jonathan.rawle.org

A name has yet to be decided for the newly merged Lloyds TSB and HBOS. Yesterday, cybersquatters were have reported to have registered domain names of potential names for the merged business, including lloydshbos, hboslloyds, lloydsbos and lloydstsbhbos (the .coms of which were all registered yesterday).

I would have thought Lloyds BOS is a sensible name. It’s been a long time since TSB merged with Lloyds, and the bank is usually referred to as simply Lloyds. As for HBOS, Halifax officially became a division of Bank of Scotland plc in their reorganisation last year. There are also the Scottish fears about losing one of their two national banks, so it seems likely that they will want to retain Bank of Scotland as part of the new name.

Of course, company names aren’t always sensible. When Price Waterhouse merged with Coopers & Lybrand, they named the company PricewaterhouseCoopers (with the case as indicated). So could it be LloydstsbHbos, or even LloydsTSBHalifaxBankofscotland?

On the other hand, they could thwart the cybersquatters by choosing an entirely different name. The merged Norwich Union and Commercial & General changed their name to Aviva, although it later emerged that this was already the name of a ladies’ clothes shop in Norwich, a short walk from the firm’s head office. I hope the Lloyds and Bank of Scotland executives have a walk around to note the names of local shops before making a decision.

One possible advantage of the merger for Halifax customers could be that Lloyds seem to have a better taste in music. When kept on hold by Halifax, callers used to be subjected to a rather annoying instrumental version of the Tom Jones song that’s used in the bank’s adverts. If this were replaced by the music from Elena Kats-Chenin’s Wild Swans, as used in Lloyds’ adverts, that would be welcome.

I’ve deliberately stuck to writing a light-hearted post about names, rather than join in the doom and gloom about how not subjecting the merger to the usual competition controls will be bad for consumers. However, I must say that the merger, creating Britain’s biggest bank, really has given Lloyds a licence to print money.

Travellers hoping to use the Channel Tunnel face huge disruption again today following a serious fire in the tunnel yesterday. This is the third major fire in the Channel Tunnel’s history, the others occurring in 1996 and 2006. In all three instances, the fire started on board a train carrying lorries.

Four types of train use the Channel Tunnel. Eurostar high speed trains carry passengers between London and Paris or Brussels; Shuttles carry cars and their passengers between Folkestone and Calais; another type of Shuttle carries lorries and their drivers; and there are also through freight trains that use the tunnel.

When cars use the Eurotunnel Shuttle, they park inside enclosed, pressurised carriages, with fire doors between each carriage. The cars’ drivers and passengers remain with their vehicles for the journey through the tunnel. However, when it came to design the trains for transporting lorries, the design was somewhat different. The lorries are transported in open carriages, and the drivers leave their vehicles and sit in a club car at the front of the train for the journey through the tunnel. It has been suggested that the carriages were originally going to be similar to those of the car trains, but that the design was changed due to weight or cost considerations, enclosed carriages requiring much more steelwork.

There are a number of problems with the current arrangements for transporting lorries. As the carriages are open, the air rushing past the train can fan a fire and cause it to spread, as is thought to have happened in 1996. There is nothing to stop the fire from spreading along the train as, unlike car trains, the carriages aren’t fully compartmentalised. Carrying entire lorries, as opposed to just their cargoes, means there are many engines and tanks of fuel on board the train, of lorries that may have just travelled hundreds of miles, so their engines will still be hot. Unlike Eurotunnel or Eurostar trains, the lorries and their condition are largely beyond the control of the tunnel’s operators and are not fitted with special monitoring equipment. And because the lorry drivers have to leave their vehicles, they are not there to spot early signs of a fire to raise the alarm.

One answer would be to stop carrying lorries altogether. In terms of energy, it can’t be efficient to carry an entire lorry through the tunnel as well as its cargo. However, in terms of logistics, it may be more efficient to carry lorries. Each year, the tunnel carries around two million tonnes on freight trains, whereas it carries 17 million tonnes on board lorries, so clearly freight operators prefer the latter solution. This is ultimately tied up in the issue of needing to move freight to the railways rather than have lorries clogging up our motorways – something to aim for in the long term, but probably not a viable short-term solution to the issue of freight in the Channel Tunnel.

The other solution is to re-examine the way lorries are transported. It has to be better to have them fully enclosed in a carriage in the way that cars are, with doors in between each carriage to prevent fires from spreading. The drivers can then either remain with the lorries, meaning that any fire can be spotted more easily, or else the carriages can be fitted with fire suppression systems which flood the interior with an inert gas to smother a fire as soon as it is detected. If the extra weight of having fully-enclosed carriages means fewer lorries can be carried per train, so be it – perhaps the remainder of the freight can be carried by rail. As for the cost of building new trains, is it really greater than the cost of repairing half a mile of the tunnel every ten years, and all the lost revenue when the tunnel is closed for a few weeks?

Something needs to change. While the thousands of frustrated passengers milling around at St Pancras and Gare du Nord is a good enough reason, it’s not nearly the most important. So far, no-one has died in an incident in the Channel Tunnel. Next time, they might not be so lucky.

With CERN‘s new machine, the Large Hadron Collider, very much in the news at the moment, it made me think back to the television series, Channel Four’s Reality on the Rocks, broadcast in 1995, which first made me interested in visiting CERN, and no doubt played a part in me eventually working with large scientific facilities.

I only have vague recollections of the series, but the one part that had stuck in my mind was where the presenter, Ken Campbell, visited the CERN tunnel, then home to the LHC’s predecessor, the Large Electron-Positron Collider. I can remember that the fire alarm sounded while he was there, and along with everyone else, Ken had to climb the stairs to return to the surface – all off which was shown in the programme.

While I could remember the name of the programme, I couldn’t recall the presenter’s name, and just remembered him being quite an eccentric character. I looked the series up about two weeks ago, and subsequently looked up Ken Campbell, and discovered he had a distinguished career in the theatre, both as an actor and writer, with some of his productions seemingly rather avant garde. He even appeared in an episode of Fawlty Towers, and was also interested in science fiction, the paranormal and popular science, hence his presenting several TV series.

As an occasional Wikipedia editor, I decided Ken Campbell’s article should be located directly at Ken Campbell rather than Ken Campbell (actor), his namesakes being rather more obscure. The article was moved last Wednesday night.

On Sunday night, Ken Campbell died suddenly at the age of 66. Of course, my thoughts are with his family and the colleagues who worked with him on his many varied projects. I doubt that reading up on a TV presenter after 13 years only for him to die less than two weeks later would be paranormal enough for Ken himself to investigate. Rather, I think it’s just an unfortunate coincidence. At least everyone now looking for information on him won’t have to read about a Canadian evangelist or Scottish goalkeeper.

By the time I finally visited CERN, I wasn’t able to go down into the famous tunnel as the LHC was already under construction, so the closest I could get was the top of the shaft into which one of the huge, new detectors would later be lowered.

It’s sad that Ken Campbell didn’t live to see the switching on of CERN’s new machine. As a rare example of someone who at least made an attempt to cross the divide of C. P. Snow‘s Two Cultures, he made many people happy, and, quite possibly, as an actor inspired more young physicists than most physicists will do in their lifetimes.

Ken Campbell (1941–2008)

Whatever their view of the status of “hero” being given by the press to the British Olympic team, most people would agree that, if we’re considering them to be representing their country as opposed to chasing individual achievement, we should be congratulating the whole team. Equally, we should be proud of British people who excel in any field, whether winning a Nobel prize of spending their life helping people less fortunate than themselves.

Unfortunately, there is one group of small-minded politicians, the SNP, who simply can not bring themselves to support anything in the name of Britain or the UK. The party’s leader, Alex Salmond, used the return of “Team GB” to call for a separate Scottish Olympic team. This idea was immediately rubbished by multiple medal-winning cyclist Chris Hoy, who called the idea “ridiculous”. Hoy later qualified his remark, explaining that while he would be proud to represent Scotland, there simply aren’t suitable facilities for any of the Scottish Olympic medallists to train in Scotland. One wonders in how many other aspects of life the same situation would arise if Scotland were independent. No doubt the SNP and other people in favour of independence realise they could continue to use many facilities provided by the remainder of the UK.

Last week, there were also calls for a Great Britain football team to compete in the 2012 London Olympics. Unsurprisingly, this idea doesn’t go down well with Alex Salmond. The constituent parts of the UK have their own football associations, and therefore field separate teams in international football competitions, for historical reasons. Salmond and the Scottish FA are concerned that a British team in the Olympics would highlight what is seen as an anomaly, and spell the end of the Scottish FA. Salmond said it could, “jeopardise or sacrifice the future of Scotland as an international football country.” Strangely, this is the same Alex Salmond who thinks Scotland will be an independent country in the next few years. Surely, if that were to come true, it wouldn’t matter if there was a Great Britain team in 2012. Once Scotland was independent, the existance of its separate football body would no longer be an anomaly. Perhaps Mr Salmond knows something about the likelihood of independence that he’s not letting on in public.

An equally barmy suggestion came from Labour’s Cathy Jamieson, who suggested there should be a play-off between the home nations, with the winner representing Great Britain in the Olympics. Surely that is just changing the method by which the GB football team is selected? The team appearing at the Olympics would still be the Great Britain team, even if they happened to all be players from the England or all players from the Scotland team. So presumably the situation from an international point of view would be no different than it would be if a single team was composed of the best players from across the UK.

In the end, it simply comes back to politics. The SNP will seize any opportunity to drive divisions between the British people to further their political ideals, whether it’s by promoting separate Scottish institutions, and suggesting that Scottish people are unpatriotic if they don’t agree; or by building resentment among people in England. I think I’ll finish with words from cyclist Chris Hoy:

The thing that baffles me is why people perceive Great Britain as England. It’s not. That’s why you can be proud to be British as well as Scottish because Scotland is part of Britain, same as Wales and Northern Ireland.

I couldn’t have put it better – someone should give that man a medal!

Didcot’s new arts centre, Cornerstone, has finally opened. Over the weekend of 30/31 August, the centre opened its doors to allow the public to have a look around the new building.

The centre includes an auditorium, an art gallery, a dance studio, an arts studio and two other multi-purpose rooms. Many of the rooms have large windows overlooking Station Road and the town’s new square, which is to be named Brunel Square after the founder of the Great Western Railway (which ultimately is what caused Didcot to develop into the town that it is).

The finishing touches are still being made to the landscaping surrounding the centre, so I concentrated on photographing the interior. Photos can be seen in my Didcot gallery.

So Didcot now has a cinema and an arts centre, two things neither Wantage nor Abingdon has…