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Hello and welcome to Spectator Out Loud with me, Lyndon Ken Cairn. Each week we choose our

favourite pieces from the magazine and ask our writers to read them aloud.

Coming up on the podcast this week, Melissa Kite mourns the Warwickshire countryside of her childhood,

ripped up and torn apart for HS2 and how people like her parents have been treated by the doomed project.

Nigel Bigger attempts to explain the thinking behind those who insist on calling Britain a racist country,

even though the evidence says otherwise.

And Matt Ridley enters a fool's paradise, where he warns against being so open-minded that you risk your brain falling out.

First, it's Melissa Kite.

When I drive to see my parents in the once peaceful farming country where I grew up,

it is a strange, bittersweet experience.

A car journey takes me through places I ought to recognise, but I don't anymore,

because the green fields of Warwickshire, the

villages and the farms, are now scarred by the tortuous works of HS2. The distinctive

red earth is now laid bare for mile upon mile as the bulldozers do their worst. Roads

of cottages and entire villages lie deserted, testimony to the billions already spent.

As I drive along the main Banbury to Coventry Road, I see mountains of earth piled high

as flyover take shape. I stare at this curiously outdated project, old hat both in terms of the

controversy and the purpose it was meant to have. It seems to me that the works

advance only about a few inches every time I drive up there. A high-speed line has for many

years now been yesterday's answer to yesterday's problem. It was outmoded when the Tories

back the idea at the 2008 conference. The speedy trains to Manchester and Leeds would cost just 16 billion, it was

...