The Wiki Man

31 January 2009

A fortnightly column on technology and the web

I try hard to like the new, darker James Bond, but I miss the camp insouciance of the earlier films. If you’ve grown up with the type of 007 who briefly interrupts a bout of exotic love-making to sabotage a Russian spyplane with a champagne cork, it’s hard to warm to a character who spends most of the film engaged in the kind of fighting you’d expect to see in a pub car-park in Maidstone.

But, like him or not, there is nothing un-British about the new Bond. In many ways, crude, inelegant but effective is what Brits do best: the Routemaster bus, PG Tips, the London taxi, the full English breakfast, the Aga, the Blower Bentley and the 125 High Speed Train are all fine examples of our ‘it’s not fancy but it works’ approach. In a curious way, the Boeing 747 is a much more British plane than the Concorde.

Like the 747, the High Speed Train was first intended as a stop-gap, yet is still unsurpassed 40 years on. There is a wonderfully manly Richard Hannay feeling to the way in which you still exit these trains by lowering the window, then leaning out to depress the vast external door-handle. I also love the way the doors swing shut with a series of satisfying clangs, followed by a deafening racket and cloud of fumes when the train pulls out. Rather than mincing along on special tracks like the French TGV, the HST uses what’s already there and, unlike the Eurostar, it doesn’t replicate the worst aspects of air-travel in a train journey. The whole thing is mad yet magnificent, a relic from an age when the world was designed by men who smoked pipes.

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Alan Challoner

January 30th, 2009 11:27am Report this comment

Your comments on the levered plug in wash basins seems to show that you have not been around as long as I have. They were in use long before the EU came into existence. They may have been developed in the 1930s but possibly even earlier.

They are unlikely to be removed and in that respect are more secure than the plug and chain.

Thomas L. Aabo

January 30th, 2009 12:41pm Report this comment

The british do the AGA best? I is a swedish invention!

Rory Sutherland

January 30th, 2009 5:18pm Report this comment

The Aga was designed by a Swede, but manufactured and popularised by Brits. And perhaps owes some of its early success to the efforts of a Scottish salesman, one David Ogilvy - who later became known in advertising.

Rory Sutherland

January 30th, 2009 5:22pm Report this comment

I can't quite buy the anti-theft argument for the Europlug. A stronger chain might solve the problem just as well. (I suppose at a pinch you might argue that the device is so stupid that noone would want to steal it).

Besides, this argument may hold some weight when the plug is used in public washrooms - although French public lavatories of the 30s were mostly guarded by a demented old woman. But why in private homes? I have some pretty dodgy friends, but none I think who would steal my household plugs.

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