Evolution in Coventry

Sunny morning in London. Rainy morning in Coventry – yet amazingly only 58 minutes apart by rail; I was there to deliver a lecture for Coventry University.

The place nestles around the cathedral in the centre of the city – the lecture was actually in the nave of it.

I had first visited the bomb crater that had been the cathedral when I was nine – the debris was still about and much of the city still bore the scars of the obliteration suffered in reprisal for Churchill’s bombing of Dresden and Munich.

The cathedral, which I last saw when I was 15, has stood the test of time and now acts as a kind of intellectual and spiritual interface between war and peace.

An amazing number of students attended the lecture, local citizens too. We were discussing the evolution of the digital age – I was arguing that it is a golden age of liberation and democratisation.

A decade ago we would never have got the small disk upon which such dynamite material as MPs expenses was stored. TV is no longer a one way street – it is much more interactive than when I began but there is still further to go.

The internet may be the porn broker of the universe but it is also the greatest threat to the authoritarian ways of the Chinese Communist Party.

I’m now back at my basement office wondering if it is still sunny in London and rainy in Coventry.

Time to wrestle with the Goldman Sachs bonus payout. Modest? Exceptional? Outrageous?