Last updated 19:49, Thursday, 21 August 2008

I AM SICK to death of the weather.

Maybe, by some miracle, when this column is printed the sun will be shining and we will be basking in it. But as I am writing it is wet, wet, wet!

The bottom of my trousers are soaked and flapping uncomfortably around my legs, I turned the heaters back on when I got to work this morning, and last night I watched television huddled in a blanket. The weather forecast said we may be getting more rain and temperatures are “academic” whatever the heck that means!

Oh, and by the way, I’m backing Britain!

The rain and the unseasonable cold is enough to drive us all to emigrate to sunnier climes but one television programme has convinced me I should stay, and that programme was Britain From Above.

Did you see the first episode last Sunday night? It was amazing. We did not only see the spectacular countryside but we also saw how a tiny island at the forefront of modern living copes – or doesn’t – with inadequate train lines, roads that can barely cope with the pressure put on them, airports that are the busiest in the world and an English Channel so full of ships and tankers that it is a wonder they don’t crash. As for the emails, phone calls and texts that fly around the country and overseas, the number is just unimaginable.

The series promises to show us a United Kingdom we don’t know and that we can be proud of.

For the first time we discovered that all the problems with the railways that send us as mad as the weather are really nobody’s fault.

The lines were built for a very different Britain, when the pace of life was so much slower. Now, with the massive expansion, with all the new housing, with the vastly increased number of buildings, the railways have been hemmed in. There is nowhere to add to them. We can’t have double decker trains because our bridges are too low and we can’t have longer trains because our platforms are too short. To correct either of those problems would be too expensive.

Then there are the roads. They were built for horses or horse and carts in centuries when nobody really went anywhere. Now we are all on the move – huge trucks bringing goods from all over the country and Europe, masses of commuters travelling in private cars, and the roads just can’t cope.

The English Channel, we are told, is the only stretch of water with a “highway code” and spotter planes flying around checking everyone is where they should be to avoid a crash! That is because so much goes from and comes to Britain. It’s like we are the centre of civilisation!

And the aeroplanes! They are taking off and landing every second, it seems, and there are whole “roundabouts” up there where planes circle waiting for a chance to land. The airways are almost as busy as the roadways and everything seems so random, but crashes are rare.

When you look at all this you might think our forefathers showed a distinct lack of vision, but I don’t think that is true.

How could anybody on earth predicted what 2008 would be like? I remember when mobiles phones (or mobile bricks!) first came out. I couldn’t understand them at all.

How would the people sending out the bills know where to send them? How would they know where I’d made calls from and to? Now I’ve got my own, and I never think about it.

I’ll tell you this for certain - if you’d told my grandparents that there would be phones that you could carry around, computers in every home and computers that didn’t even need to be plugged in they would have laughed. None of us could have known how the world would change and none of our forefathers could have provided an infrastructure then that would suit us now.

And still we haven’t ground to a halt. We get electricity into every home. Every shop has goods to sell. Everyone who wants to can reach their destination by rail, road and air - even if it takes longer than it should.

This one small island is coping with demands that nobody could have imagined. Okay, it never stops raining, but there’s still a reason why we are called GREAT Britain!