Change

We took the first number of the new tabloid version of the Guardian yesterday.

Look and feel, certainly at first, much more like the Times or the Daily Mail. Not a good sign. Then the sports and ladies' section are integrated rather than pull outs. Not good either. And then the other version had been a first class bit of design work, a pleasure to look at. Which cannot be said of this one. But perhaps I will get used to the new.

Is it all down to the Guardian gradually being pushed back by the forces of free news (of a sort), delivered to telephones from the internet? Forced to cut costs while at the same time thrashing about trying to find ways both to hold existing readers and to attract new ones?

All that said, the piece on Carillion caught my eye. On the one hand papers like the Guardian go on about the iniquities of PFI contracts, licenses for rapacious capitalists to print money. On the other, we have here a story about a PFI contractor going bust because of the hits it has taken on a succession of large PFI projects. A useful reminder that one of the points of PFI was to transfer risk from the public to the private sector, and that that is a transfer which has to be paid for.

One of these projects was a large hospital and I imagine things like hospitals are tricky. Projects which probably last more than a decade from design work starting to the new building being delivered, a decade during which medical fashions and practises might have shifted out of all recognition. Not to mention all the changes in the town or city into which the hospital is being embedded. You are build a large fixed asset against a large moveable feast.

From where I associated to a naval notion picked up in the margins of No.2 Boat Shed at Portsmouth Dockyard, many years ago now, to the effect that it might be a good idea to build warships with clear decks, with a grid of fixing holes at 12 inch intervals. One then just bolts stuff - stuff likes guns and radars - into those holes according to the fashions and needs of the time. With the obvious parallel of the clear decks of modern office buildings.

Reference 1: https://www.carillionplc.com/. With the official receiver having made his mark on this website during the course of this post!