The speed indicator at the end of the cabin reads 301 km/h, though I feel no rush as I recline my seat. Outside, one of those glorious, blank, luminous midsummer twilight skies seems so fixed, so tranquil, that we could be motionless. But the high plains of central Spain are slipping by at nearly 190mph beneath us.

Three feet beneath us. You don't need to leave the ground now to fly. This is the train from Madrid to Barcelona. We slid out of Madrid at 9 and we shall be in Barcelona just after 11.30, a journey of more than 300 miles, which the new AVE high-speed rail service will cover even faster when all is complete. Delay and controversy have attended the construction of this, one of the world's fastest long-distance railways, but since spring of this year it has been working as its planners dreamt. The last time I travelled this line was on an overnight sleeper between the two cities.

Oh come on, fellow Britons: if Spain can do it, why can't we? Look at the shape of our island, the distribution of population and the transport bottlenecks. Why are people trekking out to crowded airports to fly between points hardly 100 miles apart? Isn't it just obvious that Great Britain needs a high-speed rail track running up its spine, from London to Scotland?

Couldn't we at least make a start with London to Birmingham, a journey the AVE train could cover in little more than half an hour? While we've been messing up motorists' lives building extra carriageways on the M1 from London to Luton, why didn't we put in the first 30 miles of this track alongside the motorway?

Why, in the Derbyshire village of Elton, did they dig up all the roads for a year to bury the power lines, yet fail to bury the telephone lines at the same time? If I hear Gordon Brown or David Cameron gassing away about the future of the planet and their “visions” for “change” one more time - and then telling us that digging a few ditches or building a viaduct and laying down some track is all much too difficult, I think I shall scream.

In British politics only the rhetoric flies. Everything else is grounded.

The blow that wasn't

Brownites look away: what follows is directed only to Conservatives. Isn't it lovely, fellow Tories, after all these years, when media bias starts to work our way for a change? This month David Cameron has faced a serious and continuing sleaze row about his MEPs' expenses, dragging in both his (former) group leader and (former) group chief whip; his party chairman is under investigation by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards; and a key aide in his London mayoral team has had to resign after a (silly) “race row”. Oh - and his Shadow Home Secretary has quit not just the front bench but his parliamentary seat.

But has the headline “Cameron's worst week ever” appeared anywhere? Have those telltale journalistic clichés “fresh blow”, “new setback”, “yet another”, “plunged deeper”, “reeling” or “hapless” surfaced in the newspapers?

Don't you think that what we like to call the news is really a kind of topiary? The raw data are a shapeless wild yew bush, which we clip into peacocks, pigs or palaces, according to mood.

Snap misjudgment

Before I get carried away about continental railways, a true story from a British friend who asked a French railway booking clerk to find him not just a ticket, but the cheapest ticket, for a journey on SNCF. The clerk said this was not his job, and offered him a standard full-price ticket. After further argument, the clerk unyielding, my friend asked the official's name so he could make a complaint. The official refused. So my friend pulled out a pocket camera and photographed him, then walked away down the platform in triumph.

Within minutes a posse of policemen surrounded him. He was offered a choice between accompanying them to a police station, or destroying all his photographs on the spot. He gave in.

Orwell that ends well

I've enjoyed the Times correspondence provoked by my colleague Ben Macintyre's column about the placing of “appropriate” reading ages on the covers of books. A voracious reader at the age of 11, I saw a book called Animal Farm and read (and loved) it as a flight of fancy about some imaginary animals taking over their farm. George Orwell's prose is so direct and clear that I missed nothing except the political allegory.

It was a great story and a gripping read. And the moral was clear. Applying it could come later, and did.

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