Diary - 14 January 2016 | The Spectator

Whatever you do, don’t allow your six-year-old to be caught short at Crewkerne station. With the rain pouring and the wind howling, my daughter needed the loo. But it was locked. And no staff anywhere to be seen. So I pressed the ‘Help’ button on one of those machines that have replaced stationmasters. ‘How can I assist you?’ responded a warm South Asian voice. ‘Er, we need someone to open the loo at Crewkerne.’ ‘Where exactly are you?’ she came back, sounding lost. ‘You know, in Dorset, after Yeovil. On the Exeter line. How far away is the help centre?’ I was thinking Bristol, maybe Swindon. ‘Oh, we are in Mumbai,’ she declared. I am left with two thoughts: first, the extraordinary reach of globalisation; and, secondly, the contempt South-West Trains has for its customers if they think they can safely operate platforms in Wessex from Maharashtra.

Svelte Rohan Silva, once a sorcerer’s apprentice in Steve Hilton’s Downing Street, now an east London tech-preneur, is worried about the decline in artists’ studio space in London. ‘A further 30 per cent of artist studios in the capital will have disappeared by 2020, leaving London’s critically endangered artists on the verge of extinction,’ Rohan writes. How tragic, how painful for a fashionable creative to consider living outside zone 1. But I have a solution for Rohan and his friends: move to Stoke-on-Trent. In March we complete the conversion of the old Spode factory — where Josiah Spode invented fine bone china — and there will be studios and ateliers galore, also low house prices and a culture of creativity stretching back 200 years. So pack up your beards, hipsters, turn your backs on overpriced Old Street and hotfoot it to The Potteries.