Thursday 26 March 2015

Train Thoughts (getting back to grips)

Board a District line train carriage; I don’t necessarily travel much on these. I usually go Northern or Overground myself, each of the tubes distinct for the different stand-alone marauding characters encapsulated and throttling through tunnels.  People squeeze and sniffle and look around them like birds with beaks and specks for eyes, fluffing out and patting down their briefcases, coats and preening scarfs. Remember where you’re going. Oh, I had a sweet thought: back to a warm yellow homestead with white slats for blinds and central heating – the yellow of the walls are of hay bails.

One beautiful frosty fox-like woman in white coat and collar stands and sways with the carriage, arms folded in to the velvety flaps of a male-sized coat, sporting a male-sized man, with big nose and jawline, affably babbling statements loaded with non sequiturs. Guffaws of laughter and everyone stares down through the ground and bores holes in the floor and makes time creak. Foxy smiles with glazed over eyes staring at me and the fellow passengers who make her feel glamorous (surely she don’t need it) she smells a million dollars. He’s such arm candy, such a silly money monkey.

The river in London pulses, it heaves itself up on to the banks and slushes past the Thames Path sploshing and gulping along. Sometimes at sunset it decides to spread out thinly like a veil, like mud can be elegant, whilst tyre-filled boats bob up and down playing above its navel. The tubes make me sick a bit, garish green juxtaposed with abhorrent orange LEDs, the clatter of metal against metal against railway track, time seeping whilst under-Thames and damp. Cicadas. That’s the sound of the prolonged meeeeeen meeeeeeeeen that you deliciously want to hear to transport you away from this metallic noise and glare.