John Betjeman used to wax lyrical about the old North London railway that emanated from Broad Street Station in the City, near Liverpool Street. It was an urban railway that ran across North London, through Islington and Camden to Richmond.

Broad Street station itself was closed in 1986 to make way for the unloved an unlovely Broadgate complex (now facing redevelopment). It was the down at heel, along-the-houses’-backs nature of the railway that appealed to Bejeman and over the years it became even more shabby. The abandoned bits around Shoreditch and Hackney rotted away, unredeveloped, and a skeleton railway, often vandalized just about survived on subsistence level. By the turn of the Millennium it was on its last legs.

The came the new Greater London Authority and its Mayor. One of the sad things about modern Britain has been its can’t do attitude. Fifty years after nationalisation and subsequent privatization, most of Britain’s railways still ran along the old pre-nationalization company lines, The idea of joining them up was anathema. There then came Thameslink, linking North and South London, and the new GLA had the idea of joining up some abandoned tracks to create Overground. By next year this will provide an outer rail ring linking Stratford, Richmond, Clapham, West Croydon and points in between. Overground have also taken over the local line to Watford Junction and the network is a major new resource for the capital. I’ve just travelled from Camden to New Cross Gate for the first time and the new railway is a joy. Like Betjeman I’ve always loved what used to be the North London Line. Researching my last book, I used to take it to get to the National Archives at Kew. It is a genuine urban railway, displaying the individual character of the city’s precincts and also knitting them together.

The engineering and design are very fine. There are many new stations and the architecture is nothing fancy but crisp, clean modern metal and concrete architecture, rather like the Jubilee line but without the extravagance. The service is generally 4 to 6 trains an hour on most routes so it is almost but not quite Tube-like – you certainly only have  to turn up.

One of the joys is the way it is opening up Hackney and the old East End. Some of the East End stations have wonderful murals by Sarah McMenemy, an artist in the line of David Gentleman of Charing Cross Tube Staition fame. Unlike Charing Cross, though, McMenemy's murals are devloped form water colours. (Why hasn't the Underground attempted anyhting like this in its huge station revamp programme - there is no original artwork at all.)

The new Overground is already very popular and it should become even more so when the final link is completed. It is fast, avoiding the crush of Central London, and there is scenery. The trains are much airier too. In case you hadn’t quite got the message, I am totally smitten.  It is a triumph of the practical imagination.

When I finished compiling my poetry anthology Scanning the Century over a decade ago I wanted to follow up poets I’d discovered during the process. The one who really caught my attention at the time was Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980). The more I learnt the more fascinating she became. She was a pioneer political and feminist activist and she also had a strong interest in science, writing a biography of the physicist, chemist and mathematician Willard Gibbs. There is an urgency in her work that sounds even more compelling now than when it was written:

I lived in the century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane,
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
The news would pour out of various devices . . .

I wrote an essay on her, ‘Power of a Poster Girl’ which has only now, ten years later, been published, in the anthology The Voyage, edited by Chandani Lokuge and David Morley, published by Silkworms Ink.

Termites have figured in bio-inspiration for their air-conditioned nests which have provided a model for some architects. They now potentially have a much more widespread use for their ability to digest wood. To produce biofuels requires the breakdown of lignin and cellulose to sugars. Termites digest wood using enzymes and the August Materials World reports work by a team at Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA, led by Michael Scharf, on genetically engineered termite enzymes. At present, digestion of woody tissue for biofuels requires energy: termite enzymes introduce the possiblity of achieving digestion at ambient temperatures. So far a lab process rather than industrial chemistry, termite-enzyme digestion looks like a very promising technique for biofuels and organic feedstocks.

No one in Britain is really surprised at the rise in unemployment to over 2.5 million but reactions should go beyond a bald “I told you so”. The government’s rationale was that by cutting public sector jobs the private sector would make up the difference by some hitherto unknown “hidden hand”. But since a Tory government hollowed out the UK economy in the 1980s, almost obliterating the manufacturing sector, there has been no real private sector. Instead, governments have offered public sector industries to private companies as cash cows. First it was the utilities, then transport. Currently, it’s health and education being prepared for sacrifice.

   The reason the private sector can’t take up the slack is that much of it is really the old public sector in disguise or it lives by supplying the private sector. A country cannot suddenly start making TVs, refrigerators, cameras and bathroom fittings in the teeth of efficient German and Japanese competition, having give up these industries 30 years ago. Ah, but we’re told service industries are all these days. Perhaps I should start another high-street nail parlour? That might be the answer.

Just bought Richard Thompson’ Daring Adventures on CD and iPod. I only had it on vinyl and I listen to music almost exclusively on iPod these days. It’s a much underrated Thompson album. Missie How You Let Me Down and Long Dead Love are classic bitter lovelorn dirges, actually my favourites of his large collection in the genre. Al Bowlly's in Heaven everyone recognises as a classic that only Thompson could write, with its pitch perfect evocation of a different era of music, the ’30s, and its Djangoish guitar and languid tune. Then there are Nearly in Love and Dead Man's Handle, close cousins of Wall of Death, songs in which the jolly rolling rhythm sets up a piquant contrast with the bitter lyrics. Valerie segues from rock ’n roll (which Thompson always plays beautifully) into a wonderful tight jig and How Will I Ever Be Simple Again is one of his great store of heart-breaking ballads. The greatest living British singer-songwriter-guitarist no contest.

The obituary notices for the test pilot Peter Twiss brought back a lost world of British aviation. Twiss broke the world air speed record when he flew the Fairy Delta 2 at 1132 mph on 10 March 1956. British aviation, like British science and technology generally, had entered the post-WW2 era on a par with the USA in most departments but a series of catastrophic bungles reduced us to the condition we are in today. We no longer have the capacity to make a complete aircraft – we only do bits.

The FD2 saga is perhaps the most appalling. Not only were the Ministry of Defence not impressed by Twist’s feat, they were so incensed by the barrage of damage claims from sonic booms that they banned supersonic test flights. Twiss took the FD2 to the French Dassault airfield. The great plane maker Marcel Dassault was very impressed by the FD2 and the classic Mirage 3 shows clear signs of FD2 influence.

In 1957 the British Defence Minister, Duncan Sandys, cancelled all manned fighter projects other than the English Electric Lightning. Missiles would take over, he said. Only now are drones beginning to usurp manned planes. The last 50 years have been the age of the fighter bomber and few have been as successful as the Mirage 3. The whole story is beautifully told in James Hamilton-Paterson’s Empire of the Clouds.