The Iron Bridge

Many years ago a temporary foot bridge was built over the River Stort in Bishop’s Stortford linking a car park outside a Chinese restaurant with a car park outside the train station. It’s was never much of a bridge, but it served a purpose of allowing pedestrians, many of them hurrying to catch a train, to cross half way between the two available road crossings, thereby saving themselves a walk of about 1000 metres.

A couple of years ago the council got a lottery grant to put something more aesthetically pleasing in place. The project has the rather utilitarian title of “Bishop’s Stortford Goods Yard Bridge”. The main drawback with the old bridge was that it had quite steep steps up each side, so it was out of bounds to mothers with prams and pushchairs. The new bridge design is to have shallow ramps up each side, almost parallel with the river, with steps providing a shortcut for unencumbered, able-bodied pedestrians. Work started a few months ago, and they removed the old bridge and replaced it with an even less inspiring, even more temporary wooden affair, a few metres downstream of the original. Ground work then began to build the foundations for the new structure.

A few weeks ago I walked that way to the station in the morning, and noticed that some of the structure had started to arrive. Then last week I again walked that way for some reason, and was able to witness what may have been the first person to cross the new bridge. All they had in place were the pedestrian steps up one side and down the other, and a section of the main span linking the two. A workman was crossing over to tighten some bolts on the other side. It looked smaller than I was expecting, but it was far from complete. That evening I walked back that way, and the bridge was open – my first chance to cross it.

Since then, the rest of the bridge has continued to go up, and it’s as massive as I was expecting. Have a look at this.

British Summer Time (and the living is easy)

We’ve finally made it to the last weekend in March, when the British put their clocks forward to British Summer Time (BST), or Greenwich Mean Time(GMT) + 1 hour. The long winter nights are finally over, and it will be light for our journey home from work all the way through until November when the clocks will be set back to GMT for another five months. The only questions now is why on earth we only advance our clocks by one hour, and why do we use GMT all through the winter months. It would increase the quality of our lives enormously if we were to use GMT +1 hour during the winter and GMT + 2 hours during the summer. Why don’t the British do that?

Arguments in favour of this change:

1. It would put us on the same time zone as most of Europe, improving communication and increasing the ease of business transactions
2. It would increase the amount of daylight we are exposed to during at least 4 months of the year, thus reducing the incidence of Seasonal Affective Disorder, a form of depression associated with lack of daylight during the winter months.
3. It would save about 200 lives per year on our roads. Drivers are more alert during the morning, and thus keeping the daylight for the evening hours would reduce accidents including fatal ones during the dark evenings.
4. It would reduce the number of hours we need to light our homes and streets, saving some energy (thought there seems to be a debate about exactly how much). (In the USA the lighting issue is offset by increased use of air conditioning; but in the UK we don’t have the same consideration.)

A recent petition on the Downing Street website asked the government to switch to consider changing to Central European Time (i.e. GMT+1/GMT+2), and in response the government trotted out a list of reasons why they didn’t want to make this change. Most of these arguments were established in the 1970s when a trial of leaving the clocks on BST all year was undertaken for a couple of years. Indeed I remember as a child being dressed in reflective clothing to keep me safe during the dark mornings.

Arguments against the change:

1. Farmers prefer to have lighter mornings in the winter
2. The construction industry prefers to start work early, and this is affected by dark mornings in the winter
3. In Scotland the mornings are darker because they are further north. They prefer the light at the start of the day.
4. Milk and postal delivery people don’t like dark mornings
5. It is dangerous for school children to travel to school during the dark mornings. As the schools come out earlier than offices, children don’t benefit from the shift to light evenings.

However, that was the 1970s and much has changed since then which out-dates most of these arguments:

1. The number of people working the land has decreased, and the number of people driving cars to work has increased – in both cases the changes have been dramatic.
2. Scotland has far more autonomy, and could easily be allowed to set its own time zone
3. Milk deliveries have all but disappeared, and the postal service no longer attempts to deliver before breakfast
4. After-school clubs and social activities, and a general shift to all parents working have meant that children are travelling much later in the day and therefore exposed to the dark evenings in winter.
5. So that leaves only the construction companies affected by any such change. My only comment on that is that changing the clocks does not change the number of hours of daylight – simply the time at which it is light.

I have considered changing my own habits to allow me more daylight in the evenings. If I were to get up an hour earlier, go to work an hour earlier and leave the office an hour earlier I wouldn’t need everyone else to change. However, that’s not as easy as I first seems. I already get up at 06:00, so adjusting it any further would require a bedtime so early that I would have to drop out of society entirely. And anyone who has ever worked in an office will know that getting in early is easy; leaving early is another matter entirely. My other option is to move to France, where they use Western European Time. If I could figure out a way to maintain my income from France then that is what I would do. As it is, I find it simpler to remain in the UK and whinge for 5 months of the year.

Dem Bones

When I got up at 04:00 on Easter Sunday, I did not do so for fame. I simply wanted to be present at the first Eucharist of Easter at my church. A few hardy souls had spent the night in vigil at the church, not sleeping till Easter dawned. But I was driving to Wales on Sunday, so I needed my sleep. I did not voluteer to read the old testament reading because I wanted to be broadcast on the internet - I simply wanted to participate in the service, and Father John asked me if I'd like to read. I was unaware until today that Dr Durrant had brought his video camera along to the service. And so it was that this morning I discovered that my voice, and a dark image of my face, are on YouTube, reading the valley of the bones passage from Ezekiel. It's a bit dark, but this was dawn - about 05:30 on 2008-03-23 (and the temparature was about -3 C). The sound isn't brilliant, but I didn't read it very well, so that's perhaps just as well.

Passion Plays

This Holy Week I've been watching a couple of interesting new dramatisations of the passion story. First the BBC's excellent The Passion, serialised over the week, and last night I saw Redemption Song by the Riding Lights Theatre Company. Both pieces have given me plenty of new angles on this familiar story.
The Passion depicting not only the familiar characters, but attempting to capture the background of the politics of the time. It brings new light to the characters of Pontius Pilate and Caiaphas, also giving some interesting insights into Jesus Barabas and even to Judas Iscariot.
Redemption Song emphasised the Roman occupation of Judea, and used this as a metaphor for the occupation of our souls by sin. It also placed great emphasis on "the tradition" (i.e. Judaism), throwing the Roman occupation into even starker contrast - two peoples living different lives in the same city. Anyone in York or Southampton this week should make an effort to see this play. I left the theatre feeling I needed to go on a retreat to think through all the new ideas.

More on the Wake

Someone took a video camera to the CMG wake, and so our evening is now immortalised on youtube, including an interview with Barbara Ward, the former HR director of CMG.
I think this was made later in the evening, judging by the fact that the crowds have thinned a little, and someone is waving money at the bar staff. I have now found out that there were 47 donors to the kitty, giving a total of some GBP7,500.

CMG Wake

The CMG Wake last Friday was a really good night. I arrived at The Knights Templar in Chancery Lane some time after 18:00 to find the place already packed to bursting point. The first impressions on opening the door were of a sea of people and wall of noise. In spite of the high ceiling, the sheer number of conversations taking place in this great hall reverberated round the place and hit you as great din. People were packed so tightly into the pub that it took some 10 minutes, perhaps more, to cross the room and reach the bar. Thanks to a handful of very generous people there was a tab open for anyone waving a slip of paper saying “CMG”. The smart ones had diversified out of CMG shares during the good times, and locked in the profits before the dot.com bubble burst; there were probably a good few millionaires in the room and some people were kind enough to stand us all a few drinks.

I was tempted to buy myself two drinks to save fighting my way back to the bar, but decided against it. One hand had to be free for hand-shaking. And how many hands I shook that evening! After 15 years with the company, there were so many people I’d worked with and lost touch with. And many people I knew by sight, or by reputation. There were people kitted out in CMG ties and scarves, T-shirts and baseball caps. I heard so many tales of what people were up to now. Quite a few still working for Logica; many now moved on to pastures new; some living lives of leisure; others running their own businesses; one or two looking for new challenges as the came to the end of redundancy packages.

The bar tab was finally exhausted by 20:00, but this didn’t deter many people, and the pub continued to be just as crowded for a couple more hours until I left. Photos of the event are available at http://wakeywakey.dreamhosters.com – I haven’t spotted myself in any of these yet, but there are plenty that give an impression of quite how busy the place was. I have a tape of the 25^th anniversary song “Nobody does IT better, and as soon as I can get it copied to MP3 I’ll post it there too.

I’d like to thank John Sharp for organising the evening. I wonder if that’s the last we’ll hear of CMG, or will this become a regular reunion. I somehow think that CMG was such a big part of so many people’s lives it won’t be forgotten quickly.

CMG R.I.P.

In 1990 I got a job with a fairly small IT services company called CMG. Over the next 10 years it grew steadily into a medium sized IT services company. There was an incredible sense of community in the company. All the shares were held by the staff and there were regular after work updates on how business was going - followed by drinks on the company. When the company went public in the December 1995 it made quite a few millionaires over night, and over the following few weeks, as the share price went through the roof (sadly I was not among them). At one point during the dot.com bubble the company was worth something like 70 times the floatation price, and many employees had aquired shares at a fraction of that price . However, during those heady, frothy days at the turn of the century, CMG made a rather poor investment in merging with an overpriced and over large IT services company called Admiral. As a result of that deal, and the should-have-been predictable collapse in IT stocks a few months later, CMG became a take-over target itself; and in December 2002 was bought up (they say "merged", but we all know the truth) by Logica, forming LogicaCMG. I left LogicaCMG in 2005. Today, LogicaCMG has renamed itself to just "Logica", so CMG now officially no longer exists.

One long-serving member of CMG has organised a "wake" to mourn the loss of this great name. About 700 former employees will be meeting in a pub in the City of London on Friday evening 2008-02-29 to re-live the good times for the last time. CMG, R.I.P.