At first I thought that HS2 sounded reasonably viable, until the cost was brought into the equation. And I don’t just mean the financial cost, which is already rocketing before a meadow has been desecrated. I mean the real cost.

I visited a sculptor’s studio near Wendover this week. It was in a barn adjacent to a farm in the most picturesque of surroundings. The vista was one that 18th century painters of rural England would have been delighted to reproduce, as there were no signs of three following centuries to distort or pollute the view. As I stood by the vegetable garden and listened to the birds singing in distant trees, I was told ‘HS2 will be going through here’.

Cue Monty Python’s large descending foot.

I don’t live there, so I certainly can’t be accused of being a nimby – but on behalf of those who do live and work there as well as all the rest of those who don’t, I demand that we get the tumbrils out immediately for those who, for reasons unfathomable outside Lilliput or Brobdingnag, think we should tolerate this appalling vandalism just to knock less than 30 minutes off the rail journey from London to Birmingham.

We know that the financial cost, borne by all of us, will continue to rise exponentially and then double again at the last minute. Why can they never get a budget right and stick to it? It was only last year that we learned that HS1 had left the British taxpayer with an ongoing £4.8bn debt. Hardly a model we wish to repeat, surely? We also all know that the existing infrastructure could be improved to provide speedier transport, if we really must have it, without ploughing a noisy, festering scar through rural England. We know too that for a fraction of the existing budget for HS2 (let alone the eventual one) our steadily deteriorating roads could be restored to something approaching tolerable levels. In the age of the internet and instant communication, do we really need to have all those men sitting on trains getting to Birmingham a tiny bit faster?

With WiFi, if their time is so precious they can work on the existing trains, if they can persuade each other not to bellow on their mobiles about their being on the train.

We must make them listen to us this time.