And the monster that is the British inability to plan anything more challenging than a few overs of cricket happened. The north road in and out of Doncaster is at a crawl at quarter to nine on a sunday evening. It's down to one lane because they're building a bus lane. Unfortunately the bus lane seems to stop and start between the numerous sets of traffic lights, and looks unlikey to be the cure-all that was promised when spending 10 months digging up the road was first announced. On one side of the road the Shell garage is charging an eye-watering £1.15.9/litre for petrol.

Standing on the platform in Doncaster's award-winning station and the edinburgh train looks like it's about to depart, 90 minutes overdue. The other side of the platform I left from has a broken down 225, empty and probably staying put for a while. The signs in the station claim that there's still a stack of trains more than 3 hours overdue. The attendant on the platform was a middle-aged and bearded model of English composure I thought to be long extinct, he knows he's got less than an hour to wait until he can drive a few miles home. He told me reassuringly that there's a man sat in the the intercity lounge that's been waiting four hours for his daughter's train to arrive. I consider trying to get a refund on my ticket, and buying red bull. It's maybe a long day's red bull-induced march to Leeds, or walking 2 miles up the north road and staying another night in the house that's occasionally called home.

A Leeds-bound train crawls onto the platform an hour overdue. It' an old Intercity 125 class diesel, with painfully obsolete carriages. The kind of carriage you can only open from the outside, or by leaning out of the window and stretching for the door handle. I don't think there's going to be free wireless on this ride.

If I'd had not been swayed by the offer of a home-cooked Sunday dinner, and the determination to make one of those annoying combination inkjet/scanner/copier monstrositys work with vista, (of course it works fine with ubuntu) I might have wandered on to the last of the regional trains out of Bentley. Given the difference in ticket price (Leeds<->Bentley is £6.40 each way, Leeds<->Doncaster is £10.40 for an extra mile and a half), I think I could have justified leaving early and grabbing uber-cheap takeaway.

Now I'm sat on a sofa in Leeds watching a recording of the Canadian Grand-Prix Qualifying. On my quick trip home I cleaned out a few cupboards and drawers, and found a bunch of obsolete bits of tech and a few surprises. I think they're going to have to be a separate post. But bits of tech from the 70s and 80s where most of us still thought we were going to be much further down the road to renewable energy and at least hoped we'd be less dependant on oil. But no, nuclear power nearly got killed off in the UK, and the current biofuel craze is unfeasible in the long term as there's soon not going to be enough food to go round.

Am I a hypocrite for watching Formula 1 and grumbling about the world's energy woes? I don't know. I guess it's the question on where the technology used in Forumla 1 ends up, or whether that should be the other way round. Maybe it's just reassuring knowing that there are ways to go nowhere faster.