In bridge you play your hand in spades, clubs, hearts, diamonds or no-trumps. Last night, during a particularly challenging rubber, I decided to call ‘no-trumps’, a ‘clinton’. In honour of…

and now I’m bored with it. Not bridge, never. But ‘that’. Its over. Thank fuck for that.

If you want to travel to Stoke (no idea why you would, other than for football; but that’s the place they chose in the paper) the train will get you there in 1 hour 20 mins. Once we’ve ‘invested’ (read: ‘pissed away’) the 70/80/90 billion quid on the proposed HS2 (high speed railway), that time will come down to just one hour. Giving you 20 minutes extra time to enjoy the pleasures of that fair city. Phah.

If you go by ‘hyperloop’, it will take 12 minutes. The 400 miles between LA and San Fran (that’s more like it; give us glamour, give us cool, fucking Stoke!) would take just half an hour.

This ‘thing’ was kind of invented by the Galileo of our times, Elon Musk. The paypal dude who went on to create Tesla cars and space rockets and other really cool stuff. But after working it out he just put the idea ‘out there’ for others to use. What a mensch.

A ‘hyperloop’ is a massive tube that sits on stilts. And inside it there are pods in which people can travel at 760mph through the vacuum tube. It is, apparently, a cross between ‘Concorde, a railgun and an air hockey table’. Basically, the pods are not propelled but more ‘fired’ through the tube. And being a vacuum there’s no air to slow you down or create friction. Or, errr, breathe. But I’m sure they’ll work that out. And because the tube is on stilts, you don’t need to spend billions and billions flattening hundreds of miles of ‘track’.

The first one is being built now. To run between our two favourite Emirates; Dubai and Abu Dhabi. 78 miles, 12 minutes. Be completed in 2020 by a Danish company called B.I.G.

I’m going. Having never visited the uber-luxurious culture-void of the tackiest most superficial place in the world (other than South Manchester, and I’ve never visited there either) I will go to Dubai in 2020, just to have a go on the hyperloop. Speed of sound. Mach 1. And me. Oh yeahhhhhh.

Happy Thursday. Now I’m getting on the Tube (6mph; 6 miles in 34 minutes)

A xxxx