There’s a ‘carbon-neutral’ car-hire company that’s now offering to plant a tree for you every time you rent one of their cars. I thought I’d give it a try.

“I’ll take it now, please.”
“Take what now?”
“My tree. A leylandi please, to go in front of the wheelie-bins.”
“It doesn’t work like that.”
“What doesn’t?”
“Trees. You can’t take one away with you.”
“Never mind. Perhaps you could pop round next week and plant it.”
“No; you don’t understand. You don’t actually get your tree.”
“Who does then?”
“A Brazilian.”
“What for?”
“To replace the one he’s just chopped down.”
“How do you get it to him?”
“We don’t. It’s already there, in a nursery. They dig it up and give it to him.”
“Don’t the children mind?”
“It’s not that sort of nursery.”
‘How are all these trees delivered?”
“On a lorry”
“What sort of lorry?”
“A big one.”
“How long does it take for the trees to offset the lorry’s CO2 emissions?”
“85 years.”
“And how old are they when they are chopped down?”
“50.”

This carbon-neutral business is fascinating.

I’m confused; some would say perpetually. Network Rail has said that it’s considering a major expansion of the rail network, because the current infrastructure can’t cope. Five major new lines might criss-cross the UK to add much-needed capacity to the network. So far so good.

However, Richard Dyer, transport campaigner at Friends of the Earth, is on record as saying: “Expanding Britain’s railways by building new high speed lines is potentially very exciting - and could play an important role in weaning Britain off fossil fuels and developing a low carbon economy”.

Am I missing something here? Are these new railways going to feature trains that run on rainwater or what? I can’t see that elecricity is a viable option, and even if it was, you can bet it wouldn’t be generated from solar panels or wind – which means it would come from coal-fired power stations as the environmentalists won’t let us have nuclear either.

So in what way are these trains going to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels? The last time I looked, most of the choo-choos lining our network were diesel-powered. Still, as long as the diesel isn’t going into private cars, it just has to be more environmentally friendly, doesn’t it? Public transport is always good, even when it’s running round empty.

Perfect timing; I was just reading about how Network Rail’s employees are going to share 55 million quid’s worth of bonuses when the phone rang. It was a friend (James), who I had just dropped off at the railway station. He needed to get back to Derby, on a Sunday afternoon, and all the trains had been cancelled without any notice – he’d travelled from Derby to my house only yesterday and there was no mention of any services being cut.

The only trains available were taking him further away from home, with no promise of ever getting back onto the right track. In desperation he rang me and asked what to do; the only answer was for me to drive him to Birmingham New Street where he would have been getting his connection if the promised service had materialised.

As we drove up to Birmingham from just outside Worcester where I live, James commented that it wouldn’t have been so bad if he could have got to London, to then get back up to Derby. Bearing in mind that Derby is north of me and London is well over 100 miles south, I was incredulous; but he didn’t seem fazed by the idea.

Had James been forced to go to London because I wasn’t around to drive him to Birmingham, he would have spent the thick end of a day sitting in waiting rooms, retracing his steps by rail and having to endure some of the many odd habits of fellow passengers, but as someone who prefers to let the train take the strain, James doesn’t seem to care. That’s James – as for the rest of us, is it any wonder that the government can’t prise us out of our cars, even with fuel costing an arm and a leg?