It’s not often that St Andrew’s Street is this quiet. The railing to the right of the scene is the frontage to Emmanuel College. The street continues down and becomes Sidney Street and then Bridge Street.
And behind us the street continues as St Andrew’s Street and then becomes Regent Street and then Hills Road.
It tickles Tamara how streets in England change their name so frequently when they just seem to be the same street. I say that it is a result of small villages, hamlets, and parishes joining up in what is now a densely populated country.
The problem with Cambridge is that it is a victim of its own success. The roads through the town are narrow, and even narrower where they cross the River Cam. Yet the city is home to AstraZeneca, Raspberry Pi, Arm Computing, and lots of bio-tech startups.
And now the Government wants to build on the city’s success with 150,000 new homes around Cambridge.
Local politicians and business people say it is unrealistic because the city doesn’t have enough water to supply that many households. And more cars will only make the traffic jams through the city worse.
I just read a headline in the Independent newspaper that “Nuclear fusion enters ‘new era’ after major breakthrough for near-limitless clean energy”
I guess if that happens then limitless water would also be available. It is easy to envisage desalination powered by fusion energy.
Sometimes I think of the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds in Britain as the lowest point in human suffering. Untold numbers of workers worked in terrible conditions in the new industrial Britain.
Perhaps in the decades to come we will look back at the particulate matter and other pollutants from fossil fuel burning as the lowest point in the late twentieth century and into the twenty-first century.
On the other hand, given that man has no brake pedal when it comes to developing new acquisitions out of raw materials, maybe we are more likely to create a new hell out of heaven in new and ever expanding ways.
Happy New Year to all.
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