Two Carburettors, One Useful Question

Since tracing the Virago’s fuel leak to the rear carburettor breather, I contacted the FJ Owners Club workshop near Yate, less than 2 miles from home. The club takes its name from Yamaha’s FJ1100 and FJ1200, the large 4-cylinder sports-tourers around which it was formed.

Their first reply was reassuring, although the figure quoted was for a 4-cylinder machine rather than the Virago. A complete carburettor overhaul would be roughly £300, they said, with another £50 to collect the bike from Old Sodbury. The only difficulty was timing: they were busy and would need about 3 weeks before they could fit the job in.

Even £350 to collect a 27-year-old motorcycle and overhaul its carburettors was not going to turn a £1,750 purchase into a financial catastrophe.

There was, however, one small detail. The £300 figure was for a 4-cylinder motorcycle. The Virago has 2 carburettors.

This is why it pays to read what people have actually written rather than what you expected them to mean. Had I simply accepted the figure, nobody would necessarily have done anything dishonest. I would merely have failed to ask whether a price for rebuilding 4 carburettors also applied to rebuilding 2.

The answer came back at £250. With £50 for collection, the total is £300.

That is an entirely fair price, and the correction is almost more reassuring than the saving. They did not attempt to preserve the higher figure once the difference was pointed out. They adjusted the price to reflect the actual machine.

That matters.

We have become used to businesses where the person answering the telephone knows little about the work, the person preparing the estimate has never seen the machine, and the person carrying out the repair is expected to follow a screen rather than understand what is in front of him.

The FJ Owners Club appears to be something rather different: essentially one experienced man, perhaps 2, working from a workshop that is clean as a whistle and dealing with older motorcycles because he understands them rather than merely tolerates them.

I have been there before with my son’s Hero Bullet. It had a fault that needed diagnosing rather than a part randomly replaced in the hope that the problem would disappear. They found it and fixed it. I came away impressed then, and nothing about this exchange has changed that opinion.

A spotless workshop does not prove mechanical genius, but it is rarely a bad sign. Carburettors contain tiny jets, passages, needles, seals and diaphragms. They are not improved by being dismantled on a bench that resembles the aftermath of a jumble sale.

I have therefore asked another question: whether he would charge me more for allowing me to stand beside him while he dismantles and reassembles the carburettors.

Carburettors are something I really ought to know how to dismantle, inspect and rebuild myself. They are not sorcery, although the arrangement of springs, diaphragms, needles, floats and microscopic passages can make them appear designed to punish the merely curious.

Watching somebody competent do the job properly would be more useful than repeatedly studying exploded diagrams and then discovering, halfway through my own attempt, that I had misunderstood which way a tiny component was fitted.

Time spent explaining a job is still working time, so I would not expect the lesson for nothing. Nor would I expect him to tolerate a customer leaning over his shoulder, asking questions and slowing the job down without being compensated for it. But if he is willing, the additional charge would buy something more durable than the repair itself: the confidence to understand and perhaps deal with the system next time.

The 3-week wait is not a deterrent either. A busy specialist is generally preferable to an empty workshop advertising immediate availability. It suggests that other people have already discovered the value of somebody who knows what he is doing.

It also gives me time to attend to the other parts of returning to motorcycling: finding crash bars for the Virago and locating a decent pair of armoured motorcycle trousers that do not cost the equivalent of a small mortgage.

The crash bars are the easier part. They must fit the XV535, protect something useful rather than merely decorate the machine, and preferably provide somewhere sensible for my feet without turning the bike into a mobile scaffold tower.

The trousers have proved more difficult. I want something pale enough not to absorb every available ray of sunshine, roomy enough around the calves not to cut off the circulation, and fitted with proper armour. Apparently this is an exotic specification.

The market will happily provide endless varieties of black, charcoal and slightly different black, generally described as ideal summer wear by people who have never sat stationary on hot tarmac.

Add a 32-inch waist, a regular fit and Level 2 knee protection, and the prices begin to resemble the opening negotiations on a house extension.

Still, the delay means the search can continue without the temptation to buy the first unsuitable thing simply because the motorcycle is waiting outside. The trousers matter more than cosmetic accessories, and probably more than the crash bars. Chrome can be replaced. Knees are less readily available as pattern parts.

There is also a wider point here about old vehicles. The cheapest repair is not always the one with the lowest invoice. Paying less for somebody to guess, clean half the system, replace the wrong component and return the machine with the original fault still present is not economy. It is simply paying in instalments for the privilege of remaining stranded.

The Virago does not need somebody searching fruitlessly for a diagnostic socket. It needs somebody who understands floats, needles, seats, diaphragms, fuel levels and the consequences of petrol emerging from a breather above a hot cylinder head.

That expertise has a value.

At £250 for the carburettor overhaul and £50 to collect the bike, I am not merely buying a repair. I am buying the judgment of somebody experienced in diagnosing and repairing older carburetted motorcycles, and who knows the difference between a symptom, a cause and an expensive guess.

Should he agree to let me watch, I shall also be buying a little of that knowledge. Not enough to become an expert in an afternoon, but perhaps enough to stop the inside of a carburettor being treated as forbidden territory.

It also makes joining the club seem less like paying for a badge and more like supporting the survival of a useful institution. Owners of old machinery often complain that nobody knows how to repair it any more. Then, when they find somebody who does, they haggle over every pound and wonder why specialists disappear. There is a limit to what expertise can be expected to survive on goodwill.

The plan is for the Virago to be collected in about 3 weeks and for the carburettors to be dismantled, cleaned, inspected and rebuilt. The float system and diaphragms can be checked rather than guessed at, and any contamination can be dealt with before the bike is asked to cover serious mileage again.

Meanwhile, I shall continue searching for crash bars and protective trousers while trying to establish why motorcycle clothing manufacturers believe every rider wants to dress as a member of a heavily armed burglary team.

The original £300 estimate turned out not to be the price of my job. It was the price of a larger one.

One question saved £50.

Another may teach me how the carburettors actually work.

And the 3-week wait may yet prevent me from spending £200 on a pair of black trousers that do not fit.

The First Tank Tells the Truth

I had only just bought the 1999 Yamaha Virago XV535 when it began introducing itself properly. It had passed its MOT, looked sound and had covered only about 80 miles during the previous year. At the time, I regarded that low mileage as reassuring.

The first warning came at Bromyard, where I filled the tank for the first time after buying it.

There was no petrol leak that I could see. Instead, almost immediately after filling, the bike began popping, misfiring and operating at roughly half power. It felt as though one cylinder had decided to become an occasional contributor rather than a full member of the team.

Because the trouble began immediately after filling the tank, the filling itself became the obvious suspect. Perhaps I had brimmed it too enthusiastically. Perhaps excess petrol had found its way somewhere it should not. Perhaps filling the tank had disturbed some contamination lying quietly at the bottom. At that stage, all I knew was that the bike had been running properly, I had filled it with petrol, and it had immediately begun behaving like an asthmatic lawnmower.

The bike would still run, so I carried on to home, following Hay who was driving the motorhome..

After about 15 miles, the popping and misfiring disappeared and the bike appeared to be running normally again on both cylinders. By the time I reached the M5, it had recovered its full power. I could still hear what sounded like backfiring, which was not encouraging. Then I moved my head down and the noise disappeared.

The position of my head could not possibly affect a backfire, so I began moving it around deliberately. Head up: popping. Head down: silence. The engine had not developed a posture-sensitive ignition fault. The loose strap from my helmet was flapping against the skid lid.

That was reassuring, but also slightly misleading. The motorcycle genuinely had recovered its full power, and the remaining apparent symptom had turned out not to be mechanical at all. It therefore seemed perfectly reasonable to conclude that whatever had happened after filling the tank in Bromyard had worked its way through and cleared itself.

That was the comforting interpretation.

45 miles further on and back home, No. 2 Son took it out for a ride. When he returned, he said it had been cutting out. I immediately noticed petrol leaking from the right-hand side of the bike, but only while the engine was running.

That changed the nature of the problem.

The fact that it appeared only while the engine was running suggested that the active fuel supply was involved, rather than petrol simply draining continuously under gravity.

At first, the source was not obvious. Petrol was appearing around the decorative air-filter housing on the right-hand side, but on an old motorcycle the place where liquid becomes visible is not necessarily where the fault began. Petrol runs along pipes, castings and brackets before eventually dripping from whichever point happens to be lowest.

The answer came from following the hose rather than continuing to theorise about it. The hose ran across the bike to the rear carburettor. It was not a conventional overflow pipe hanging safely beneath the machine. It was the carburettor breather routed into the right-hand dummy air-filter housing, directly above a hot cylinder head.

A breather is supposed to carry air. It is not supposed to pour petrol onto one of the hottest parts of the engine.

That meant the fuel level inside the rear carburettor was rising far above where it should have been and entering the vent passage. The likely cause was a sticking float, dirt beneath the float needle, wear in the needle or seat, or some combination of old petrol deposits and contamination from the tank.

Suddenly, the trouble at Bromyard made rather more sense. The popping, misfiring and half power may not have been an unrelated episode caused by overfilling. It may have been the first indication that the rear carburettor was flooding and overfuelling one cylinder. After 20 miles, the fault may have temporarily cleared, allowing the engine to run normally again.

It had not repaired itself. It had merely become intermittent.

This is one of the traps with old machinery. When a symptom disappears, we are inclined to treat the problem as solved. The engine stops misfiring, the warning light goes out or the strange noise vanishes, and we decide the machine has recovered.

Machines do not recover. They either continue to malfunction or wait until a less convenient moment to demonstrate that the fault is still present.

I tried the simple remedy first. Tapping the carburettor bowl did not free the suspected float valve. One float-bowl drain also appeared blocked, strengthening the suspicion that old fuel deposits, or possibly rust from the tank, had contaminated the carburettor.

None of this should have been entirely unexpected. For a 27-year-old motorcycle that had covered only about 80 miles in the previous year, it was a problem waiting to happen. That is not really use. It is occasional proof of life.

The MOT showed that the bike met the test requirements on the day, but an MOT is not a mechanical health certificate and never has been. It cannot establish how an ageing fuel system will respond when the tank is filled and the motorcycle is suddenly asked to cover real mileage again.

Like many people, I instinctively equated low mileage with good condition. What this episode reminded me is that machines do not simply wear out through use. They also deteriorate through inactivity.

A motorcycle ridden every weekend may be healthier than one that has spent years sitting quietly in a garage. Regular use keeps fuel moving, valves operating, seals wetted and passages clear. Standing preserves the odometer. It does not necessarily preserve the machine.

In hindsight, the bike was not failing. It was introducing itself. The important point is that the fault has appeared now. Thank God it happened at home rather than on another long journey. A leaking carburettor on the drive is an inconvenience. The same fault miles from home, with petrol escaping above a hot cylinder head, becomes a recovery problem at best and a fire risk at worst.

Fortunately, the remedy is neither mysterious nor ruinous.

There is a workshop experienced with older carburetted Yamahas only a couple of miles away. A mechanic accustomed to rebuilding banks of 4 Mikuni carburettors on Yamaha FJs is unlikely to be frightened by the Virago’s pair. The sensible course is a proper carburettor rebuild, inspection of the tank and fuel supply, replacement of any worn needles or seals, and possibly a tank flush before the carburettors are balanced and the bike returned to service.

The anticipated cost is somewhere around £250 to £400, depending on what parts are required and whether the tank needs attention. For a motorcycle bought for £1,750, that is entirely acceptable. It is not a catastrophe that suddenly makes the purchase uneconomic. It is a reasonable recommissioning cost on a 27-year-old machine that has spent too long doing almost nothing.

Nor is there any value in disguising the fault. Extending the breather hose would merely arrange for the petrol to leak somewhere less visible. That is the mechanical equivalent of moving the bucket rather than repairing the roof.

Once the carburettors have been properly cleaned, rebuilt and set up, and any contamination in the tank has been dealt with, there is every reason to expect years of happy riding.

Buying a classic or modern classic motorcycle is not like buying a new appliance. You do not simply acquire an object; you begin a relationship with a machine that has accumulated its own history, habits and weaknesses.

The purchase price buys the motorcycle. The first proper journey starts the conversation. The Virago had passed its MOT. What it had not yet passed was its first full tank, its first proper run and its first opportunity to reveal what 27 years of age and 80 miles a year had been quietly storing up.

I should be back on the road within a week.

Marrakech and the Death of Greige

I was watching one of those Sunday afternoon television programmes the other day. You know the sort. Somebody wanders slowly around a foreign city while soft jazz plays underneath and a presenter in expensive linen says things like:

“Marrakech assaults the senses.” Which is television shorthand for: “There are lamps.”

It was on PBS, which, as a pensioner, I am increasingly drawn towards, along with Sky Arts. Between them they appear to contain the only two vaguely worthwhile things left on Freesat that do not involve either house auctions, serial killers or a celebrity learning pottery while crying.

Normally these programmes are little more than visual chewing gum for the overfed and mildly sleepy. Half travel documentary, half DFS advert. But this one drifted into the world of designers who became obsessed with Marrakech, and suddenly it all became rather interesting.

Because Marrakech appears to have a very particular effect on wealthy Europeans. They arrive as sensible minimalists and leave wanting seventeen courtyards, three fountains, carved cedar doors and somebody quietly hammering brass in the background at all times.

At first it is innocent enough. A tile pattern. A courtyard. Some lanterns.

A few days later they are discussing “texture” with alarming seriousness and wondering whether the downstairs loo in Swindon might benefit from artisanal plasterwork.

Six months on, they are trying to persuade a man called Tariq to hand-finish seventeen thousand zellige tiles while a Labrador named Basil lies exhausted beside an olive tree in Surrey wondering where everything went wrong.

What fascinates western designers about Marrakech is not really Morocco itself. It is the discovery that decoration can be unapologetic. Britain, especially modern Britain, became terrified of visual confidence somewhere around 1997. Since then our interiors have largely consisted of fifty shades of greige interrupted occasionally by Farrow & Ball knock-offs and a sign saying LIVE LAUGH LOVE.

Then people arrive in Marrakech and discover rooms where somebody has clearly said: “No, keep going. More pattern. More colour. More carved wood. Hang another lantern there. Put a fountain in the middle. Yes, under the banana tree.”

And somehow it works.

The extraordinary thing is that Moroccan design manages to feel both disciplined and sensual at the same time. Beneath all the colour and ornament there is structure, geometry and craftsmanship. Repetition. Precision. Balance. Nothing is accidental. It is rather like looking at a beautifully engineered classic car underneath all the polished walnut and leather.

Designers like Yves Saint Laurent and Jean Paul Gaultier did not merely visit Marrakech. They inhaled it. Suddenly fashion collections became drenched in jewel colours, embroidery, strong lines and theatrical silhouettes. European minimalism briefly got shoved aside by people returning from Morocco muttering: “We need more texture.” Which, translated into English, usually means: “I would like the sitting room to resemble an extremely expensive spice market.”

Even Pierre Balmain succumbed. His Marrakech pool, tiled in the style of a Persian carpet, looked less like somewhere to swim and more like somewhere an exceptionally wealthy sultan might quietly discuss silk exports while being handed a fig on a silver tray. It was gloriously over the top and, annoyingly, utterly elegant at the same time. That is the Marrakech trick. It marches right up to the brink of absurdity, peers over the edge, then somehow lands gracefully on its feet.

The amusing part is that Britain cannot quite carry this off because our climate fundamentally disagrees with the concept. Moroccan interiors are designed around blazing sun, cool courtyards and shadow. British houses are designed around horizontal rain and asking whether the radiator is on.

A real Marrakech house belongs in Marrakech. It belongs behind heavy walls keeping out heat and dust, with shadow falling across a courtyard while water quietly trickles somewhere unseen. Transporting the entire thing to a new-build in Swindon feels faintly like wearing a dinner jacket to clean the wheelie bins. Unless, of course, you are actually Berber, in which case you can probably do what you like.

So what happens instead is that people attempt a sort of Marrakech-inspired compromise. One brass lantern, two cushions and a vaguely distressed side table from Homesense, then they stand back believing they now live in a riad. Meanwhile outside it is 7C and Dave from next door is pressure-washing algae off his wheelie bins.

Still, I rather admire the ambition. Modern Britain desperately needs reminding that decoration is not a moral failing. Somewhere along the line we confused minimalism with sophistication.

Marrakech never made that mistake.

Marrakech looks at your beige open-plan kitchen, quietly orders another mosaic fountain, then watches while somebody in Wiltshire tries to recreate the effect with a £14 brass lantern from Dunelm and a reed diffuser called Arabian Nights.

HouseholdJobs

I spent yesterday cleaning the doorbell.

Schrodiger's Spreadsheet

A quick update on yesterday's post - the Yamaha Virago passed its MoT. That's a 100% pass record over 26 years.

On to today's observation.

I made a small mistake in my solar power spreadsheet the other day, which briefly suggested that my fairly modest domestic solar installation had generated enough electricity to make Gloucestershire glow gently in the dark.

This was not, strictly speaking, true. My roof had not become a small nuclear fusion facility. The National Grid had not rung up to ask if I could take the edge off peak demand. I had merely entered something catastrophically stupid into Excel, which is not really physics, but does have a tendency to create strange effects in the observable universe.

The interesting bit was not the mistake itself. I can make mistakes perfectly well without troubling the Nobel committee. The interesting bit was that the wrong figure fed a chart on another worksheet.

So the question wafted through my mind: did the chart change the moment I entered the wrong figure, or only when I opened the chart worksheet and observed it?

This is where Excel became unexpectedly philosophical, which is not something one wants from a piece of software that still thinks 1-2 is a date. The underlying data had changed. The workbook had accepted the madness. Somewhere inside the file, the future graph had already become ridiculous. But the chart itself, sitting on another worksheet, had not visibly changed, because I was not looking at it.

Then came the more awkward question: did the chart still exist?

This is not the sort of question one expects to ask about a spreadsheet. Normally the difficult questions are things like why has column G turned into dates, why is this formula referring to a workbook I deleted in 2018, and why has Excel decided that 1-2 means the second of January rather than, say, a subtraction sum, which would seem a reasonable enough guess.

But there we were, asking whether an unobserved chart actually existed.

The answer, rather annoyingly, is yes. It existed. But not as a fully alive, continuously updated visual thing sitting there nobly redrawing itself in the dark while nobody was watching.

The chart existed as an object in the workbook. Excel knew where it was, what it was linked to, and broadly how it was supposed to look. It had not lost the chart behind the sofa.

The last rendered version also existed. That was the old visual state: the chart as last painted, calm and respectable, still pretending my solar panels had behaved themselves. In that sense, the visible chart existed in the old state.

But the new visual chart did not yet exist on screen. The underlying data had changed, and the next rendering was already doomed, but Excel had not yet painted the new evidence.

So it was not, strictly speaking, a quantum superposition. The chart was not both old and new at the same time, like a cat in a box with an attitude problem. It was more prosaic than that, which is usually where Excel lives. It was an old rendered picture attached to a changed underlying reality.

Then I opened the chart worksheet.

At which point the graph suddenly leapt into its new and absurd position, like a startled cat finding out it had been assigned to PivotTable maintenance. The old visible chart vanished, the new ridiculous chart appeared, and for one brief moment my solar panels appeared to have outperformed the Severn Barrage, had anyone actually got round to building it.

Observation had not collapsed a probability curve. It had merely forced Excel to redraw the stale evidence from the changed data.

But that is enough for me.

This is not proper quantum mechanics. No serious physicist is going to win a Nobel Prize by staring at a line chart and asking whether June’s solar yield is both 243 kWh and the annual output of Dinorwig. Excel is not Copenhagen. It is more Swindon with formulae.

Still, it has the important ingredients. There is a hidden state, an observer, and a sudden change when the observer looks. There is also, regrettably, Microsoft Excel, which does rather lower the intellectual tone.

So no, the chart was not both old and new. It was old on screen, wrong underneath, and waiting to embarrass me the moment I clicked on it.

Schrodinger’s Spreadsheet: the data is wrong, the display is stale, and the observer is standing there with a cup of tea wondering why June has produced 14 gigawatt-hours.

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.

Nigel Farage's Real Victory Was Never Number 10

Today, I find myself returning to a theory that I had previously abandoned because it seemed too cynical, too tidy, perhaps even a little conspiratorial.

What if Nigel Farage’s real purpose was never to become Prime Minister?

The real question is this: why does a politician who claims to want to govern repeatedly behave as though the standards expected of a future Prime Minister do not matter?

A £5 million personal gift from a billionaire donor. A remarkably lucrative role promoting a gold bullion company. Questions over declarations. Persistent criticism of his parliamentary attendance and engagement with Clacton. Now even talk that a standards investigation could, depending on its outcome, lead to a recall petition.

None of these episodes is, by itself, politically fatal. But together they do not look like the careful, disciplined conduct of someone methodically building public trust.

A serious contender for Downing Street normally spends years demonstrating competence, reliability and judgement. Every scandal matters because every scandal chips away at the trust needed to persuade floating voters.

Farage appears to operate under different rules.

Perhaps that is because his political capital does not depend on persuading the broad middle. It depends on retaining a sufficiently large and loyal core who treat almost every criticism as confirmation that he is challenging the establishment.

If that is true, scandal is not necessarily fatal. It becomes a running cost.

He may lose moderate supporters around the edges, but if the core remains intact he keeps exactly what makes him valuable: the ability to frighten his opponents.

That changes the calculation.

The conventional assumption is that Reform succeeds only if it forms a government. But that may misunderstand where its real influence lies.

If your objective is to reduce regulation, cut taxes, weaken environmental obligations and shrink the state, it is irrelevant whether those policies are delivered by Reform, the Conservatives or Labour. The vehicle matters less than the destination.

So a wealthy donor does not necessarily need Farage in Number 10. They simply need Labour and the Conservatives to believe that unless they move in Reform’s direction, Reform will continue taking votes from them.

In that scenario, Reform becomes less a government in waiting than a permanent pressure group with parliamentary representation.

Its success is measured not by the number of ministers it appoints, but by how far it can drag everyone else’s policies towards its own.

And to some extent, that has already happened.

The Conservatives have become Reform Lite, forever hardening their language and policies in the hope of recovering voters they lost to Farage. They present this as conviction, but it increasingly looks like panic dressed up as principle.

Labour has not been immune either. Whether by conviction or electoral necessity, Labour under Starmer has adopted tougher positions on several issues where Reform has been influential: asylum, welfare and fiscal restraint among them.

Shabana Mahmood’s stance on refugees is not merely a change of tone. It is a hardening of policy.

That matters because it shows Farage’s influence working even without power. He does not need to sit in government if government already feels obliged to answer questions framed by him.

But two things may now complicate the model.

The first is Burnham. If Labour under Burnham can speak plainly to insecure voters without accepting Farage’s premises, Labour could move out of Reform’s gravitational field.

The second is Prosper UK. A serious centre-right movement rejecting populist Toryism is precisely the fishbone in Farage’s throat. It does not need to win over his core supporters. It only needs to give respectable centre-right voters somewhere else to go.

That is the threat to Farage: not that his believers abandon him, but that everyone around them stops being frightened of him. 

Farage’s danger lies in his ability to define the battlefield. His weakness lies in the possibility that others stop fighting on it. If Burnham can reach insecure voters without parroting Reform, and Prosper UK can offer the centre right a home that is not built from grievance, Farage’s leverage shrinks.

He can keep his loyal core. He probably will. But a loyal core is not the same as national dominance, it is only powerful while others panic around it.

Perhaps I was wrong to abandon my original theory. The real measure of Farage’s success was never whether he became Prime Minister, it was whether Britain changed because he was here.

The Price of Patriotism

Kemi Badenoch has discovered a £4.7bn gap in Labour's defence investment plan and is behaving as though she has uncovered the political scandal of the century.

She hasn't. The remaining £4.7bn is not "missing". It has not disappeared behind a filing cabinet. It is a funding decision for the autumn Budget.

The truly astonishing part is the identity of the messenger.

This is the party that spent 14 years hollowing out Britain's armed forces while wrapping itself in the flag. The party that cut troop numbers, delayed procurement, presided over chronic cost overruns and left equipment programmes years behind schedule. It also left behind an economy weakened by Brexit, a tax base that grew more slowly than it otherwise would have done, and public finances under severe strain.

Having created so much of the problem, the Conservatives have now reinvented themselves as guardians of sound finance. It takes a spectacular lack of self-awareness.

Then comes the inevitable slogan: "We're spending it all on welfare."

Fine. Which welfare?

The state pension? Disability benefits? Housing support? Universal Credit? Carers? Low-paid working families?

If Kemi Badenoch wants £5bn found, she should have the courage to tell us precisely who is going to lose it. "Welfare" is not an answer. It is a convenient label designed to avoid saying "pensioners", "disabled people" or "working families".

The real question is not whether Britain needs another £5bn for defence. It probably does.

The real question is the opportunity cost.

Every pound spent on defence has to come from somewhere. There are only four options: higher taxes, lower spending elsewhere, more borrowing, or stronger economic growth. Those are the choices. There is no fifth option called "common sense".

Britain's security is a national responsibility. Defence protects our territory, our infrastructure, our trade, our supply chains, our businesses and our accumulated wealth.

So who should contribute most?

The answer is surely those with the greatest ability to contribute, those with the greatest financial stake in Britain's stability, and those least likely to bear the physical burden.

That is not class warfare. It is proportional responsibility.

Indeed, if Britain's loudest millionaire and billionaire patriots spend their lives telling us how patriotic they are, this is their moment. Patriotism is not measured by the size of the flag on your lapel, the volume of your speeches, or the frequency with which you accuse others of lacking it.

Patriotism is measured by what you are prepared to contribute when your country genuinely needs you.

Recently Badenoch accused Bridget Phillipson of being a "spiteful class warrior". Yet when Britain needs more money for defence, her instinct is not to ask more of those with the broadest shoulders, but to look down the income scale instead.

If there is class politics at work here, it is not coming from those arguing that contribution should reflect ability to pay.

It is coming from those who instinctively protect wealth while presenting cuts for everyone else as patriotism.

This is the same political trick we have seen time and again. Promise easy answers. Avoid difficult choices. Wave the flag. Hope nobody notices that the arithmetic has quietly left the room.

Serious defence policy requires serious honesty. It means telling voters what security costs and explaining, openly, how it will be paid for. Slogans about "welfare" are not a funding strategy. They are simply a way of changing the subject.

Badenoch offers none of that.

Instead, she performs the oldest trick in politics: create the mess, leave the mess, then express theatrical outrage that the people clearing it up have not yet finished.

If her answer is that the poorest should fund Britain's defence while the wealthiest remain comfortably insulated, then this is not patriotism.

It is austerity dressed in camouflage.

If others are expected to risk their lives, the very least the wealthy can risk is a little more of their wealth.