Teddy Bears and Prophets

I see that the Sudanese religious "authorities" have been inciting their people to protest (link) at the light sentence of Gillian Gibbons, who received only a 15-day jail term for allowing her pupils to name a teddy bear Muhammed.

As we are repeatedly told, Islam is a peaceful religion; those of its followers calling for Mrs Gibbons to be executed for insulting the prophet (who, let's not forget, married and slept with a nine-year old girl) are presumably not "true" Muslims...

The BBC report contains a couple of positive points, one being the reported comments of the President of the Federation of Student Islamic Societies, Ali Alhadithi, who appears to have spoken out in defence of Mrs Gibbons. Could it be that UK-based Muslim groups are at last making a stand against the 8th-century philosophy of their overseas brethren? That would represent a significant step forward in the relationship between Islam and the West.

Trains On Tuesday

They're getting worse, they really are. On time, reasonably clean, moderately comfortable and so overcrowded that I can't even sit on the floor, and standing all the way from Southampton Airport Parkway to Waterloo is no joke, I can tell you!

In my current carriage, which has about 60 seats and a buffet bar (closed) there are 14 people standing or sitting on the floor, which can't be safe. Are there any rules governing the number of passengers allowed on a train, or is any number ok as long as the doors shut?

Having seen some of the local commuter trains on there way into Waterloo (which could carry more people only if they were minced and sprayed into the carriage through holes in the roof) I suspect there are no limits at all and this begs the question "why use even moderately comfortable carriages?". It can only be a matter of time before the current medium-distance trains are replaced by their short-haul cousins, at which point working from home will look increasingly attractive.

Shimla Pinks

If you're looking for food in Birmingham, you could do a lot worse than Shimla Pinks on Broad Street. We had dinner there on Saturday evening and the Gourmet Set Menu is very nice with a good selection of starters and main meals.

Cold Frosty Morning

Autumn has landed and even in southern Hampshire, where we are about as far south as you can get in England without dampening your turn-ups, frost has started appearing on the cars. There has been no ground frost at home (it is rarely cold enough) but travel only a few miles further north and the countryside is dusted with frost, sparkling in the early morning sunlight.

I'm a big fan of progress - I like to see things steadily improving - but I worry that the Government's house-building plans, which call for a huge number of new homes between Portsmouth and Southampton, will cover great swathes of countryside and the silver landscape I've enjoyed this morning will become ever more scarce. The point at which development changes from progressive to oppressive is defined, I suspect, by the proximity of the development to one's home; is that reasonable?

Maybe it depends on the type of development. Houses can be built almost anywhere and maybe we need, as a society, to reconsider the options offered by high-rise development of brown field sites. Another development, wind farms, I find rather less worrying and controversial. I can't help thinking that people who complain about local wind farms fields haven't fully considered either the impact of a new coal-fired power station on their locale or the fact that the power they currently take for granted is currently generated by a power station in somebody elses back garden.

The First Class Difference

I may have mentioned this before, but the 0650 train from Southampton Airport Parkway to London Waterloo is unusually quiet and relaxed on a Friday. Monday to Thursday the train is full when it departs and it gets worse after picking up more passengers in Winchester; the stress generated by lots of people competing for seats is tangible and pretty unpleasant. By contrast, the Friday train is only half full when it leaves Winchester (although it normally fills at the next stop, Woking) and this makes an enormous difference to the quality of the journey because the atmosphere is very much more relaxed.

I’m sure that it isn’t economically or physically practical to run this number of empty seats (or, in fact, any) on the Monday to Thursday services (they’d need to at least double the number of carriages) but I can now understand the appeal of First Class travel (where there are fewer seats per carriage). It isn’t the free coffee, the comfortable waiting room at the station or even the large seats; it is simply that First Class carriages carry fewer people and produce lower levels of stress. My season ticket expires in mid-January; I might try a monthly First Class ticket, just for comparison, you understand.

Winter

Winter draws in and post quality deteriorates. Complaints to the usual address.