Is Your Journey Really Necessary?

As I mentioned in A Capital Day Out , I'm taking a trip to Manchester next month. Ideally, I'd have booked the return ticket in one easy transaction – but putting my hands on £73.00 is beyond me at the moment. Even though my travel costs will be reimbursed afterwards, I'm trying to find the most economical way to do the journey within the scheduling constraints. It's the outward leg that's the stumbling block. I need to be in Salford by 4.45 p.m., so I've had to make sure that I'll get to Manchester with time to spare in case of disruptions. With this in mind, my first port of call was the Arriva Trains Wales website. I've seen numerous advertisements for their bargain fares over the past few months, in the stations, in the pocket timetable, on the trains themselves, and on their website. According to these, the cheapest single fare is £13.00. That sounded like a good option to me, so I had a closer look at the website. Isn't it odd how, even with my...

Shanara the Dippy Bint texted me last week out of the blue and asked me when I was planning my next trip to Cardiff. I told her that I wasn't planning a trip at all – £7.00 for a return ticket represents a fair chunk out of my Giro. To make matters worse, thirty quid of this fortnight's money has come and gone already on another rail ticket, this time to Manchester. (All will be revealed in a month's time, don't worry!) But she insisted that we had to meet up soon. For one thing, she's expecting her second baby at the end of November. For another thing, I saw enough of Cardiff during the run-up to Xmas when I was working there, and I certainly don't think I can face a day there for 'fun.' So we eventually agreed to meet for lunch yesterday. It was an interesting day out, to say the least. I'd planned to catch the 10.21 train, but first of all I had to call into the Library and book my ticket to Manchester. Luckily, I'd stayed overnight in Rhian...

Our student halls at Brunel University were in a village called Cowley, just about a mile or so from Uxbridge itself. Cowley is as far west in Greater London as you can go without falling in the Grand Union Canal. Even though it meant nothing to any of us at the time, it's a stone's throw from a place called Little Britain. (Please feel free to read the rest of this in Tom Baker's voice if you like.) It placed us very firmly in the Outer Zone of the London Transport network. As you can imagine, it didn't take long before I started exploring the place. We were about a minute's walk from one main road, the A408 between Uxbridge and Heathrow Airport. By cutting across the campus for a few minutes you could get to the A4020, the road into Ealing, Acton and Shepherd's Bush. In those days, bus travel was cheap – a 'short hop' of up to a mile cost the huge sum of 20p, and a longer journey in the Outer Zone was capped at 30p. At the time (1984-5), Ken Livingston...

A word of warning: If you thought Space was complicated, wait until you start thinking about Time. As Cypher says in The Matrix , 'Hang onto your hat, Dorothy, because Kansas is going bye-bye.' Most scientists will point out that what we call 'time' is merely a way of rationalising the implications of the Second Law of Thermodynamics – the famous one about Entropy tending to a maximum. This means that the energy in a closed system will spread itself out evenly over time. In layman's terms, it means that complex systems inevitably break down into simpler, more stable elements, as the energy involved in holding them together dissipates. Elaborate structures decompose into their component parts. A pint glass dropped onto a solid surface (such as the tiled concrete floor of this pub) will shatter into a hundred pieces. The energy stored during the process of creating the object is released in a small 'explosion' of kinetic energy (as the pieces fly around the pu...

This one was written in April 2002, and sent to the South Wales Echo , who declined to print it. It's a follow-up to the earlier (published) A Letter to the Editor 1 . . On September 27 last year, you printed a letter from me in which I suggested that Shamrock Coaches had developed a Stealth Bus, invisible to all forms of detection. I am pleased to report that I have just returned from a Public Enquiry into Shamrock Coaches at Rhondda Magistrates' Court, held over three days under the chairmanship of Traffic Commissioner David Dixon. The experience has been, to say the least, enlightening. During the enquiry, Mr Clayton Jones wove a tangled web of conspiracy theories involving various arms of the Vehicle Inspectorate, Rhondda Cynon Taff County Borough Council, the police, head teachers of schools throughout south Wales, the Traffic Area Office, and a powerful supercomputer, which is apparently situated somewhere in Pontypridd and has the ability to alter time and space. I suspe...

This one appeared in the South Wales Echo in August 2002. At the time, our train service was a lot more limited than it is now, and I took the opportunity to have a bit of fun. I sent it in – but somewhere between my typewriter and the finished page, the Echo typesetters struck. A few weeks later I bumped into my old Maths teacher in the takeaway. He took me to task for using Roman capitals for the irrational numbers – but I'd typed them in italics to begin with. (Incidentally, I seem to be one of the few people who've noticed that Platform 5 has disappeared altogether from Cardiff Central Station. It's all a bit Harry Potter…) Following the news that Cardiff Central Station now has a Platform Zero, I wonder whether Wales and West Trains have any plans to add further platforms in the spirit of mathematical adventure. For instance, the 'circular' City Line between Radyr and Coryton would be ideally suited to run from Platform π , which represents the ratio between ...

If you don't believe me, check out this notice I spotted at Cardiff Central Station this morning: