Virtually Reliving The Past

 Back in the dark days of regular commuting I penned a plaintive little piece called Imagining the Past. I invited you, the reader, to put yourself in the place of a commuter of an earlier era, someone travelling on the Metropolitan Railway (not Line, this is well before the creation of London Transport) who was standing at Rayners Lane station in the dark waiting for a connection. In the early days (we are talking before the First World War) the station was out amidst fields with no buildings in sight, and only a few oil lamps would have provided any comfort. Forget today's comfortable waiting rooms - our earlier self would have stood on a wooden platform exposed to the wind and the chill night air, with perhaps only the clanking of a distant cart or the hoot of an owl for company.

A year later I wrote nostalgically about the Met's operations at the extremity of its network - the line to Verney Junction and the little branch line to Brill, routes that closed in the 1930s.

Back then (2005, not pre WW1), that was as far as I could go. But in the last couple of years I have gone much further. Using a clever computer game called Transport Fever 2, I have actually created the Metropolitan Railway as it was and put up on YouTube some videos about it. Two of them feature a full journey on the Brill branch, rebuilt as it was in 1900. And having whetted my appetite for such recreations, in the last three months I have also done the Severn Valley Railway and the Alcester branch line. The latter is of special interest for it used to run between Alcester and Bearley, in Warwickshire, just a few hundred metres down the hill from where I now live.

Here is the link to one of the videos on the Met in 1910

 

This is the link to the Brill video

and this is the Alcester branch link. I am better at making these thumbnails than when I started.

Once in YouTube it is easy to see all the videos in my channel.  Have a wallow in times gone by.

What's in a Nm?

 In 2021 the giant investment firm Standard Life Aberdeen decided to be more cool, cutting-edge and dynamic. Naturally, they did not bother to upgrade their systems, develop smarter market-trading algorithms or make a stand against short-termism in UK financial decision making. No, they changed their name. Out went the old-fashioned, though highly respected, name of Standard Life. Joining it in the bin were all the vowels from Aberdeen. Even the hopelessly outmoded capital letter had to go. An entity to be known as "abrdn" was born. 

This column subjected the directors of abrdn to a blast of derision and contumely, not least because I happened to be a long-standing investor in this firm and was not consulted. That should have resulted in the instant sacking of their branding consultants and an emotional reconciliation with all those discarded letters. Sadly, it did not. I had to assume that that was the end of the matter.

I was wrong. For others also found the change of name risible.  It seems that abrdn has become a figure of fun in the financial world and that though the change was three years ago, sniggers follow the abrdn managers as they queue up at coffee bars, guffaws are stifled as their thrusting young executives limber up in front of PowerPoint presentations and even in the hallowed clubs of Pall Mall, newspapers are hastily raised to mask the contorted features of rival chairmen as they chortle at the entrance of one of the vowel-less ones.  And now, the jibes and the jollity have taken their toll. Like a football manager savaging his critics after yet another dreary and well-deserved 2-1 home defeat, the man from abrdn he say "No more".

source: The Guardian

Childish jokes? Me?? I made some rather adult (in the sense of being grown-up and sophisticated, not the other sort)  comments, righly pointing out that it was ludicrous for the company to shorten its name to something unpronouncable while its chief executive continued to sport every one of the letters that he had had when he started out as a tousle-haired lift-boy thirty years earlier.

Corporate bullying? There's 5,000 people working for abrdn. All I have behind me is the occasionally useful comments of my editor, plus my trusty waste-paper basket. Did David bully Goliath? If these people, with their directors of marketing, their brand managers, their consultants and PR people, their lawyers and tax advisors, their tea ladies and postboys cannot take the legitimate comments of those of us who do actually care about words and the English language, then there is only one way to sort this out. In the car park, right now! I'll trounce the lot of them or my brand is not Rmblngs of Rslp.