7 November

The engineering behind restoring the gas supply (a story that is amazing) reminds me again how much most of what we call modern life is nearly entirely down to engineers. It’s not democracy that created the modern world. Engineers did. The fastest way to end Covid? Ask the engineers to do it. Get all of the politicians and show pony doctors out of the way. In Victorian times that’s what they did, engineers have saved orders of magnitude more lives in history than politics or even medicine.