Whiteout Heroes

There was a very well constructed programme on TV last night called Collision Course, which yesterday detailed the events of the Southall Rail crash. It started off concentrating on the lives of some of the people killed and injured in the crash and could so easily have been like one of the 'Airport' films where the personal lives of the various passengers are mixed up with a major air event. This steered a straight course which allowed the details of the few seconds of the crash to be told in an informative and compelling way without ever seeming to be voyeuristic. I try to avoid watching things like this but at the moment it actually seems that a train crash is a more familiar tragedy; there seem to be so many strange and dangerous things going on at the moment, that such an event seems almost normal. The real tragedy is that at the moment rail crashes are almost normal. The stats suggest that we can expect a rail crash of such proportions every two years. Still, rail (and indeed air) travel is far far safer (10-20 times safer) than travelling by car. The problem for most people is as stated by one of the injured passengers, that people fell more afraid, the more divorced they are from the control of their mode of transport. Many of us drive cars and we feel happy doing so because we feel completely at ease with the control of the vehicle. We are happy even if we are not driving, because we can drive. The further we get from being able to drive/pilot a vehicle, the more worried we are about it crashing. The bottom line is that, in general, we don't trust people other than ourselves. Anyway, all credit to the production team but more especially to the people prepared to talk about something which must be a real gash in their memories. I do hope that this man was watching and that he keeps his mits off things which he knows nothing about.

Wonderful suggestions have been made, that we may actually be seeing some snow over the next few days. It is always nice to wake up to but in the city it so quickly turns to slushy mess rather than just melting away over days like it does in more rural areas. I loved the snow when I lived on the common but I told you that yesterday. When it snowed there, you were actually in some danger. I walked all the way from our house to the top of the Herefordshire Beacon (See this map - the route is all the way from the house just above the 'n' in Castlemorton Common on the right to the peak of the Herefordshire Beacon on the left.) and when I got home (in -18C) I found the house empty and I was locked out. I think I was in danger of frostbite then. My nose was certainly on the point of crystallising. The Beacon is an old hill fort which has many concentric ramparts surrounding the two main peaks and these were filled with snow to a depth sufficient to cover me had I fallen in. I think I was probably a little reckless. I am still here though. Or in another quantum universe, I was sucked under the drifts. I have this theory that no-one ever really suffers. We all have our personal result of Sum Over History and all the bad stuff happens to other people, the further away you look from yourself, the more terrible the tragedies become. However, for the actual people who expereience those bad things, life is OK and it is us who seem to have the terrible lives. Probably not true but there is an element of reality, in that people generally like familiar things and so life changes, including those for the better, upset one's feeling of 'comfortableness'. Maybe that is just me and thinking about it it is quite pompous because there are many people in the world whose lives are really bad, no food or clean water or abuse so that their lives are just one long terrible experience. Maybe it only applies in our western culture. And the annoying thing is that more western people take their own lives. It seems that people for whom life is a chore, value it more than those of us who have no real problems. The human brain is a sea of irrationality. The more comfortable you are, the more you worry about things not being comfortable. Mental anguish. Who needs it? Follow the seven-fold way.