I have a friend called Don Riley, who originates from New Zealand. He is a property developer. He owns – lucky man – property next to London’s new Jubilee Line. The Jubilee Line, as everyone in the Anglosphere surely knows, is the latest addition to the tube, that is to say to the London Underground railway system.
Don is also an International Man of Mystery. He’ll tell you all kinds of stories about how he sold computers to the Russians in the seventies, and he still has numerous deeply mysterioso friends from behind the ex-Iron Curtain. He occasionally goes on “birdwatching” expeditions to places like Morocco. So if he isn’t a spook of some ex- or pensioned or maybe even current variety, he has a lot of fun pretending to be.
Last year Don wrote a book, about “public” transport and how to finance it without the government crawling all over everything. Book. You remember those? A pile of paper joined together at the side. Paper? Well, it’s flat and usually white, about the same size as the average screen but you generally point it upwards rather than sideways, and it’s very user friendly but for the time being rather hard to update … oh never mind …
Anyway the point is, unlike the usual drivel perpetrated by businessmen who fancy themselves as political stirrers without troubling to learn the trade, Don’s book is actually quite good. I haven’t read it properly, despite Don’s telephone nagging, but Patrick Crozier over at UK Transport has, and I commend his review to your attention, and the book itself.
