Although many candidate countries inherited a transport system which encourages rail, the distribution between modes has tipped sharply in favour of road transport since the 1990s.
The problem with this wedding is that everyone with a brain remembers the last wedding of a royal heir, Charles Windsor and Diana Spencer back in 1981.
In the week that a divided jury awarded the 2006 prize to Kiran Desai's "the Inheritance of Loss", what is astonishing is that Mr Amis's publishers did not even submit his book for consideration.
Some of us, like the novelist Richard P. Brickner, "look on as others name their children who in turn name their own lives, devising their own flags from their parents’ cloth."
Other phobias that persist intomodern times may have been fixed much more recently than snakes and spiders, say in the late Paleolithic age, about 100, 000 years ago, or even morerecently.