ORDINARILY, if the current Secretary of State for Scotland announced fireballs raining from the skies next Tuesday, you’d plan for salad picnics and school sports days. But Alister Jack – a familiar McTory mix of bumble and bombast – is at least consistently parroting his master’s line. So there’s at least one real civil servant PDF in there somewhere.

Yet it isn’t a “Boris bridge” from Scotland to Ireland any more.

It’s a tunnel.

“It would be less expensive to tunnel it,” the large, hollow tube told Holyrood’s culture, tourism, Europe and external affairs committee. “It’s no different to the tunnels connecting the Faroe Islands, it’s no different to the tunnels going under the fjords.”

Apparently the idea of a “bridge” was a Johnsonian “euphemism” for the more Platonic concept of a “link” between Scotland and Ireland. It has now taken the material form of “starting as a bridge, then going under the sea for a 22-mile tunnel before rising up to be carried by a bridge again”.

I can think of a long list of euphemisms for any number of DePfeffel’s projects.

Sure, the Tory Ultras are trying to secure their electoral base by commissioning major infrastructure projects that “level up” the rest of the islands to London’s percentages of public investment. And sure, we’ll believe it when we see it.

But if you sniff around the current regime, you can see the engineering and architectural communities gearing themselves up for some major contracts. And undersea tunnels are, indeed, very much on offer.

For example, in January, the Institute of Civil Engineers brought out a pamphlet proclaiming that a massive new era of tunnelling is upon us. Drilling technology is now capable of hundreds of feet of advance every day, making them more cost efficient than ever before.

READ MORE: Boris Johnson's government urged to ditch Scotland-NI tunnel plan

The newspapers picked up from the publication that a UK-Ireland tunnel was one of the starry options. Except this one starts in Liverpool, bores under the Isle of Man and ends up in Belfast.

Mr Jack may yet have downloaded the wrong PDF. And even for his imperial master, I doubt that any infrastructural bauble would be glittering enough to turn the Scousers loyally blue.

The Institute’s tunnel guru, Bill Grose, makes a strong case for tunnels as pertinent for an era of increasingly unpredictable weather. Bridges often have to close in response to high winds or ice (as in the Queensferry Crossing this year).

Your common sense shouts “rising water levels? Flooding?!” at Mr Grose. But he powers on. Tunnelling is apparently a thing, globally. The last four years have seen a 35-mile Gotthard rail tunnel constructed under the Swiss Alps, a 27-mile train tunnel beneath Singapore, an 18-mile metro tunnel under Sydney; and even bigger projects in China.

There’s a huge degree of “meh” wafting from the Scottish Government on all this. On the previous bridge announcement, the Scottish Transport Secretary Michael Matheson itemised what £20 billion worth of transport investment could do for Scotland, in a letter to the UK Transport Minister, Grant Shapps (yes, him, still). However, if any construction ever kicks off, there’s doubtless some subtle re-messaging already planned (“the ultimate Celtic connection” etc).

Yet some people’s boats are not automatically floated by the prospect of giant pontoons studded across many kilometres of water, either supporting bridges or underwater tunnels to link up islands. And strangely, given my default modernist tendencies, I might be becoming one of them.

The long-term advocate of a Celtic Bridge, Professor Alan Dunlop, kindly responded to my enquiries the other day about the Celtic tunnel’s viability. He likes, indeed once advocated, the creative combinations of tunnel and floating bridge hinted at by Jack.

Alan is very enthusiastic about its deployment on the new Norwegian Coastal Highway. This $57bn project will create a straight drive through its western islands from Kristiansand to Trondheim, removing the need for seven ferry crossings in the process.

Professor Dunlop attached an explainer video and its smooth computer graphics simulate every element of the Norwegian project – from the tallest bridge yet built, to energy-generating, cable-tethered, undersea railways. (Yes, I know. That’s one way to handle the excesses of your near-trillion dollar sovereign wealth fund. Automatic sigh).

Yet I must confess – and I’m surprised at myself – it’s soul-shrivelling viewing. This is probably due to my time spent years ago in Norway, particularly a trip based on travelling through the fjords;

the most sublime natural experience I’ve ever had. The point of the experience, of course, is to be moving across the water itself, craning your neck and filling your lungs, in awe at what natural processes can do.

So to watch these tubes, stanchions, cables, towers and roads sprawl across, under and through this glorious landscape seems …wrong. The opposite of magnificent. The nerdish voiceover says explicitly that the Norwegian authorities want the coastal highway to “improve access to services, and boost residential and labour markets”. The imperatives of modern, managed capitalism are assumed here.

And what really animates these scenes is the scuttle of cars and vans. Hark at these tiny, insistent lords of the rocks and the waters, compelling vast and abstract structures to serve their beetling about!

There are some nagging broader questions here. Are the Norwegians just bored with themselves?

Having managed under current infrastructures to prosper until they are the acme of all countries, is it really necessary for their future progress that they blast a dual carriageway through their wondrous littoral? Perhaps it was the degree of distance between communities which allowed them to operate calmly, at a human scale, developing skills for resilience and self-reliance.

And not to make the obvious coronavirus reference ... but the idea that $40-odd billion should be spent on structures that enable the easy and fluent circulation of populations may, in the superbug era, raise

some questions.

Massive carbon reductions seem to be the consequence of corona-driven homeworking, or desisting from retail therapy in town centres.

By accident, this points to exactly the kind of low-impact local living and making that green activists have long advocated.

Yet we’re so locked into the current system – and the impulse to en-road and en-rail through any object serves it directly.

How can the local retail giant bring us our fresh mangoes and our rock-salted French butters if they don’t have enough connected

roads down which their supply chains can thunder, ensuring the just-in-time delivery of such delicacies?

Or, alternatively, perhaps we could start to take local food production seriously – where we shorten the distance between farm and plate as much as possible? Food ecosystems humming with electric/hydrogen delivery vehicles and us in our homes with the time to cook it properly...

I can dream (and I will). But I remain emotionally divided over these great transport infrastructure projects. Alan Dunlop shrugs at tunnels. Where’s the shining, inspirational, collectively uniting symbolism in all that, he asks?

And yet there is an argument that we may need our landscapes to look as pristine and flourishing as we can make them, if the pressures of development are too great. So maybe going underground (or underwater) is the better option.

As the planet visibly shudders under our yoke, it’s understandable we should try to bury our modernity under the ground. Though unless we grasp the essential question – that of the material throughput our transport systems are making possible – we should expect more troubles to erupt from below. Tunnel with planetary care.