jonathan.rawle.org

The BBC News website carried an ariticle today on growing dissatisfaction with rail fares. Now fair enough, the article makes some valid points. No-one likes the above-inflation rises in ticket costs that we see each year, and it is undoubtedly cheaper to travel by train in many other European countries.

However, what made me laugh were some of the comments other readers left on the article. Many people made remarks along the lines of how much cheaper, faster and more convenient it is to drive than take the train. If that’s true, why are the trains so overcrowded? Why would anyone take the train if it was simply better to drive? While there are some people who are unable to drive, perhaps due to disability, that does not apply to the vast majority of people. The truth is, despite it being unpleasant for many commuters, taking the train is still better value for money than driving. Of course, value for money can mean on of two things: it is simply cheaper, or it is slightly more expensive but you get more for your money as it’s faster or more convenient.

People can argue about whether the railways should have been privatised, but if the private rail companies are really creaming off profits, it’s market forces that are keeping tickets high, and prices would fall if people stopped taking the train. To some extent, this would be true even with a nationalised railway. So the answer is, if you think it’s better to drive, please do so. Only when people stop buying train tickets will the price fall in real terms. However, I suspect that most of the people who claim it’s so much better to go by car are the ones who take the train about once a year, and people of that mentality are never going to see any value in not having to drive.

There has been a spate of cases recently of jurors in criminal trials being themselves jailed for acting inappropriately. A number of jurors have been found guilty of researching cases or suspects online, others have used social media such as Facebook to post comments about or even contact the person whose case they were hearing. There was even one juror who phoned in sick in order to go to the theatre.

Today it was the case of Dr Theodora Dallas, who was jailed for not only finding out online that the defendant had previously been charged with another offence, but then going on to share that fact with the other jurors hearing the case. This is despite the trial judge and other court officials warning jurors not to do any background reading about the case, and specifically warning them not to do research on the internet.

Now, Dr Dallas is presumably an intelligent woman, given that she was a lecturer at the University of Bedfordshire, so you would have thought that when the judge said don’t look things up online, she would have known not to do that, and even if she did inadvertently see some information while looking for something else, she should have kept it to herself. She claimed to have been looking up the meaning of GBH, but of course the correct way to find the meaning of legal terms would be to ask the court staff. Her claim not to have understood instructions due to a poor grasp of English is shocking too: how can she fairly reach a verdict if she might not understand all the evidence? It hadn’t occurred to me that foreign citizens with sub-standard English might find themselves on a jury.

It’s extremely important that defendants receive a fair trial. While it may seem harsh to jail someone for contempt of court, it’s worth remembering that a trial biased by inadmissible evidence could result in someone innocent being jailed for considerably longer. Alternatively, it could cause a trial to collapse, resulting in either a retrial at significant cost to the taxpayer, or a criminal being set free, at the expense of the victim.

Some people have suggested that the current rules for jurors are outdated in the age of the internet, and unworkable or unenforceable. I disagree with this assertion. Just because technology makes it easier to do something doesn’t mean it automatically becomes right. The invention of television didn’t mean that it was suddenly OK for jurors in high-profile cases to watch coverage of the trial. Nor should the internet or social media make it all right to do background research. It’s quite easy to go home and use the internet to e-mail, contact friends on Facebook, do some research for work, etc., but avoid looking up the case, just as it’s possible to watch a soap or the football on TV without watching the News at Ten. Other than telling people not to do it, and jailing anyone who steps out of line, how do you control it? If you keep jurors shut up in a hotel for the duration of the trial with no access to the internet, that is rather harsh on the majority who would not be tempted to research the case – and acting as a juror is arduous and inconvenient for those people called for duty as it is without that. Scrapping jury trials is hardly desirable, either.

Hopefully the recent high-profile cases where people have been jailed for contempt will serve as a warning to jurors in the future, and enable us to retain this important part of the justice system, even in the 21st century.

On Thursday there was an item on BBC Radio 4′s The World Tonight about Kodak filing for bankruptcy protection, which included an interview with Terry O’Neill, whom they introduced as, “One of the great British fashion photographers of the 1960s,” a description that proved rather apt. You can hear the interview on iPlayer.

After lamenting the fate of Kodak, O’Neill was asked his opinion of digital photography. He thinks that digital is simply not up to the job for professional photographers. He said that the difference in quality between film and digital photography is similar to that between HD and regular television. I have to disagree. In terms of resolution, digital has now caught up with 35mm film – you probably need around 15 megapixels to equal the finest-grain film. Admittedly, if O’Neill uses larger film formats, digital currently still lags behind, although it will catch up quickly. From a technical point of view, a good analogy for film is in fact old analogue television, or vinyl records rather than CDs or MP3s. I can believe that O’Neill can tell if a photo was shot on film, in the same way that some people prefer to listen to LPs. It isn’t that the quality is better, just that they like the perceived warmth of the old analogue format.

Unfortunately, O’Neill then appeared to confuse the difference between film and digital formats with the difference between professional and amateur cameras. He claimed that digital photography means that anyone can just press the button to take a photo without having to know anything about photography. However, compact, fully automatic cameras have been around a lot longer than digital cameras. I agree with him when he says that there are lots of people taking photos, but few are any good, and that this doesn’t make them photographers. What I don’t agree with is that it’s the type of camera that makes someone a photographer or not. Surely for a renowned portrait photographer like O’Neill himself, it’s the interaction between the photographer and model, the way they make them pose, the lighting arrangement, and the framing that makes him successful. That would be true whether he was using film or digital, an SLR or a mobile phone camera. While it is true that digital cameras have made photography much more accessible, and allowed people to take many more pictures, a large number of which have little artistic merit, it doesn’t follow that a digital camera is an inferior tool in the hands of a professional.

O’Neill finished by saying good photography is a three-dimensional medium, and that only a real photographer would appreciate that. I’m not entirely sure what he meant, so clearly I’m not a good enough photographer, but I can only assume he is referring to depth of field. Compact digital cameras have a very large depth of field due to their tiny sensors and focal lengths. This means the entire frame is usually in focus. One of the pleasures of using a digital SLR, though, is the ability to control the depth of film, and a full-frame digital SLR will have exactly the same depth of field characteristics as a 35mm film camera.

Ultimately, Terry O’Neill’s views sound like those of someone who has been in the business such a long time and doesn’t want to change his ways. I can’t believe no professional photographers use digital. Patrick Lichfield had already started to try it, and he died in 2005. Perhaps someone who produced such a lot of good work in the ’60s can afford can eschew advances in technology, but the rest of us will undoubtedly produce better results if we move with the times.

Imagine you are on an airliner and due to land shortly, and you have the window seat for the view. But there is no being held in a stack, no seemingly endless circling while below you see houses of all the people whose lives are blighted by aircraft noise, no seeing all sorts of famous landmarks of the city. Instead, you suddenly notice a ship on the sea beneath you, and think just how large it looks – the plane must be flying rather low. Just at that moment, before you realise what is happening, the plane is touching down on the runway, at the airport you didn’t even see approaching.

This scenario isn’t entirely make believe, but is the experience of millions of passengers per year landing at Hong Kong’s international airport. The airport, opened in 1998 and designed by Britain’s own Norman Foster, is situated on a man-made island. It replaced an old airport that was hemmed in at the centre of the city, with no room for expansion, and with scary approaches over densely populated areas.

The UK government this week announced that they would be considering a number of schemes to expand airport capacity. In 2010, they ruled out building a new runway and terminal at Heathrow Airport. One of the options they are looking at is building a brand new airport in the Thames Estuary, possibly at least partially on reclaimed land.

Heathrow Airport is becoming a national disgrace. It is at capacity, as the airlines will be quick to tell you, but the last thing we need is expansion of Heathrow. The airport is in the wrong place, among residential areas of London. Any expansion means demolishing hundreds of homes and blighting thousands more. The noise and pollution for people in the area is horrendous, and transport links congested. With perhaps the exception of the most recent Terminal 5, the terminals are rather scruffy and tired, and the central bus and rail stations a bit run-down. The whole huge, sprawling site is a mess. The airport is hardly the best first impression to present to foreign visitors.

There are currently two main proposals for estuary airports. One has been dubbed “Boris Island” after the London mayor. But the other, located on the Isle of Grain, is by none other than Norman Foster. This detailed proposal also includes a new Thames Barrier to protect London from flooding and produce renewable electricity, as well as new transport links. An airport in such a location could see passengers travelling into central London as quickly as from Heathrow (from where getting into London fast presently means taking the world’s most expensive train) yet aircraft taking off or landing at the new airport would do so over the sea, not over people’s homes. There would be much more capacity, so the airport could be a major European hub airport, and the whole site could be planned carefully from the start, rather than just develop almost by accident from a small military airfield.

There would certainly be challenges in constructing an airport in that location, and these have been much discussed in the press this week. But this is the 21st century, and problems can be overcome by engineering solutions, unlike the problem of an airport in the middle of a densely populated city with no room for expansion.

But there is one important principle that I believe must be stuck to if an estuary airport were to be built: Heathrow Airport must be closed down. We don’t need an additional airport, we just need to replace the current one with a better one. The owners of Heathrow, Spanish-owned BAA, have said that closing Heathrow would be a disaster because it employs 10,000s of people. They seem to assume that none of the staff would transfer to the new airport, and that none of the businesses servicing Heathrow would move either, which doesn’t quite seem a valid assumption. A larger airport would support even more jobs. Yet there are also huge gains to be made from demolishing the terminals and digging up the tarmac. Heathrow occupies a site the size of a medium-sized town. The mind boggles at the thought of how much the land would be worth to developers in that location in west London, particularly as it would no longer be blighted by being close to a major airport. The number of jobs it would create could be phenomenal, and new housing would relieve the serious shortage in the capital. The sale of the land would surely pay for the new airport (although those in the know seem to think foreign investors would pay for it anyway).

The opportunity to create a whole new suburb of London is even more exciting than the opportunity to create an airport the country could be proud of. One day “Heathrow” could be a the name of the newest and most desirable part of London, rather than shorthand for the place people like to spend as little time as possible.

Tonight I was at the Royal Albert Hall to hear the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra under Zubin Mehta perform some of my favourite works, including Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio Espagnol, and the popular Bruch violin concerto with Gil Shaham as the soloist.

Unfortunately, a small number of people in the audience chose to spoil the concert with protests against Israel. During the first piece, Webern’s Passacaglia, a group started to sing some sort of protest chant. The orchestra continued to play, being the fine professional musicians they are, and the people causing the disturbance were escorted out. However, further interruptions followed, although these all occurred between pieces of music, so all the remaining musical works were heard by those who had gone to the hall to hear them, and indeed the Israel Philharmonic are an orchestra with a splendid sound.

I’m not going to link to the BBC’s story about the disruption to the Prom, as it is (at least at the time of writing) somewhat misleading as it suggests the audience booed the performers. In fact, no-one booed the performers. A small number of people in the audience, who clearly have no interest in music, shouted slogans that were more or less unintelligible, which simply caused disruption. At this, the rest of the audience booed the protesters and shouted for them to be thrown out, which they were. Each time, the performance then continued, and the performers received rapturous applause at the end.

As far as people in the hall were concerned, the protest was pretty pointless. I have no idea what the protest was about or what the message was, other than that they are, obviously, against Israel. Most people in the audience, like me, were not there because we support Israel, but simply because we are music lovers. Many people attend regularly; some even attend every single concert. So when people booed the protesters, they were on the whole not doing so because they are pro-Israeli, but because they are annoyed and angered that someone should disrupt a concert like that. Those causing the disruption probably have no idea about the Proms or classical music and do not care. However, the disruption failed to get across any message about why people should not go and see the Israel Philharmonic perform, and I suspect the majority of people leaving the hall this evening will feel at the very least a little less sympathetic towards the Palestinian cause.

Some people travel long distances to attend the Proms. Others, from all corners of the world, might be staying in London and decide to drop in to catch a concert. Often they will have no clue who is performing, but just go there for the experience. As a Proms regular myself, I know only too well the mix of music buffs and foreign visitors found in the arena. This evening it was exemplified by the young, foreign woman whom I overheard ask the man next to her who the people were who disrupted the first piece. It was her first Prom and probably her last. Hundreds of people have now had their taste of what’s ordinarily a piece of quintessentially British culture ruined. To quote a tweeting twit, I think the protesters should try thinking of people other than themselves. It’s also just as well all the idiots were in seated areas. Had they chosen to stand in the arena, I doubt they would have lasted five seconds.

There is a time and place for protesting, but a concert attended by thousands who have no connection with Israel is not it. Perhaps if they had found a more appropriate time and place, their message might have reached people. As it happened, it’s hard to see that anyone was the winner.