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Good morning. The British built Bloodhound car is making its first public test runs at Newquay Airport in Cornwall this week. It’s both jet engined and rocket propelled. In two years’ time it’s hoped it will become the first land vehicle to travel at 1000 miles per hour. There’s a ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ documentary in the South West this evening about the Bloodhound’s 85 year old designer, Ron Ayers. It all takes me back to my childhood. I was fascinated by attempts to break the world’s land and water speed records. Donald Campbell was a hero to many of us. Then he died tragically on Coniston Water in January 1967. We saw his last run on television, and the horror of it curbed my teenage interest. Yet my fascination with speed has never quite gone away. And in all sorts of ways life has got faster in the intervening years. Somewhere in the back of a cupboard we have a coffee percolator, a standard feature of a wedding list in the late 1970s. It would still make excellent coffee but it gurgles away for the best part of half an hour. We want our real coffee quicker than that. We live now in an age of instant communication via social media, text and email. Speed itself seems a yardstick of virtue. Whenever something is wrong an organisation will set up a Rapid Response Unit to put it right. No-one ever establishes a Slow Response Unit though the reflection and thought which may go into it might yield better results in the long term. Perhaps we don’t do it because it’s thought that being slow means we don’t care. The challenge for the Bloodhound car is to remain on the ground when propelled at high speed. Intriguingly, we speak of someone being a grounded person when they are stable, practical and react calmly in a crisis. That includes being slow to come to judgement rather than responding rashly in the heat of the moment. In the gospels Jesus never seems to be a man in a rush. He waits almost thirty years in obscurity before even beginning his brief public ministry. Even then he’ll go off to an isolated place to pray when the demands of crowds are pressing on him. Time for reflection was essential. The Bloodhound project is testing the boundaries of human achievement. And although it’s about speed it’s taking a long time. It needs slow, considered human preparation alongside the advanced engineering. I wish it every success and hope it remains well grounded.