I have been condemned by Abellio Greater Anglia – or rather by Network Rail – to many dead hours through February and March behind a car wheel. It’s not just day-trippers or the tourist trade that will be hit by the line closures. For those of us who work in London at weekends it’s a proper nuisance.

Of course I don’t object to maintenance and improvement work on the Liverpool Street line. Heaven knows, it needs it. But once again travellers must suffer for the lack of the alternative line that would have provided a way to bypass the affected sections of track.

It would have delighted that man Beeching. The one-time chairman of the British Railways Board wanted us all on roads, not rails – and that’s where, for the next few weekends, I shall be.

My London colleagues are sometimes amazed at how much time I spend commuting. Often I spend more time on the journey to and from work than I do at my desk. The frequent delays can be irksome, especially late at night on the home leg – and of course Sundays are notorious for mucked-up timetables – but otherwise I don’t mind too much.

Sitting on a train gives you thinking time. And we could all do with more of that.

What do you do on the train? Do you, like so many, sit with earplugs in? Listening to music can be a good kind of thinking time, leading thoughts off in all kinds of random directions.

I spend much of my travelling time reading. Books mostly, sometimes a newspaper, never one of those dreaded electronic devices. Occasionally I’ll get absorbed in the puzzles – can I finish the Independent crossword before we reach Ipswich?

Sometimes – like right now – I’ll use my train time writing. Which can only happen because I’ve passed earlier miles in thinking. And that, at its best, means not thinking about anything in particular, but just letting one thought follow another.

If you’re asking yourself by now what this column is really about, that’s it. Just thinking.

It’s a thing most people do too little of. Or so I suspect. I’m never actually inside anyone else’s head to know for sure what, if anything, goes on there.

But if you can’t take pleasure in just thinking, what’s the point in being a sentient creature?

Thinking purposefully to solve problems is all very well – useful, perhaps. How can I fix this doorhandle? Where’s my next meal coming from? Where should we take our next holiday – and can we afford it? How can we get a better government? What would a better government be, anyway?

Regular readers will know that the last of those questions is one that nags at me a lot. Partly because if there is an absolutely right answer to be found, no one anywhere has yet found it.

But thinking with no particular aim in view is good too. Not merely pleasurable in itself, a satisfying workout for the brain, but a key part of what makes us human. And for now I have other essentially unanswerable questions to play with.

Like: why have there been more little grebes on the river this winter, but fewer godwits or shelducks?

Is Blackstar really the best David Bowie album for 35 years, or does the sad timing just make it seem that way?

Why do some accents make people sound stupider than others? Why is south Essex estuarine spreading so deep into East Anglia and elsewhere? And what, if anything, can be done about it?

How do graffiti artists get to some of the apparently unreachable places they beautify with their paint sprays? And how many hours of practice does it take some of them to get so good at it?

And here’s one for my forthcoming days on the road.

You’ll have seen those signs advising: “Speed limit for safety reasons”. Which invites the question, what other reason could there possibly be?

Artistic reasons? Sporting reasons? Political reasons? Philosophical reasons? Foreign reasons? Scientific reasons? Hidden reasons? No reason at all?

Just a thought. I’ll leave it with you.
 

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An interesting response to my piece last week about wealth and fame comes from regular reader Rebecca Clifford of Norwich.

"Money," she says, "is a dark religion that requires vast human sacrifice." Which for me is a new way of looking at it, but a strangely compelling one.

She goes on: "Perhaps the desire for fame comes from the need to be acknowledged. An un-noticed child may later crave more attention than one that has known themselves loved and wanted. Our prime minister and his faithful companion Osborne may be good examples of that psychosis."

Perhaps this helps to explain why former boarding-school kids are so dominant in professions such as acting, TV and politics. That and that "dark religion". 

It almost makes me feel sorry for them.

The best Bob Dylan album for at least 19 years has hardly been out of my CD player since I was given it for Christmas. Pity all the tracks on it were laid down 50 years ago. Did whoever stored away all those unissued tapes know what treasures they were saving up for posterity? Probably.

I have all Dylan’s official records except his 2009 Christmas album (I own no one’s Christmas album and am never likely to) and his even more ghastly collection of Sinatra covers, last year’s Shadows in the Night. I also have a shelf-ful of what we used to call bootlegs until the issue became clouded with the growing collection of so-called “official bootlegs”, which is surely a contradiction in terms.

Never mind. Though at 74 Dylan goes on touring as hard as ever, and still writes the odd good song, his best releases of the 21st century have all been in the Bootleg Series.

The latest, The Cutting Edge, is the best yet. It is drawn from the sessions – all in Dylan’s annus mirabilis from January 1965 to February 1966 – for the albums Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde. Dylan’s three best albums and therefore three of the best by anyone. (Dylan's closest contenders, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, Blood on the Tracks, and Time Out of Mind, have some great songs but also some relative weak spots.)

I’ve known most of these songs nearly all my life. Several of them – Visions of Johanna, Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream, Subterranean Homesick Blues, Highway 61, Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues – have taken turns at being my favourite song. And all of them gain something from being heard in versions no worse than the familiar ones, and in a few cases better. Now go away while I give Desolation Row another spin.

Remember a book called “Do You Sincerely Want to be Rich?” I always assumed it achieved the desired result for its author, Charles Raw, if not for its readers.

These days what everyone seems to want – every young person, anyway – is not to be rich, but to be famous. Though I suppose accompanying riches would not come amiss to most.

Rich and famous? Sounds like something of a nightmare to me. I have never – sincerely or otherwise – wanted to be rich.

Enough money not to have to worry about it would be good. More than that is unnecessary for anyone. It also seems (and I speak from observation, not experience) to bring more worries with it.

The greed for more money than anyone needs is a kind of mental illness. Unfortunately, in a money-based society it is the madness that drives the system.

So where exactly does fame fit in?

We have become even more obsessed with a shallow, TV-based “celebrity” than we are with cold cash. Extracting one from the other is almost a side-effect – though it’s one that can work both ways.

There would be no profession of “publicist”, and no Simon Cowell, if fame couldn’t be milked for money. And no Rich List if we didn’t put a celebrity value on extreme ownership.

So if a sane person wants only enough money, how much fame would be enough?

I did once think I’d like to be famous. Or, at least, I used to envy people I knew who had become “successful”. Which is, I suppose, a kind of hybrid of “rich” and “famous”.

Going to a so-called “good” university, then working in newspapers, I have known a few such people. Do I still envy them? Not really. Are they happier, healthier, more comfortable in their own skins than I am in mine? Probably not. So what’s to envy? Apart from financial security – if they have it.

I am occasionally spoken to by people who recognise me from the photo at the top of my newspaper column. That’s usually pleasant enough. A gentle pat on the ego. If it happened all the time I’m sure I’d soon tire of it.

I used to think it would be good to write a bestseller. Well, I still do – but not quite enough to put in all the necessary work. What a waste of that effort it would be – and what a disappointment – if I turned out not to be good enough. Or lucky enough.

And JK Rowling is not the only successful author who has found fame to be a mixed blessing at best.

Of course, I wouldn’t mind picking up one of the big literary prizes. Though I know the whole prize culture is a debased and tawdry business. Little different from X Factor, Britain’s Got Talent, or the Little Snoring biggest marrow contest. Beset with backbiting and flavoured with sour grape.

But the real measure of success – of being someone – in 2016 is the Wikipedia page.

At least one of my friends has one, and so does my great-grandfather, Isaac Hourwich. Several of those creeps I met at my “good” college have them. You can find me on Wiki, but only as a name in two long lists of names.
I suffer from Wiki-envy. There, I’ve admitted it.

So how about Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, now officially the sixth most visited site on the worldwide web?

The founders of the five sites ranked higher – Google, YouTube, Facebook, Yahoo! and Amazon – are all multi-billionaires. Jimmy Wales isn’t.

His site is about the movement of information, not money. And all the more laudable for that.

Does his lack of preposterous riches of Mark “Facebook” Zuckerberg or Jeff “Amazon” Bezos proportions trouble him? I doubt it. He’s famous enough anyway. And surely a lot more financially secure than me.

North Korea is a strange country, but not quite as “closed” as is often reported. For under £2,000, including flights, you could have a nine-day touring holiday there, visiting monuments, mausoleums and temples, mountains and seaports.

You could. I couldn’t – much as I would love to. I believe it’s rather beautiful, and it would surely be fascinating. A step back in time to a quieter, less glaringly colourful way of life, but also a step into a kind of parallel world.
The one thing that might prevent you is if you too are a journalist. We’re not allowed into the country. Which may be why it gets quite such a lousy press.

It’s certainly an oddity, sticking out against the global commercialism which has taken over the rest of the world – even its allegedly Communist neighbour, China. But how ghastly is it really to live there? And exactly how afraid of it should we be?

There is something weird in reports about North Korea being delivered from Seoul, the South Korean capital and one of the richest cities in the world. Yet there, last week, among the lit-up skyscrapers, was the BBC’s Steve Evans telling us about the North’s supposed hydrogen-bomb test.

I say “supposed” because monitoring of the earthquake caused by the test suggests the device was something smaller than a fully-blown H-bomb. Nevertheless, there is understandable fear in Seoul.

A bomb of the size this one is reckoned at would be enough to flatten that glittering downtown area and instantly kill about 80,000 people. That’s about the same number that died in the US bombing of Hiroshima in 1945.

Depending on wind direction and the height the bomb was exploded at, the fallout might reach well into North Korea itself. Seoul is only 30 miles from the border. Your guess at how much that might worry Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un is probably as good as mine.

One apparently ordinary North Korean citizen shown by the BBC said developing the bomb was “inevitable” and “refreshing”. Another said: “I think it is very obvious to counter a robber waving a nuclear stick with a nuclear stick.”

This is madness thinly disguised as sanity. And exactly the argument that is used here to justify renewing Trident.

A brilliant online tool developed by nuclear science historian Alex Wellerstein at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey enables different nuclear sticks to be compared. Using his Nukemap, I find that if a Trident D5 warhead were exploded over Seoul, the death toll would rise to 940,000, with nearly four million severely hurt.

If one were dropped on Norwich, it would cause at least third degree burns to everyone from Bawburgh to Brundall, Swainsthorpe to Frettenham. These are not toys we’re playing with.

The biggest bomb yet tested by the USA would pretty much wipe out Seoul’s 10 million population, devastating the land all the way to the border and potentially spreading deadly fallout right across North Korea and deep into China.

The biggest bomb yet tested anywhere – the Russians’ Tsar Bomba – would be big enough to completely obliterate East Anglia, with fallout spreading as far as the Shetland Islands or Italy.

The idea that such monstrous weaponry could ever be part of anyone’s “defence” would be hilarious if it weren’t so troubling.

The first inkling I had as a child of issues much beyond the family home was the general dread of The Bomb that hung over us all in the early 1960s. In that period, America’s Strategic Air Command had B-52 bombers – many East Anglian-based – permanently in the air, ready to dump nuclear warheads on cities throughout the Communist bloc.

A recently released haul of formerly secret US documents reveals that the SAC had a plan for the “systematic destruction” of more than 1,200 cities from Poland to China. Some of the targets were military-industrial – others were casually listed as “population”. Airfields were to be hit with bombs 70 times as powerful as the one that devastated Hiroshima.

It’s estimated that 520 million people would have died in the Soviet bloc alone. The plan also foresaw, and accepted, that nuclear fallout would kill unspecified numbers of “friendly forces and people”. And that’s without taking into account any retaliation.

All this was essentially the plan of one madman, General Curtis LeMay. But it involved the active participation of more than 200,000 personnel, “just following orders”.

Among things said or written by LeMay was: “There are no innocent civilians.” And: “I’d like to see a more aggressive attitude on the part of the United States.”

How much more aggressive could it have been without launching the global holocaust we feared? We were right to be afraid. Perhaps we still should be.
 

 
And finally...
 
 
When I wrote a month ago about the right-wing bias of BBC News, I didn’t imagine they’d get up to anything quite as blatant. To induce a shadow minister to resign live on air, just before PM’s questions? A ludicrous, scandalous stunt.

Yet that – by the detailed admission of Daily Politics editor Andrew Alexander – is exactly what he, presenter Andrew Neil and BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg got up to last week.

Am I old-fashioned in thinking it should be their job to report the news, not to manipulate it?

You can stumble across some fascinating and unexpected things among the fastnesses of the worldwide web. I’ve recently come upon a wonderful site called, with disarming spelling failure, flashbak.com.

It’s a treasurehouse of the unexpected, and I recommend it heartily if you don’t mind losing yourself for hours in what seems an alternative world – or a selection of alternative worlds.

Much of what’s there does indeed have an element of flashback, such as pages of 1970s adverts that seem as bizarre now as they were normal then. Or bygone science fiction magazines that foretell a future entertainingly different from what we now know. There’s also much enjoyment to be had from old photos of London, Paris and other cities.

And there’s much history to be learned along the way, too. In some cases, history that throws a stark light on more recent events. For example, there’s a page (if you can call it that – I’ve seen shorter books) on Palestine from 1920 to 1948.

Those were the years of British rule before the Jewish state of Israel was granted its independence. The photos are great. Lots of British Tommies in baggy shorts and pith helmets, Arabs in kaftans and turbans, Jewish volunteers in fezes. But it’s the captions, from the British and American press when the pictures first appeared, that are the real eye-opener.

One picture shows a shipload of British soldiers disembarking at Haifa during what’s referred to elsewhere as “the Palestine Trouble”. The caption explains: “After months of terrorism, loss of lives in the hundreds and loss of trade in the millions, Britain apparently is determined to halt the terror and is dispatching thousands of additional troops.”

That worked, then. That was in October 1938. British forces heading to the Middle East to “stop terrorism”. Remind you of anything?

From the same month there’s a rather charming scene captioned: “British police captain leading Jewish kiddies to safety away from Arab snipers during the reoccupation of the old city of Jerusalem”.

What it doesn’t say is that the kiddies are almost certainly refugees from Nazi Germany, probably sent to “the Holy Land” by their parents. And we know what became of them.

Nine years later comes another disembarcation at Haifa. This one is of “young happy Jewish orphans… the majority of whom lost their parents during World War II”. Which seems a rather carefree, offhand way of describing the devastation of what has become known as the Holocaust.

The 500 orphans, it adds, “were interned in Cyprus and brought to Palestine as part of the monthly immigration quota”. Does that ring any bells? Bells with a slightly cracked, uncomfortable sound, perhaps. Immigration quotas; refugees from unimaginable horror interned in camps.

Earlier, from 1935, we had this: “The tired groups on the ship King Carol were homeless Jews barred from entering Palestine by the Quota system restricting immigration. For two months they wandered vainly seeking a country where they would be permitted to land. Finally the Polish government consented to receive them.”

Which, not many years later, would put them in just the worst place they could be in the world.

I could easily fill the paper this column first appeared in with commentary on this one page from history. History that’s shown in black and white, with quaint costumes, and which almost makes you read aloud in a strange, outdated accent you’ve heard only on old newsreels.

It’s another world, another time. But it’s also, in quite a chilling way, a commentary on our own world, our own time. Almost like a premonition.