wrote:
On 14.11.17 3:54, Recliner wrote:
Roland Perry wrote:
In message
-septe
mber.org, at 15:28:49 on Mon, 13 Nov 2017, Recliner
remarked:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/p...66c31bc93f5152
e2fd0

That's going to make Edinburgh Council look like a paragon of
financial prudence. Especially as it'll be "Britain’s first new
underground railway in decades", so there are no workers available with
recent experience of tunnelling in, say, London.

Huh? Crossrail, HS2 and the Northern line extension all have significant
London tunnels.

Is this national "fail to spot sarcasm day", or what?

For you, vigorously participating in usenet threads is a full-time
occupation, as a substitute for the paid work which you'd much rather be
doing. For most of the rest of us, uk.r is something we dip into in idle
moments, and we don't carefully analyse every post for sarcasm. For
example, I'm currently sitting in the lounge in Vientiane airport, sipping
an early beer, and will soon be taking off. I won't be checking uk.r until
at least tonight.

I hear that Vientiane has some impressive French colonial architecture,
though narcotics abuse there is more obvious.

There are a few of the old French colonial buildings left in Vientiane, but
they're not particularly valued or protected against replacement by a more
practical and profitable modern building. You'd be hard-pressed to spot
that it was once a French colony, apart from a few French street names.
Bilingual signs mostly feature English or Chinese, and you see very few
European cars, none of which are French (but there some shiny Range Rovers
and even an old London taci). Their new boss, the world's most powerful
man, followed me to the city, whse roads were accordingly lined with
Chinese flags and flag-waving, uniformed kids.

The old colonial buildings in Phnom Penh are also disappearing fast, under
a wave of Chinese investment in new skyscrapers. The traffic jams are
terrible, as the new Chinese flyover is still under construction.