Tag: TrainTravel

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No food on the trolley

A blog-writing gift from the universe. 

A moment after I submitted my last post, the customer service attendant on the train came past and apologised that they didn’t have any food available. 

But outside, just beyond the platform at Didcot Parkway station, the hedgerows are groaning with fruit. 

So what would it take to get that fruit in here?

Well, there’d need to be a hedgerow fruit-picking company. This company would need to train its staff on the safe handling of fruit in the railway environment. 

The fruit would then need to be transported to a logistics hub, sensibly by train but more likely by road.

There would need to be a food logistics processing hub, probably located centrally for transport convenience but potentially a long way from the fruit bush and the fruit eater. 

All this transport means the fruit might spoil, so it needs to be put in plastic packaging, which requires its own supply chain of oil extraction, government lobbying, single-use plastic manufacture and waste gathering and processing stream. 

Because it’s fresh fruit, it also needs cold storage. So now we need refrigerants, which means another supply chain. 

All of this would need to be coordinated by a rail catering logistics company, complete with departments for HR, finance, compliance, managerial oversight and operations.

The fruit, picked, packaged and chilled, would then need to be re-transported to local train catering distribution hubs in Bristol and Swindon, from which stock levels can be managed using GPS-enabled (yep, satellites) apps on every train trolley.

Finally, the blackberries on the trolley, they can now be served, as long as the card reader can get reception.

Quite a journey for blackberries that are mere metres away. 

Of course this is all silly. But then again, I’m not convinced the way we organise our economy is all that sensible. 

  • Have we created systems that are so centralised and specialised that they can’t handle what’s right in front of them? 
  • Have we scaled things to a point where the cost of the support structures outweigh the benefits of what we are actually doing?

This is the essence of the intensification paradox – more scale leading to more layers and multiplying costs. The scaling of each part of the system enables a profit to be extracted, but the overall burden is increased.

If we want systems that enable us to live within planetary boundaries, then we need systems that can:

  • build relationships rather than become abstracted
  • seek to work with abundance
  • respond to changes in place and time
  • scale elegantly

Catering blackberries aside, these are the sorts of question the regenerative designer works with:

  • how do we enhance connection rather than build separation?
  • how do we work with what the rhythm of what is available, enhancing the system even through our harvest?
  • how do we respond to local, emergent changes in the system
  • how do we scale elegantly, where scale enables the primary relationship between production and consumption, not distancing it?

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Cobalt blue and cadmium yellow

One of my highlights of my year studying engineering in France was a module I did on Impressionist painting and engineering. We explored how the artists of that period were fascinated by the new railways that were arriving in cities—the light, the smoke, the transformation of the cities and the access to the countryside, where they would ride to and paint. 

But before they could catch a train, they had to assemble their paints.

The Impressionist period was time of innovation in paint technology. Alongside traditional natural pigments — ochres and siennas, derived from iron-oxide rich clays — new synthetic pigments became available in vibrant colours like cobalt blue and cadmium yellow.

For me this idea of creating your palette is a necessary precursor to creative work. It is both an enabling process and an ongoing one. 

The metaphor applies wherever we make something from something else. A jazz musician creates solos from the scales they’ve practised for years. Those scales give the music its flavour. A swing dancer practises individual moves so that they can weave them in when the moment is right in the music. A building designer chooses from a palette of materials, developing confidence in how to work with them, combine them, and bring out their best.

The more colours you have in your palette, the greater the number of combinations you can create. The better you know the colours in your palette, the more confidently and creatively you can work.