Thank you sir!

Can I be shitty to him too?

I used to do this at Borough Market. Stand there and watch the flow of people, the faces, the behaviour, the details.

I also do it at Euston, as well as many other places in London. Paris is great for it too. This is one of my retirement goals: to watch people.

Is there a bit of flâneuse in you?

Building railways is easy; getting the bloody things to work is hard.

Especially for a railway that is old-fashioned overground to the East and West, and proper deep-tunnel at its heart.

Tiny detail: it was 2008. The bill passed the Commons select committee stage in 2005.

Here’s me celebrating the passage of the Act in 2008 (back row) and at the opening of the line in 2022.

At the Act celebration party, Keith Berryman joked that Crossrail was first put forward as a scheme in 1904!

Also: I’ve spent the last five years working for the joint venture that has built the UK’s longest rail viaduct, near where I’ve lived for 30 years. It is breathtakingly beautiful.

One objector told me railways didn’t belong in the countryside. I told him the nineteenth century would beg to differ.

I led a review aimed at getting JLE stations finished in time for the Millennium. And I negotiated with opponents to the Crossrail Bill around Bond Street, for my friend and former colleague Keith Berryman, who joked that he’d not let architects anywhere near the stations budget.

I love them all!

At that age, I did a lot of my reading and writing on trains. I was studying for a BA in English at Birkbeck, with a module in creative writing, and either commuting into London or, for two years, living away from home and travelling from York two nights a week for seminars.

A performative degree?

Mawkish matey banter.