The best way to attract people from cars to trains on journeys of this duration is not to make trains faster, but to make trains and stations pleasanter – adding wifi, onboard video and so forth – or parking. Restoring the Euston Arch and running an ad campaign for Birmingham would work better and would cost 99 per cent less than a high speed railway which at prodigious cost will merely allow people to travel at unnecessary speed to a place they don’t want to go.

Rather than forcing them to represent themselves as they are, which I think is Facebook’s major goal, Tumblr allows them to represent the romantic self (or selves) they wish to be. I think this is a big part of the intense emotional attachment a lot of people seem to have to Tumblr.