It’s not exactly a new thought. William Wordsworth had it a lot. William Henry Davies expressed it famously in verse:
“What is this life if, full of care,
“We have no time to stand and stare?”
And Simon and Garfunkel set it sweetly to music in their 59th Street Bridge Song:
“Slow down, you’re moving too fast,
“You gotta make the morning last.”
I was hit hard by it this week while travelling back to East Anglia from the relatively deserted wilds of northern Scotland. Sometimes you have to get away for a bit to see the full craziness of the way most of us live our daily lives. It generally strikes you as you make your way back to what we crazily call “normality”.
In all the 40-odd years I’ve known the North Yorkshire stretch of the A1 it has always seemed a work in progress. A “work” in the sense of an earthwork, a gigantic, landscape-altering engineering project like the Great Wall of China. Or, closer to the right scale, Hadrian’s Wall.
Great earthmoving machines prowl its length, gradually transforming the once adequately two-laned road into a rolled-out ribbon wide enough to land a Jumbo jet. In places two Jumbo jets.
Old houses, old pubs – some of them once beautiful buildings – stand derelict at its verges, sad reminders of past lives swept away in the name of motoring progress.
Whole villages and countless farms must have disappeared under the full length of the London-to-Edinburgh highway. And that’s just one of this little island’s tight network of ever-expanding highways.
How many cars, trucks and vans are in motion at any one time on this monstrous tangle of tarmac?
What compels so many of us always to be going from one place to another in this way? Is it some peculiar form of human madness? Or are we just like the ants whose busy trail leads from one sandy hole in my garden to another?
In some places, where bridges, flyovers and embankments are under construction, you pass by wondering what just new mark on the map is being made.
Did the locals in western China 2,400 years ago look at the scar being gouged across their land and wonder in the same way? Or the hill-farmers of second-century Northumberland scratch their heads at the building frenzy of those crazy Romans?
Humans, like ants, seem to have evolved with a constant desire to go on moving, building, changing things. To go on doing stuff. Even when not doing stuff would be the saner option.
Thousands of years ago, when mighty structures like Stonehenge or the Neolithic complex now being – excitingly – unearthed at the Ness of Brodgar on Orkney were being assembled, they were sure signs of human prowess.
Whether their purpose was religious, as commonly assumed, or something else entirely, they were great building works. Built by human muscle, huge collective will – and a great deal of ingenuity and planning. They surely were, as they remain, literally awesome.
The very fact of their building is proof that their communities were efficient enough not to have to spend all their time and energy finding food. The fine quality of many of the artefacts found shows a level of specialised skill that implies a sophisticated society. One in which craft and art were valued.
People of the stone ages were not “primitive” in any sense in which that word is normally used. Their technologies, their beliefs and their social structures were different from ours in ways we can only make educated guesses at.
The biggest difference is that there weren’t so many of them. In a world of fewer people, doing stuff – like building earthworks – was sustainable. Sane. Admirable even.
Is our ravening road-building – not to mention the vehicles that hurtle along those roads, burning up irreplaceable fuel resources – sane or sustainable? Is the A1 awesome?
Delivering buzzword logistics
When, and why, did haulage mutate into logistics? Look at the hurtling lorries as they pass and you’ll still see some badged with the word “transport” and a few offering “distribution”. But “haulage” has all but disappeared. And “logistics” – such a daft word, still redolent of military operations – is everywhere.
And then there are solutions. Some management guru around 20 years ago or so coined the vacuous phrase: “Bring me solutions, not problems”. And it stuck. Boy, did it stick.
Those trucks all deliver the same message. Solutions can be ambient, complete, green, greener, sameday, managed, integrated, practical, global (never merely local, or even national), supply-chain, food-chain, utility, environmental, safe, systems or packaging. You can fit those words together in almost any combination, as long as you add the vital “solutions”. Solutions that are always plural – and always delivered. Strangely, they don’t seem to include beer or paint.
I’m a little troubled by “business waste solutions”, which sound as if they should be dealt with on a sewage farm. And they don’t score as well in the game of buzzword cricket as the well-known firm which boasts of “Delivering logistics solutions”.
Which just sounds to me like a funny way of saying “haulage”.
“What is this life if, full of care,
“We have no time to stand and stare?”
And Simon and Garfunkel set it sweetly to music in their 59th Street Bridge Song:
“Slow down, you’re moving too fast,
“You gotta make the morning last.”
I was hit hard by it this week while travelling back to East Anglia from the relatively deserted wilds of northern Scotland. Sometimes you have to get away for a bit to see the full craziness of the way most of us live our daily lives. It generally strikes you as you make your way back to what we crazily call “normality”.
In all the 40-odd years I’ve known the North Yorkshire stretch of the A1 it has always seemed a work in progress. A “work” in the sense of an earthwork, a gigantic, landscape-altering engineering project like the Great Wall of China. Or, closer to the right scale, Hadrian’s Wall.
Great earthmoving machines prowl its length, gradually transforming the once adequately two-laned road into a rolled-out ribbon wide enough to land a Jumbo jet. In places two Jumbo jets.
Old houses, old pubs – some of them once beautiful buildings – stand derelict at its verges, sad reminders of past lives swept away in the name of motoring progress.
Whole villages and countless farms must have disappeared under the full length of the London-to-Edinburgh highway. And that’s just one of this little island’s tight network of ever-expanding highways.
How many cars, trucks and vans are in motion at any one time on this monstrous tangle of tarmac?
What compels so many of us always to be going from one place to another in this way? Is it some peculiar form of human madness? Or are we just like the ants whose busy trail leads from one sandy hole in my garden to another?
In some places, where bridges, flyovers and embankments are under construction, you pass by wondering what just new mark on the map is being made.
Did the locals in western China 2,400 years ago look at the scar being gouged across their land and wonder in the same way? Or the hill-farmers of second-century Northumberland scratch their heads at the building frenzy of those crazy Romans?
Humans, like ants, seem to have evolved with a constant desire to go on moving, building, changing things. To go on doing stuff. Even when not doing stuff would be the saner option.
Thousands of years ago, when mighty structures like Stonehenge or the Neolithic complex now being – excitingly – unearthed at the Ness of Brodgar on Orkney were being assembled, they were sure signs of human prowess.
Whether their purpose was religious, as commonly assumed, or something else entirely, they were great building works. Built by human muscle, huge collective will – and a great deal of ingenuity and planning. They surely were, as they remain, literally awesome.
The very fact of their building is proof that their communities were efficient enough not to have to spend all their time and energy finding food. The fine quality of many of the artefacts found shows a level of specialised skill that implies a sophisticated society. One in which craft and art were valued.
People of the stone ages were not “primitive” in any sense in which that word is normally used. Their technologies, their beliefs and their social structures were different from ours in ways we can only make educated guesses at.
The biggest difference is that there weren’t so many of them. In a world of fewer people, doing stuff – like building earthworks – was sustainable. Sane. Admirable even.
Is our ravening road-building – not to mention the vehicles that hurtle along those roads, burning up irreplaceable fuel resources – sane or sustainable? Is the A1 awesome?
Delivering buzzword logistics
When, and why, did haulage mutate into logistics? Look at the hurtling lorries as they pass and you’ll still see some badged with the word “transport” and a few offering “distribution”. But “haulage” has all but disappeared. And “logistics” – such a daft word, still redolent of military operations – is everywhere.
And then there are solutions. Some management guru around 20 years ago or so coined the vacuous phrase: “Bring me solutions, not problems”. And it stuck. Boy, did it stick.
Those trucks all deliver the same message. Solutions can be ambient, complete, green, greener, sameday, managed, integrated, practical, global (never merely local, or even national), supply-chain, food-chain, utility, environmental, safe, systems or packaging. You can fit those words together in almost any combination, as long as you add the vital “solutions”. Solutions that are always plural – and always delivered. Strangely, they don’t seem to include beer or paint.
I’m a little troubled by “business waste solutions”, which sound as if they should be dealt with on a sewage farm. And they don’t score as well in the game of buzzword cricket as the well-known firm which boasts of “Delivering logistics solutions”.
Which just sounds to me like a funny way of saying “haulage”.
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