A policeman with hipster beard drinks red bull standing by the door. He gazes out of the window. The view is blocked by sound barriers. What is he looking at? A woman arrives and sits down next to me. She begins reading CVs. She has a cup of cheap coffee with her bought from Yorma, a chain of train-station convenience stores. She eventually settles into reading her company’s strategy paper. She works for easyCredit, TeamBank AG. The strategy centres around platitudes about customer focus and team-work. There is a section on leveraging new networks born out of the technological, digitised revolution. The positive economic conditions have led to an increase in consumer credit, it says. She underlines a section of text about how customers transfer expectations from other industries to the banking industry. The traditional inn has a comforting, analogue goodness. You have to let the needle of your attention move through the polished grooves of character. The shy friendliness of a waiter, the decor, the pairings of food and beer have all evolved and …

I place myself at the front of the train. I was last on among seven people congregated in anticipation of a particular pair of doors. A bulky man wearing a blue and white horizontally striped shirt and a blue and pink diagonally striped tie moves his feet to the side towards the aisle so that I can pass and sit down. There is plenty of space. He is wearing an old Barbour jacket over his shirt and tie. He holds his phone out in front of him within his folded hands. The man opposite me has a shiny forehead and a pink tie with five diagonal white and black stripes. His getup looks expensive and new. But above his waist the shirt isn’t tucked in and the shirt folds outwards between the buttons making it all look wrinkled and diminishing the appearance. He has a cup of AMT coffee waiting for him on the table and for a while he had the receipt for it on his lap and it looked like he was entering the …

The 6:59 is delayed by ten minutes. A train on the other side of the line will leave first. An announcement is made. A number of people cross over the bridge to the other platform to take the other train. The reaction of those who are left varies. Some have ignored the opportunity to change trains, while others are on edge: to change or not to change? Over the next few minutes two or three suddenly make a decision and rush over, running and breathing audibly as they pass. The delay was caused by problems with level crossings between Cambridge and Royston says the driver on the intercom. But now we are back to “line speed” and only a few moments behind schedule. For a few moments this holds true, then the train brakes to a crawl before accelerating again. The fields on the way to London are as green as the fields on the way to Vienna. Again the train brakes. Why can’t the load on the network be balanced more efficiently? A young …

En-route to Vienna and the Austrian stewardesses are dressed in red. Austrian airlines is behind the times: the service is professional and friendly, the uniforms are worn well, drinks are offered twice. The choice of snack is well-stated: “Sweet or salty?” It would be interesting to expand the palette: “sweet, sour, salty, bitter or umami?” We pass a large OMV refinery (Raffinerie Schwechat).  For a moment it looks like a futuristic city; tall structures dotted with lights. I put my glasses back on. Trees and open space and another impressive factory structure with red, white, red coloured chimneys. The relationship between cloud and sky is inverted. The clouds dominate and present a negative, grey-bluish space. Within this space there are small white-blue shapes. At first glance it appears as if these shapes are clouds set in a grey-blue sky, but in fact they are glimpses of the sky through the clouds. The taxi will be more expensive than expected. It’s a huge van, much to big for my suitcase. The taxi-rank manager shouted at passengers …

A misty morning in early spring smells of freshly cut grass. The train horn honks around where I heard it yesterday when I stood at the top of the heath. Paying attention for the first time, the reason is apparent: there’s a level crossing here. (Under rules set by the Rail Safety and Standards Board, train drivers have to sound their horns when they approach level crossings, tunnels, or trackside workers.) The landscape is concealed by grey fog. The grass looks wet and dull. The boundary between the ground and the sky, with its ground-hugging clouds, is soft and imprecise. The lady next to me is listening to music on a small, thin music player. Its brand name is Lenco. A blue scarf with white dots is tied around her neck. The cord to the earphones is red. She has a small, brown leather satchel bag. A larger satchel hangs by its strap from the fold-out table. Gloves are placed neatly on top of a grey hat, which is perched on a tartan patterned scarf. …

How to steal a country: while the groupuscules struggle, entrenched power thrives. A man in a high-vis jacket, functional track-suit pants and general purpose shoes is reading the Economist while his laptop boots up. No time shall be wasted. The portrait caption would be:  Blue-collar & Economist, or perhaps more accurately, High-vis collar & Economist. Either way, I had never noticed the column by Bello before. A man wearing a Dastar is standing behind the last seat in the row across the aisle. He is thumbing his phone. He wears a silver watch. Strange shapes of modern architectural imagination from Blackfriars: slanted and rectangular stands behind inward-curved and squat, a rounded cylinder somewhere in between and the sharp and splintered tower overlooking the crowd of shapes from the other side, taller than them. Standing only on the 7:30. A woman with a polka-dot top tucked into trousers is reading a textbook on business and management: 5.1 Management Buyouts… The head of an older man with round glasses leans against the wall of the carriage between …

The morning sky could be from a Poussin landscape. Blue, pink, orange: gradations of energy. In the line of sight to the window is a man who is a regular on the 5:59. He is sketching an architectural plan on lined paper in pencil. Four passengers are familiar this morning. By the end of the train journey the man seems to have finished imagining the house. He has written a lot of text around the drawing. He was wholly absorbed by his work. The train is pulling into the station. The architect is in conversation with another regular, who is immaculately dressed, wears very narrow rimless glasses and carries a wood-handled umbrella. They’re talking about a heritage site in the Lake District. The man with the wood-handled umbrella is giving the architect a history lesson. The architect is silent, looks up at the other man, doesn’t have a rejoinder or a contribution to make. He seems uncomfortable next to his fully dressed neighbour who speaks with Received Pronunciation.”Worth another visit then” says the architect. The architect’s …

A big ear with a pinkish tint around the edge; short hair indistinctly parted; grey suit, stiff white shirt with cufflinks. An umbrella is lapel-pinned to his jacket; its canopy is coloured red, green, yellow, green. The wide-cut black tie features an arrangement of dark blue umbrellas. He wears rounded rimless glasses. A sip of coffee. Shiny black shoes; he is absorbed by his tablet. Yellow and orange sunlight is creeping up into the dark blue morning sky. Grades of blue: from the yellow-blue green to shades of fish-belly white-blueness. A long cloud hangs in the sky like a blue whale. A colourful umbrella at the end of the tie matches the umbrella on the pin. The tie and the lapel-pin are a pair. One day follows the next, the wheel keeps turning. Does it leave any tracks? Does it matter? Across the aisle: a man in new-looking, light brown suede shoes, a silver ring on his ring finger, a razor cut around the middle of the jaw bone. Head forward, 90 degree angle between …

Alan Turing showed that a machine can do arithmetic without understanding what it is doing. Most competence does not depend on comprehension. Consciousness as a user-illusion, as an app. A decision is an illusion too. The yes/no dichotomy masks the conscious and subconscious thoughts that precipitate into action when a decision is made. The timing of a decision is more telling than the decision itself. Successful deal makers delay a decision until an optimal moment. They do not let events run them into a decision. It’s like Buffett famously says: investing is like baseball except I don’t have to take a swing unless I want to. You can wait for the pitch you want. The train is refreshingly empty. The temperature is perfect; a slight breeze. Across the aisle a man browses his Facebook feed taking time to investigate some of the pictures from the feed in detail. Feed is the right word, it looks like a drip-feed of inanities. The visions of David Foster Wallace are becoming true. The phone is our entertainment cartridge. …

Schumpeter saw capitalism as a “process of industrial mutation… that incessantly revolutionises the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.” In Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital Carlota Perez writes that Schumpeter “remained attached to market equilibrium forces…”And why not? Everyone needs a reference point. If the premise is that everything is unstable, how would you be able to define terms and think clearly? This carriage in the 365506 smells of washing detergent. Two rows in front of me a man’s hair looks wet, his hair oozes with gel. Bunches of hair are stuck together. It looks like an experiment gone awry. The shiny black shoes belong to a man wearing a waistcoat. Small unrimmed glasses, his head resting on a stiff collar, sleeping. Very poor air quality. A sudden smell of food, someone’s lunchbox? It’s a nauseating ride this morning. A lot of coughing. Tempted to open the window, but I’d have to reach over. I’m sure some people find this moist, rotten atmosphere homely. Fresh air would disrupt …