He has been struck by the huge queues of people (many wearing the Newcastle United colours) generated whenever the Lindisfarne Gospels, a richly illustrated 8th-century bible produced by Lindisfarne monks but now kept in London, have been on show in Newcastle.
Sending large amounts of information down an optical fibre is done by encoding many separate streams of data as pulses of light of different colours, so that they can travel along the fibre without interfering with each other.