The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Koneko:

English born and bred, born 1988, I have vague recollections of Pinatubo's eruption. Of course, between then and about nine-ish I have no strong news or television-y memories; when I was nine I watched Volcano. I still can't watch it, but I love volcanoes. Won't go within four kilometres of one, though.

I asked my mother, also english, if she remembered any major news story from when she was seven, and she responded that the first one to make a real impression on her was the fall of the Berlin wall. (I was one. It still throws me off that I was born in the Cold War.)

#2 - it IS. The tracks are terrible and I've yet to go on a train that doesn't cross a town, village, or city, for at least fifty percent of the journey. Rabbits on the line are fine - people get messy. 'Sides, I'd feel scared going much faster, with all the gardens almost on the track.

But... the british rail system is really quite good. We're an island, built up, and we haven't got half the space of most countries. You can't rebuild it and fix it because that means knocking down houses, usually the ones that people are living on. An English home is the home owner's castle, and no one will let them go through it.

You can't, therefore, make one main station to feed all the country and Europe - where would you put it? Want to knock out central London?

You could make a monstrously sized nexus sort of station outside London, but people would complain about the size of it, how easily you get lost, the fact that it's not central... and, of course, the clincher that London itself is the largest city in England, the most easily accessable city in England (as all trains go there, in the end) and has a direct link to the Channel Tunnel.

At least if there's sixteen stations to feed different parts of England, you can't get lost on which part of England you're going to.

A tuppence from me, possibly because I can -

It's a little strange, Remembrance Day. To me at least, mostly because the poppy sellers seem to pop out of the wood work in some silently planned manoeuver. I can also be as unobservant as a pea in a pod, but there you go...

You ask questions about it as a kid, but it just... goes without question. No one really talks about it, outside school and the media, and you have the poppies that seem to magically grow out of the concrete around the memorial in town (which, incidentally, needs a wash - the names are leaking green. Very noticeable on white). It Happens. It Happens with the momentum of something that will Happen for a Very Long Time, ingrained into you as a child because, well, everyone does it...

I don't know how it is in America - or indeed, anywhere else - but from my point of view here in Blighty, we don't use it to push whatever military endeavours are currently going on. It's a solemn, quiet, give thanks and clap a lot, sort of day. And then you dump the poppies in the bin, put the pin somewhere (because a pin is a pin) and get on with it all.

#96 - I wonder if we are the most advanced civilization in the universe?


That is the most terrifying thing I have seen all week.

Comment statistics for Koneko on the Making Light blog

Total: 4 comments. View all these comments on a single page.