10 Membranes

British engineering lives yet! Rejoice at the news that while British manufacturing and technological excellence may be in decline, that UK companies have no global presence and continue to get bought out by ravenous predators (yes Cadbury) there are still good things happening. This, the Bloodhound, is one of them. A car aiming to break the world landspeed record and the 1000mphy barrier in the process, and by doing so inspire a new generation of British engineers to take up the urgent challenges of today and tomorrow.

It’s something I keep banging on about: we have art schools overflowing with people taking a crap in a can and mounting an installation. We have pubs full of English students like myself, smoking roll ups and talking non-sense about T.S. Eliot, even when we would rather shut up and chat about the X-Factor. We have no shortage in other words of creative types. But creative types don’t do anything; creative types ultimately masturbate into the ether while all the bridges crumble, and the lights go out, and the fuel stops running and civilization crashes and burns into a putrid post-apocalyptic melt down of its own creative making.

Thank God someone realised this and has attempted to stem the tide. It’s like those adverts on TV for taking science - selling science on the premise that it will lead to a career building computer games. I’ve heard people being cynical. Wrong. It’s genuis! Britain is the forth largest games producer on the planet (thanks to the Canadian governments enormous tax breaks they over took the UK); this is a huge industry and only gets huger. Games designers and programmers are the precise people we need - high end skills with a huge market and a cutting edge. And creative. Of course artists and eng lit students add something, we just have too many.

Rant over. Salutations to the Bloodhound and the future of cool stuff.