pre-atomic history, and everything afterwards as the Atomic Era. Just as we talk about the Bronze Age or the Industrial Revolution, they may regard the unlocking of the nucleus as the moment humanity genuinely entered a new age.

The deeper point is that calendars don't reveal history. They reveal priorities. Every civilisation chooses an event and quietly declares, "This is where our story begins."

The interesting question isn't why we count from the birth of Jesus. It's whether, in another thousand years, anyone else still will.

The Cartwheel Divide

I've noticed something curious.

When children are showing off in a park, a playground or a beach, it's almost always the girls doing handstands, cartwheels and walkovers.

The boys are usually trying to kick something, climb something, break something, or convert a stick into a weapon.

It's an odd little window into how early we steer children. Nobody gathers them together and announces that cartwheels are for girls and football is for boys. It just seeps into the culture until it feels normal.

The irony is that a cartwheel requires strength, balance, courage and coordination. Qualities we supposedly admire in everyone, yet somehow the public display of them has been quietly sorted into the wrong mental drawer.

Children are not just expressing themselves naturally. Quite often, they're expressing the expectations adults have wrapped round them before they're old enough to notice.

The girls invert themselves gracefully.

The boys prepare for siege warfare with a twig.

Update

I have been remiss. 

Some of you may have noticed that my posts have become somewhat sporadic. The reason for this is because I have started to write the more political posts on Substack, rather than Blogger.

When I write a post on Blogger I copy it to Facebook, where the vast majority of my traffic comes from. I also copy the Substack posts to Facebook.

I neglected to cater for those who come to Blogger direct and are not aware that some of my posts are now published on Substack.

To access these, here is the Substack Link. You can subscribe to my Substack posts at no cost, and you will receive an email when a post goes live.

Enjoy!

The Temptation of the Cruising Plodder

I was idly scrolling through Facebook Marketplace when I came across a 1991 Yamaha Virago 535. Cream. Chrome. Twin-cylinder. Shaft drive. £1,300. It sat there on the screen looking quiet, faintly pleased with itself and not remotely interested in proving anything.

This, of course, is precisely the sort of motorcycle I now find dangerous. Not dangerous in the usual way, with savage acceleration, poor brakes and a rear tyre made from ambition. Dangerous because it looks reasonable.

I've been vaguely thinking about another bike for a while, mainly to take with us when away in the motorhome to give us more reach than a couple of bicycles. A Honda Gold Wing appeals, because obviously what every man needs is a two-wheeled sofa with reverse gear, stereo speakers and enough mass to affect the tides. Sadly, they're too heavy. A Triumph Rocket 3 also appeals, because I still have some idiocy left in me, but that's also too heavy and still too expensive. A Triumph America or Thunderbird would do nicely, but they remain stubbornly outside the sensible end of the market. Even a Bonneville now seems to require either a larger pension or a more forgiving bank manager than I currently possess.

Then there's a Dnepr, which appeals for all the wrong reasons. A Soviet-sidecar-shaped act of mechanical self-harm. Agricultural, eccentric, heroic and almost certainly a gateway to standing in the rain beside a leaking final drive muttering about parts availability.

My limit, in the unlikely event that common sense briefly leaves the building, is about £2,000. Preferably £1,000. Which is not so much a motorcycle budget as a polite enquiry at the gates of disappointment.

There's also the small matter of my 71-year-old's built-in aversion to Japanese bikes. I was brought up to believe that only Triumphs, BSAs and Ariels were real motorcycles, and everything from Japan was a suspicious appliance with indicators. This was, of course, nonsense, but it was very strongly held nonsense, which is much the same thing in British motorcycling circles.

Mind you, the rot may already have set in. 3 years ago I bought a 50cc Mobylette moped for about £400. I told myself it wasn't really a motorcycle. More of a historical curiosity. A French bicycle that had somehow acquired an engine. The sort of thing a sensible retired man could own without alarming anybody.

In practice, I rode it about 3 times. For most of the 3 years it was either awaiting parts, leaking petrol from its carburettor or giving every indication that French engineering had been conceived as an elaborate practical joke. A few weeks ago I sold it for £700, thereby accidentally making a profit from mechanical incompetence. Unfortunately, this has done nothing to discourage me. If anything, it has reinforced the dangerous belief that motorcycles can somehow be justified as investments.

And yet there it was, this little Yamaha, quietly undermining decades of inherited prejudice by looking affordable, tidy and unlikely to strand me in a lay-by.

20 years ago I had a Honda Shadow 600, and I liked it. Low, comfortable, friendly, not especially fast, and not constantly whispering, go on then, you coward. That sort of bike suits me. A cruising plodder. The motorcycle equivalent of an armchair with a modest exhaust note.

Back when I first met Hayley, I used to ride it from Caversham Marina, where I kept my boat, to Old Sodbury to see her. It was one of those journeys that suited the bike perfectly. Just settle into the inside lane at a steady 60 mph, listen to the engine doing its thing and watch the miles drift by. No drama, no heroics, no attempt to arrive first. Just the simple pleasure of being on a motorcycle heading somewhere you wanted to be.

That, I suspect, is why the Virago caught my eye. At my age, I am no longer shopping for excitement. Excitement has an unfortunate habit of involving hospitals. What appeals now is comfort, character and the ability to arrive with all the original body parts still attached.

I also used to have a Triumph Daytona 955i, which was a rather different proposition. Beautiful, fast, muscular, and perfectly capable of encouraging a man to overestimate both his ability and the coefficient of friction available on a roundabout. I came off it on one. Roundabouts are where motorcyclists go to meet diesel, gravel, white paint and physics, usually in that order and without a formal introduction.

I nearly ripped my thumb off in the process and, luckily, there was nothing coming in the opposite direction, as I ended up on the other side of the road. This did not improve the domestic case for continued motorcycling. My wife, applying the sort of calm risk assessment normally missing from male hobbies, banned me from motorcycles. Strictly speaking, this was less a law carved in stone and more a suggestion written in oil.

So perhaps the universe is trying to tell me something. Not loudly, because the universe has seen my garage and knows shouting is pointless, but quietly, in the shape of a cream Yamaha Virago.

The Virago doesn't pretend to be a sports bike. It doesn't pretend to cross continents. It doesn't come with 6 riding modes, a heated dashboard and a computer asking how assertive you feel today. It just sits there saying: I can take you to a cafe, make a pleasant noise, and probably not involve paramedics.

It knows what it is. A simple Japanese cruiser from the era before every object had to come with a lifestyle attached. Shaft drive. Low seat. V-twin burble. Enough chrome to cheer a man up, but not so much that he starts wearing tassels, talking about freedom and reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which I have actually read.

The problem, as ever, is Facebook Marketplace. The bike may be sane, but the environment in which it is being sold is not. Marketplace is less a buying and selling site than a long-term study into the collapse of language.

Is this available?

Yes.

Silence.

Best price?

No greeting. No words wasted. Just 2 words dragged from the cave wall and hurled into the void.

I was tempted to message the seller and ask whether it was left or right hand drive. Not because I needed to know. I just wanted to establish whether there was still a functioning human being at the other end of the transaction.

And once that bond had been formed, I could move on to the serious questions.

"Can you deliver to Ulan Bator?"

"Will it fit in the lift of a 3rd-floor flat?"

"Has it ever been submerged?"

"Do all the wheels come with it?"

At that point the seller would either block me immediately or become a lifelong friend. There is very little middle ground.

In the end I resisted. For now.

The GT6 is still in pieces, the garage is already full, and there is a limit to how many charming mechanical nuisances one retired man can justify. Though admittedly, nobody has yet established what that limit is, and £1,300 for a tidy old Virago is a dangerous little number to leave unattended.

Stalin Liked Gardening Too

There is always a slightly smug assumption surrounding gardening that it is an inherently wholesome activity. You picture decent retired couples in straw hats discussing delphiniums while Radio 4 murmurs gently in the background. Gardeners are thought of as patient, nurturing souls at one with nature. The sort of people who apologise to worms.

And yet one of history's most prolific mass murderers absolutely loved gardening. Stalin was apparently obsessed with it. He spent hours in his dacha (above) tending plants, discussing grafting techniques, selecting trees, and fussing over lemon bushes. One rather imagines the Politburo nervously complimenting the begonias while trying not to get shot.

It does rather undermine the theory that gardening reveals moral virtue. In fact, when you think about it, gardening contains quite a few alarming features. Gardeners are forever quietly killing things. Entire species of plant are declared undesirable and ruthlessly eradicated. Slugs are poisoned. Aphids are gassed. Weeds are exterminated with chemicals that sound like rejected First World War weapons programmes. Perfectly innocent shrubs are "cut back hard" for failing to conform ideologically to the overall design vision.

There is also the authoritarian tendency. Gardeners cannot simply allow nature to exist freely. Oh no. Every living thing must know its place. This one climbs here. That one flowers there. This hedge shall be straight. These roses must comply with regulations regarding spacing and discipline. Any deviation from the Five Year Planting Plan is dealt with severely.

The allotment world is particularly revealing. Entire cold wars exist between elderly men over bean encroachment and suspiciously oversized marrows. Somewhere in Britain at this very moment there is a retired chartered surveyor glaring at next door's runner beans with the same expression Stalin probably reserved for agricultural dissent.

Then there is the sheer emotional volatility of gardeners. A person can spend all winter tenderly nurturing seedlings indoors, speaking to them like infants, then erupt into incandescent fury because a squirrel ate half a tomato.

It is also worth noting that dictators in general often seem oddly keen on rustic hobbies. They like uniforms, maps, architecture, and gardens. There is clearly a psychological overlap between wanting absolute control over Eastern Europe and becoming extremely agitated about bindweed.

None of this, of course, means gardeners are secretly tyrants. Most are perfectly harmless people with muddy knees and an alarming knowledge of compost acidity. But it does suggest that tending a herbaceous border is not, in itself, proof of saintliness.

Somewhere there is probably a man quietly pruning roses while simultaneously posting comments underneath newspaper articles demanding the deportation of everyone under forty.

And if you visit a garden centre on a bank holiday weekend, observe carefully. Behind the polite discussions about peat-free compost lies a faint atmosphere of suppressed territorial aggression. Britain is only one badly managed hanging basket shortage away from open conflict.

Still, it keeps people occupied. Better they spend Sunday afternoon arguing about lupins than attempting to run the country. Stalin rather demonstrated the risks of combining the two.

Sack the Fans

Sack the fans.

Why not? Everyone else gets blamed.

The manager must go. The players are useless. The tactics are wrong. The board is incompetent. The left-back is apparently a national disgrace because he misplaced a pass under pressure.

Yet the fans remain oddly untouched.

This is especially worth remembering before England play Mexico. Because if England win, we will hear all about the supporters. The noise. The passion. The shirt. The anthem. The “12th man”.

Fine. But that cuts both ways.

You cannot be the 12th man when the team wins and an innocent paying customer when it loses.

A crowd can lift a team. It can also smother one. It can turn pressure into energy, or pressure into panic. Groaning after 10 minutes, booing mistakes, abusing players online, demanding instant perfection from human beings trying to play knockout football - none of that is neutral.

It affects the atmosphere. It affects confidence. It affects decisions. It becomes part of the match. So by all means criticise the manager. Question the selection. Moan about the substitutions. That is half the fun, and without it football would be 22 men running about while sober people make spreadsheets.

But if supporters want credit for inspiring victory, they should not vanish from the accounts when things go wrong. If England are poor against Mexico, perhaps the first question should not be, “Who do we sack?” Perhaps it should be:

How well did the 12th man play?

The Keyboard That Time Forgot

The laptop keyboard is one of those bits of technology we have somehow agreed not to notice.

On a phone, we accept the obvious. The keyboard is not really a thing. It is a function. It appears when needed, vanishes when not needed, changes language, changes colour, changes size, predicts what we’re trying to say, corrects our ham-fisted typing, offers symbols, numbers, swipe typing, specialist layouts and whatever else the software people have slipped in while nobody was looking.

And it all happens on one piece of glass.

Then we open a laptop and suddenly we’re back in the age of little plastic tiles.

Not just plastic tiles, either. Country-specific plastic tiles. British ones, German ones, French ones, American ones with the @ sign wandering off to somewhere unfamiliar. Whole supply chains devoted to making sure the apostrophe is printed in the correct place for whichever nation is currently trying to answer emails while eating a sandwich.

This is called progress, apparently.

If you want a laptop in another language, you do not simply change a setting and carry on. Oh no. The manufacturer has to build a slightly different physical object, stock it, ship it, support it, repair it and eventually dispose of it. A great many tiny moving parts, all so the same letters can sit in slightly different places.

Meanwhile the phone quietly gets on with being the more advanced machine.

A phone keyboard can be whatever the user wants. Bigger, smaller, darker, lighter, themed, reshaped, rearranged, bilingual, one-handed, predictive, silent, haptic, not haptic, polite, vulgar, or apparently convinced that when I type GT6 I actually mean GTA, which at least shows enthusiasm.

The laptop keyboard, by contrast, arrives as a constitutional settlement.

Here are the keys. Here is the spacing. Here is the language we think you speak. Here is the layout you will have until the machine dies or until a child removes the letter M with a teaspoon.

Of course, the traditionalists will say they can type faster on proper keys. Fair enough. For people writing thousands of words a day, physical keys can still make sense. They give feedback. They allow touch typing. They have muscle memory on their side, and one should never underestimate the human attachment to doing the familiar thing quite quickly.

But that is not the same as saying they are the more advanced interface.

A starting handle had feel. So did a choke cable. So did winding down a car window while your elbow froze solid on the way to Preston. Some things had feel because that was what the available engineering allowed at the time. We should not confuse old limitations with timeless wisdom.

The issue is not whether a physical keyboard still works. It plainly does. So does a hammer. The issue is whether it is still the most intelligent interface for a machine that otherwise changes itself constantly.

A laptop can show films, maps, spreadsheets, design drawings, video calls and a shameful number of browser tabs. But the lower half is still a fixed little grid of manufactured compromise, pretending that every task needs the same physical alphabet bolted to the chassis.

The phone has already shown us the alternative. The keyboard should be software. It should adapt to the user, the language, the task and the moment. It should not require a warehouse full of national variants and a small prayer that nobody spills coffee into the wrong crevice.

There are moves in that direction, but they still look tentative. A few dual-screen machines, a few virtual keyboard experiments, then a detachable physical keyboard included in the box in case the villagers become restless. Manufacturers can see the future, but they keep a plastic comfort blanket nearby.

And that may be the real lesson. The future does not always arrive because it is logical. Sometimes it has to wait until people stop mistaking familiarity for superiority.

So we have not failed to invent the future. We have merely decided that, on laptops, the future can wait because some people enjoy the sound of tiny plastic doors being shut very firmly.

Which is fine, I suppose. Everyone needs a hobby.

The Cost of Chasing Every Penny

Everyone agrees that government waste should be cut. The disagreement begins when someone has to explain what, precisely, counts as waste. It is easy enough to say “Cut the waste” in a broadcast interview. It is rather harder to identify it, quantify it properly, remove it without breaking something useful, and then show that the supposed saving has not simply reappeared elsewhere wearing a different departmental badge.

There is undoubtedly waste in government: failed IT contracts, duplicated systems, consultant dependency, unnecessary property, weak fraud controls, grants that outlive their purpose, and procurement procedures so elaborate that they seem designed chiefly to employ themselves. That is where the work should start.

A sensible approach is the 80/20 rule. Not as a law of nature, because it is not one, but as a practical management discipline. In a large organisation, a relatively small number of failures often account for a disproportionate share of avoidable cost. A handful of dreadful contracts, abandoned projects, duplicated back-office systems, suppliers charging monopoly prices for mediocre work, and badly designed incentives can waste remarkable sums. Find those, fix those, and measure the result.

If an audit identifies £5 billion of possible savings, begin with the large, repeated and demonstrably useless costs. Stop projects that should never have started. Merge functions that genuinely duplicate one another. Renegotiate contracts that have become a licence to print money. Recover fraud. Stop paying consultants to map processes which everybody in the department already knows are absurd. That is real reform. It can cut costs and improve services at the same time.

But there is an important question for anyone claiming to have identified £5 million, £5 billion or any other conveniently impressive figure of “waste savings”: what will it cost to remove it? That is the question which separates the operator from the rhetorician. Anyone can circle a number in a report. The serious bit is calculating the staff time, systems changes, legal work, procurement, redundancy costs, extra controls needed to stop the waste returning, and service disruption required to achieve it. Then one has to check whether the saving has merely been pushed into another budget, or deferred until it comes back later at a higher price.

The trouble begins when politicians treat that £5 billion as though every pound of it can be extracted without cost. It cannot. There is a law of diminishing returns. The first savings may be straightforward, but the next tranche is harder. Eventually, the remaining “waste” is scattered across thousands of small decisions, local contingencies, bits of spare capacity, checks, records and safeguards. At that point, chasing the final scraps can cost more than accepting them.

You get more audits, reporting, approval stages, tender exercises, compliance officers and managers checking whether someone else has checked whether another person has saved £17.50. The system becomes so determined to demonstrate thrift that it turns into an expensive machine for measuring paperclips. That is not efficiency. It is bureaucracy doing an expensive impression of thrift.

Some inefficiency must be tolerated. Not because incompetence is endearing, nor because public money grows on a shrub behind the Treasury, but because a functioning state needs a margin of slack. It needs people who are not already working at 100% capacity when a crisis arrives. It needs proper records, basic checks, training, maintenance and enough legal care to avoid turning a bad decision into 3 years of litigation. It needs reserve capacity in hospitals, courts, local authorities and emergency services, because life has a tiresome habit of refusing to arrive in neat, predictable instalments.

The private sector understands this perfectly well. A serious company keeps spare parts, duplicate systems, insurance, lawyers, contingency funds and stock in reserve. It does not call this waste. It calls it resilience, risk management and overhead. When government does the same thing, however, the very people who would complain if the system failed suddenly discover the word “bureaucracy”.

The human body makes the point neatly enough. It does not turn every calorie into visible movement. A great deal is spent on balance, repair, temperature control, circulation and remaining alive. Nobody regards that as a design failure. A living system needs overhead to remain functional. A modern state is not a combustion engine either. It is a complex system expected to cope with error, fraud, legal challenge, surges in demand and the occasional national crisis.

Some spending does not show up as a neat front-line output because it pays for maintenance, training, proper procurement, legal checks, information security and the ability to cope when demand rises unexpectedly. The important distinction is not between efficiency and inefficiency. It is between waste and productive friction.

Waste is paying twice for the same thing, funding programmes that do not work, allowing suppliers to milk the public purse, retaining layers of administration that add no value, or paying external advisers a fortune to recommend that a department might perhaps consider speaking to its own staff. Productive friction is the modest cost of making sure public money is not stolen, contracts are checked, decisions are lawful, vulnerable people are not abandoned because a caseworker had no time to read the file, and nobody awards a £200 million contract to a mate over lunch.

There is another trap: cost-shunting. A department can meet a savings target by cutting prevention, maintenance or casework, only for the cost to arrive later in another budget. Cut support for vulnerable families and the bill may return through homelessness, policing, the NHS, schools or the courts. Cut maintenance and it may return as emergency repairs at several times the cost. Cut compliance and it may return as fraud, tax loss and expensive private contracts. Whitehall may call that a saving because the cost has moved department. The taxpayer is entitled to notice that it has not disappeared.

The serious question is not, “How large a saving figure can we announce?” It is, “Which costs can we remove, what will it cost to remove them, and will the state still be less expensive and more capable afterwards?” A credible programme would set targets based on named reforms, published evidence and independently audited results. It would show lower unit costs, fewer failed contracts, reduced fraud, shorter delays and better service reliability. It would not simply announce a heroic number and hope the public mistakes arithmetic for administration.

The test is simple: does the state cost less while delivering the same or better result? If a supposed £1 saving requires £1.20 of extra auditors, compliance staff, delay, management time and remedial spending elsewhere, then it is not a saving. It is an ideological preference dressed up as efficiency.

The aim is not a theoretically perfect state with zero waste. That would require an army of people checking the work of another army of people. The aim is more modest and more intelligent: find the 20% of failures causing most of the waste, deal with them properly, tolerate the small margin of inefficiency needed to keep a complex country functioning, and do not save pennies today by creating much larger bills tomorrow.

The Curse of Cursive

People of a certain age will remember the great educational obsession with joined-up writing. Or, to give it its proper grandiose title, cursive script. Schools treated it as though civilisation itself rested upon the ability to turn the alphabet into a sort of continuous decorative hosepipe.

An astonishing amount of time was devoted to it. Sheets of lined paper. Endless loops. Pen licences awarded with all the solemnity of a military decoration. Children who could barely explain basic grammar were nevertheless expected to produce handwriting resembling a peace treaty signed aboard a battleship in 1919.

What always strikes me is that nobody actually reads joined-up writing voluntarily.

Books are printed. Newspapers are printed. Shakespeare is printed. Even medieval monks, sitting in freezing stone rooms inhaling candle fumes for thirty years, generally tried to make individual letters distinguishable from one another. Humanity did not spend centuries developing printing presses only for schools to decide that the pinnacle of communication was making every word resemble a set of cursive hieroglyphs discovered inside a damp pyramid.

I did a little research into the history of cursive script recently, which illuminated me somewhat. Not, obviously, in the sense of illuminated script, involving gold leaf, decorated capitals and monks slowly going blind beside candles, but intellectually.

The strange thing is that cursive script originally had a perfectly sensible purpose. If you were writing with a quill or dip pen in 1720, constantly lifting the nib from the page interrupted the ink flow, caught the paper and increased blotting. Keeping the pen moving in one flowing motion was quicker and smoother. Fine. Entirely rational.

The problem is that schools carried on teaching it with near-religious intensity long after the world that created it had vanished.

By the time we were all painstakingly joining our letters in the 1970s and 80s, the country was watching colour television, flying in jumbo jets and listening to music recorded electronically, yet children were still being trained in a handwriting system optimised for a man in a powdered wig writing shipping invoices by candlelight with a feather.

Nobody ever seemed to pause and ask whether this made any sense.

Mind you, I am not entirely innocent here. In my 30s I became mildly obsessed with calligraphy and used to write entries in ship's logbooks in perfect Gothic script, which probably made routine navigational observations look as though they had been copied from a 14th century monastery shortly before the arrival of the plague.

But Gothic script, importantly, is not cursive. Quite the opposite. Gothic lettering positively revels in separating everything into sharp, formal, individually constructed characters. It takes ages to write and was never pretending otherwise. Decorative, ceremonial and faintly intimidating, certainly, but at least honest about the fact it belonged to another age.

My father, meanwhile, fully embraced cursive script. Besides owning a typewriter that produced it, he also used peacock blue ink in a fountain pen for his logbook entries. It was his mark. Beautiful flowing cursive handwriting in vivid blue ink, looking faintly as though a Victorian shipping clerk had somehow wandered into the late twentieth century and been handed radar and diesel engines.

In fact, before going to sea, he had briefly been a bank clerk and had been taught copperplate writing properly. That was still considered a serious commercial skill then. A neat hand implied reliability, competence and trustworthiness. Banks, after all, were places where one badly written figure could accidentally move the equivalent of a semi-detached house from one ledger to another.

I rather inherited that tendency myself. Until I nearly ripped my right thumb off in a motorcycle accident, my handwriting was genuinely rather beautiful. Not elegant in the copperplate sense perhaps, but neat, controlled and readable. Afterwards it deteriorated into something that looks as though a startled chicken has walked through wet ink during a minor electrical incident.

Which perhaps rather undermines the old moral assumptions surrounding handwriting. Schools treated penmanship almost as a reflection of character. Yet in reality, good handwriting often comes down to mechanics, muscle control and whether your thumb remains broadly attached to your hand.

And perhaps that is partly why the whole thing lingered for so long. There is something undeniably elegant, personal and individual about good handwriting. Mechanical printing may be clearer, but it carries none of the fingerprints of the person behind it. You can almost tell the era and character of somebody from the way they wrote.

The original technical problem behind cursive script had nevertheless been solved decades earlier. The biro existed. The typewriter existed. Photocopiers existed. Word processors were already appearing. Yet the educational system clung to cursive script with astonishing determination, as though the collapse of joined-up handwriting would somehow lead directly to barbarism.

And schools became oddly moralistic about it. Good handwriting implied discipline, intelligence and upright character. Bad handwriting suggested idleness and possible future criminality. Meanwhile the medical profession had already evolved a written language entirely incomprehensible to the human eye. Prescriptions written by hand probably accounted for a measurable percentage of accidental drug-induced deaths over the years, with pharmacists effectively working as part-time cryptographers.

That, in many ways, summarises the entire joined-up writing obsession. A society becoming so attached to the appearance of effort and tradition that it starts deliberately reintroducing the very problems technology had just solved.

Most adults eventually drift into a compromise anyway. Half print, half scribble. The natural human equilibrium between speed and legibility. Nobody, outside perhaps wedding invitations and threatening letters from solicitors, actually writes in full cursive script anymore.

And now, of course, children type.

Which means future generations will probably regard joined-up writing the same way we regard deportment lessons, hat etiquette and ceremonial sword drills. One of those strange rituals people defended fiercely long after its original purpose had quietly died.

Still, somewhere in Britain there is probably a retired headmistress who firmly believes society began collapsing the moment children stopped joining their letters properly. She almost certainly writes Christmas cards in green ink using a fountain pen that leaks slightly, and regards the self-checkout at Tesco as the first stage of civilisational breakdown.