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Once upon a time, there was going to be a new train line. It was meant to run from Manchester to London or vice versa, depending on what you were escaping from. It was going to be very high speed, just a smidge ahead of what France had achieved in the 1980s. And it was definitely, without a shadow of a doubt, going to be ready for 2033.
But along the way there were so many points of friction with which the train could not contend: the countervailing forces of inflation, the drag of bureaucracy and logistics, the deflation of the human spirit. Even so, some victory had to be claimed and so an ingenious solution was found: if one simply halved the distance, you might get to your destination in the end — a kind of Zeno’s paradox of a train line.
This is what the Conservative government is proposing as it prepares to announce the mothballing of significant parts of what was to be Britain’s major infrastructure project, the one we thought would be the envy of the world. We are now only confident of getting it from London to Birmingham, or at least the outskirts of each.
Achilles couldn’t overtake the slow-moving tortoise of reality. But his shortfall was never comprehensive; he was perpetually on the cusp. No one could ever say he failed.
Some may redouble their efforts in the face of obstacles. Some may see an opportunity in not doing so. The director general of the Sagrada Familia, Xavier Martínez, is one. The Barcelona basilica has been under construction since 1882, and consumed Gaudí’s life. After his passing, the building was delayed by the Spanish civil war, there were desultory efforts to complete it until an announcement that it would indeed be finished in 2026, the centenary of Gaudí’’s death.
But then the pandemic came along, slashing the income from tourism revenues and postponing that deadline. What a relief. When a journalist sought a completion date, Martínez candidly responded, “I’d be lying if I gave a precise date.” Its perpetual state of incompletion has become its unique draw. Why kill that golden goose?
Every Italian prime minister seems inevitably drawn to the promise of completing the bridge spanning from Reggio Calabria to Messina, a vision since Roman times. It has become a rite of passage, signalling one’s place in the storied lineage of Italian leadership, despite the footings never even being poured.
Our fixation on completion might be our very undoing. We had an early warning with the Tower of Babel. Its ambition culminated not in a towering success of bricks that would reach the heavens, but in its downfall. This pile of rubble created a diaspora of people, with each group venturing out to create grand dreams of their own that would prove just as impossible to build. Each could plan their own grand projects, only to see them decline.
I do not put too much faith in Kipling’s stiff upper lip where he tells us, when meeting success and failure, to “treat them both as imposters”. He suggests we can just brush off these rival outcomes with clever perspectives. The reality is that many grand ideas reach neither of those two points. They slip gently into a space between them, never quite releasing us from their thrall. The aim of finishing something might nag for years or centuries, long after the animation enjoyed during its conception. And the un-conclusion attains a life of its own. The route into the abandoned Euston terminus is a 100-metre wide scar that will soon fill with buddleia — great for the butterflies. Finding the Tower of Babel has given several archaeologists a reason to work.
This HS2 debacle should also be a useful prophylactic against too much ambition. For every achievement there is a folly to match: a 100-mile long mirrored skyscraper through the Saudi desert — pity the fellow charged with cleaning away the sand; a bridge between Northern Ireland and Scotland — we scrapped the proposing PM soon after the proposal; Elon Musk’s California hyperloop for which one mile of prototype steel tubing was laid, then removed to make way for a car park.
There is a rarer approach, that of honesty: “We set out what we wanted to do, but acknowledged that we are not actually as brilliant as we thought we were.” After all, success does not come without its own problems. What would happen if indeed HS2 got back on the tracks and chuffed its way to victory? Someone might start suggesting we embark on HS3.
Jo Ellison is away. Follow Joy at @joy_lo_dico
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