Drought conditions

This week: southern Britain has too little water; this map projection has far too much. But first: in praise of inefficiency.

The best part of the railway from London to Cornwall comes just south of Exeter. On the train’s left-hand side, the estuary of the River Exe widens out gradually until, suddenly, there it is: through the resort town of Dawlish, the line runs just metres from the sea, so close that on a rough day the spray will coat the windows.

This is of course delightful. But it’s also a problem – because every few years, a storm washes away the ballast supporting the tracks, and the line has to close for repairs. There was a second route that once linked Exeter to Plymouth and points west, this one running through the centre of Devon instead of hugging its southern coast. But this closed in 1968, one of the many unprofitable routes axed in the series of closures blamed, not entirely fairly, on Dr Beeching. The route’s unprofitability was easy to see; the downsides its closure might have for the region during a storm decades hence was not.

I’ve been thinking, in a burned out kind of way, about the value of redundancy in relation to my own work. I have, as you’ll know from the extensive whinging, not really stopped for much of this year, as I’ve raced to get the new book done without letting any of the other balls my career requires me to juggle drop to the floor. It’s gone well, in the sense that the balls have, by and large, stayed in the air. But I’ve started to feel like something’s missing: not just that I’ve got the balance off between output and input, but that I’m not leaving space for those ideas I do take in to bang into each other, in the manner creative thought requires.

What those things have in common, other than the fact they both popped out of the same brain on the same train, is the fact that the things that provide value are not always the things you can quantify. Most of the time, for the relatively sparse population of western Devon and Cornwall, one train line is enough. But when that line breaks, as it does, it’ll generate all sorts of hidden costs: migrations and holidays, investments and growth, all of which should have happened but did not. A decision that made sense in a British Rail spreadsheet does not in a regional economy.¹

In the same way, a version of my work where I’m always running from task to task, set constantly to transmit not receive, would mean that over time I’d just get worse at everything. (I really hope this has yet to happen.) Focusing too closely on the things which seem to have immediate value can make the final outcome worse.

This is one of those phenomena that is, when you start looking for it, everywhere. In normal times, having more hospital beds or equipment than you need is a financial drag on a health service; when a pandemic comes along, it turns out you’re stuffed without those things. In the same way, my friend Peter Apps relates in his latest book The Next World War that the US military came under pressure to buy into just-in-time supply chains of the sort used by companies like Amazon. This worked great, right up until the moment you’re fighting a war, when it turns out you suddenly run out of bullets. There are substantial differences between the US military and the NHS: but what both have in common is that, when they need something, they really do need it. The entire notion of “efficiency” is misplaced.

I could, and will, go on. The internet-enabled shift from wastefully spraying TV advertising at everyone to hypertargeted-ads may have actually made ad spend less effective. More generous welfare and educational systems, of the sort we used to have, weren’t just a cost to the taxpayer, but something which created the space for the sort of early career mucking about required to produce art or take entrepreneurial risks: with 23-year-olds now under pressure to immediately grind, who knows what innovations we’ve missed?

And the obsessive focus on squeezing the value out of every square inch of a town, and every line in a budget, has not led to more efficient councils but to places which just seem, on any metric that actually matters to humans, worse. Sometimes the most valuable assets are things, like galleries and gardens and trees, which simply cannot be sweated. I suspect, looking at a higher education sector that’s been pressured to switch from humanities degrees to more career-focused professional courses, we’re soon going to find a parallel misunderstanding of where an institution’s real value was there, too.

This is obviously a big topic, which deserves more than one piece, and which I’m going to be thinking about for a long time; please comment with examples, or argue with my thesis, below. But in closing I have two thoughts. One is that an obsessive focus on the bottom line can, over a long enough timeline, make the top line worse.

The other is that, for what remains of the summer, I really am going to try to take my foot off the pedal.

A book about borders which I didn’t write

Something of a departure on today’s episode of The Bunker as I interview someone else about borders. Hannah Lucinda Smith’s Hinterlands is a brilliant book, about her travels through the disputed territories to the south east and east of Europe, and how the presidents of Russia and Turkey are using those places to their own advantage. It’s a great chat, taking in Syria, Cyprus and Nagorno-Karabakh.

Also, buy the book. You won’t regret it.

(I occasionally like to give you a break from the ceaseless promotion of my own work. But if you have yet to pre-order 31 Inventions That Built Our World, my history of cities and all they contain – now out in just three weeks’ time! – you can do so here; there’s a list of events I’m doing to promote the book, from St Andrews to Canterbury to Cardiff, on Instagram here; and today only, 47 Borders is 99p on Kindle for some reason. Okay, I’m done.)

Some notes on drought

In Britain, the summer of 1976 brought the rise of punk, the fall of Jeremy Thorpe and almost, but not quite, no rain whatsoever. Not only was it the driest summer in two hundred years: much of the previous year, stretching back to May of 1975, had been unusually dry, too.

So on 23 August, with parts of the south having seen not a drop of rain for a month and a half, and much of the country dependent on emergency standpipes in the streets, Prime Minister James Callaghan took emergency measures. Denis Howell, MP for Birmingham Small Heath, was appointed to the brand new position of Minister for Drought, and given the unenviable job of persuading the public to use less water. Howell invited reporters into his home, where he talked about sharing a bath with his wife. Callaghan reportedly instructed him to – I assume this was a joke – do a rain dance.