Yesterday, the UK Government approved the HS2 high-speed train route from London to Birmingham, and potentially then on to Leeds and Manchester.

Personally, I don’t understand the need for HS2 between London and Birmingham. There’s already several ways to do that journey.

To my mind, what’s *really* needed is a cross-country route, rather than another up/down-country route.  For example, at the moment I’m travelling between Bury St Edmunds and Bedford on a daily basis. It takes about 65-75 minutes door-to-door, which is OK.  However, if I were going by train, I would have to go Bury St Edmunds -> Cambridge -> London -> Bedford – around five hours of travelling time. And that’s ridiculous.

We simply don’t (to my understanding) need another ‘length of the country’ high-speed route. We do need one that goes across the country – from Cambridge across to Oxford and on to Bath/Bristol. That would have allowed for far more useful routes and better links, and would probably be better used.

This year I’m not going to lay down a big old list of plans. They rarely work out, or I’m just too ambitious – or other things take over.

Take last year’s list, for example :

• Write more
• Take more photos
• Do more websites
• Get more business
• Pay stuff off
• Get off the antidepressants

Not much, really. Yet most of it didn’t quite happen. Work and life got in the way, and things just didn’t quite happen.

Mind you, I did get off the antidepressants, and I did take photos when I got the chance, so that’s not too bad. I also completed a fair few websites, and some other projects – just not for myself.

I think I’ll be keeping the same basic list for this year though.  It’s written with the best of intentions – but the knowledge that things change, including my motivation.  But I think the 2012 list will be (in no particular order) :

• Write more
• Photograph more
• Owe less
• Weigh less

And that’ll do, I think.

So here we are, in 2012. I’ve been insanely slack this winter (and for a fair amount of 2011, to be fair) and I still don’t know what the plan will be for D4D™ in 2012. We’ll see.

As Blue Witch suggested in her comment on the previous post, 2011 wasn’t really a great deal of fun for D4D™ – plus I’ve been busy with other odds and sods.

Being ‘Corbetted’ (as I understand it’s now known) wasn’t any fun at all. Basically, this involves being threatened with legal action because you’ve made comments regarding your personal opinion about someone’s stupidity in light of a very stupid error – and that person then doesn’t have the sense to either contact me (whether by phone, email, or comment on the posts in question) but instead waits two fucking years before complaining through solicitors. We’ll just ignore the fact that Article 11 of the EU’s Human Rights Charter specifically says …

Everyone has the right to freedom of expression.  This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.  The freedom and pluralism of the media shall be respected.

After all, Gore Grimes conveniently ignored it, so I might as well do the same.

So that might explain some of why things went a bit quite here.

The other major change for me was that I stopped wanting to write about some of the more personal stuff that’s been going on. Writing that kind of thing bit me hard at the end of 2010, and the effects of that rumbled through into 2011.

D4D™ used to be a place where I could write, and dump my brain when I needed to. In 2011, it stopped feeling like I could do so.   It affected my desire to write at all, to be honest – well, that and the stupid levels of commuting, but that’s no decent excuse either.

I don’t know what will happen to D4D™ this year. It may be that it’s coming to a natural end. After all, it’ll be ten years in August – maybe that’s a good closing point. I don’t know yet.

I don’t know that I want D4D™ to end. I don’t know that I want to keep it going.  So it’s all a bit up in the air, and I guess only time will tell.