I’m building up a stack of National Rail compensation vouchers - I’ve made two big complaints in the last 6 months and got well-rewarded for doing so. If you don’t answer back, you don’t get anything. That is my moral.
They’re good stories too…but they’ll have to wait for another time.
…what should I do? I wanted to go to Birmingham but I’ve ended up in Crewe.
I went to neither but I think of that song a lot when I’m waiting at train stations. Today I went to Sheffield, to speak to some young people (because of course, I am fine with being 27 - I really am, actually, I like it) about films and how to make a community of amazing DIY-ing people, and passed through Doncaster. Doncaster is quite a place - I only know the train station, but it’s got a great air of mystery - it has a very large amount of train-spotters (a group I admire - I unironically adore public transport and train mechanics [aka their faces and personalities]), multiple cafes with depressed servers, and a very lot of routes running through.
I study the timetables and construct imagined journeys through the regions. Can you believe you can get a direct train to Totnes from Doncaster? Wow! We went to Totnes a couple of years back. We live in Stoke Newington so it was in effect coming out the other side of the wardrobe into the same place but with slight changes.
Trains are where I do my best mental work and here’s what I processed:
- I sat across a table from Newcastle fans, drinking on their way to see their team almost certainly die a tedious death at Arsenal. Here were representatives of a major theme in my mind - change of manager at my beloved team - surrounding me. But of course I couldn’t say anything. I was in work facepaint and it wouldn’t be right. And whilst I happily traveled to Luton on Saturday to see Leeds whilst drinking a can of ale (it really was ale by the way) and soaking the dirty looks, I found it so strange that they each had bulging bags of lager cans to drink for the next hour and a half, getting ever more…not drunk, just strange and melancholy. It’s the North you see - it’s my heritage and I understand the mood when you’re a boy traveling South on a midweek afternoon and within a few minutes, sadness envelopes you…
- Then on the 73, I wondered about the woman and her daughter sharing the headphones of an ipod. They shared the same haughty dismissive look and subjected me to the usual staring sesh. The Mother had two sets of glasses - one around the neck, and one around the head - neither of which she actually wore on her face - why would you do that? I think it’s a way of asserting your all-seeing gaze and so deterring people like me from actually knowing why people like her irritate me so much. I suppose it’s because they remind me of home and a vague sense of what I left behind once, but that is so non-specific, it’s totally meaningless.
- Then I smelled a strange scent whilst staring at (another) grumpy-looking woman’s scarf, and worked out I was smelling the peculiar green drink Sonja’s Oma (grandma) gave us in Holland, and then I was confused by whether what I was seeing and smelling was totally real. And then I really recognised that I was tired.
Which brings me to the end. I did notice more, but I need to do some work on into the night and get even more tired.