Returning home from one meeting, it was quickly time to move on to another, and so I spent Saturday lunch happily listening to 29 High School kids from overseas telling a Rotary District Meeting the answers to 3 questions; what they most missed from home; what they would most miss going home from the US; and what they said "back home" when somebody sneezed.

To remark on only the first (though I liked the Belgian third answer) it was remarkable the consistency with which, from Japan to Latvia, the answer to the first question was "public transport."

I was reminded of that tonight, at the first evening of the Peak Oil and the Environment meeting, when Alan got up in the question period to ask Roger Bezdek (second author of the Hirsch Report), who had just ably summarized the contents thereof, as to whether he could hold out much hope that the re-introduction of trains and trolleys might help reduce the wedge time for the vehicle efficiency sector in the future.