| [Tags**|children, cornwall, dogs, easter, family, holidays, trains] [Current Location** |
a train in England] [Current Mood |
partly fulfilled]Another day, another train. So much of my life spent in trains. When I was knee-high to a wolfhound, trains made a continuous tacketytack, tacketytack noise. Another memory lost to progress and continuous welded rails. Someday soon I'll be at least physically old.I've been in Cornwall, that green land of bright air and the memories of childhood, spending the Easter holiday with my family in a welter of children, dogs, and assorted generations. When I arrived at the small farm where I grew up, I found the house empty: my parents were still sailing back from Spain with my big brother. It was just me, and the spring-green grass and the daffodils and the sun and the rain and the wind. So I spent two days alone, tending the wood stove, cooking meals and baking bread, doing small jobs and walking to town for provisions, savouring the familiarity and the gentleness and the silence.Then everybody got back and, in shocking contrast to those days of peace, bedlam descended. We're not so much a family as an indefinitely extended autochthon, and the youngsters tend to be very fond of their lupine uncle. So I was promptly dragooned into adjudicating wooden-sword fights, messing around with chemistry sets, commentating on Lego constructions, answering interminable questions about "blowing stuff up", cooking traditional German meals of potato and pig (to general applause), basking in the lovely English weather, drinking proper English beer, and suffering through every damn English virus that anyone cared to donate to me.Easter Sunday was of course a riot: the children ransacked the farm for chocolate eggs, the adults took shelter wherever available, and my parents' Labrador got loose and soon developed symptoms of theobromine poisoning, which will do nothing to curb her relentless scavenging in future.And now... a train. A train bearing me away from Cornwall and towards Zürich, back to the strange everyday life I lead, so divorced from these elements of earth and water, air and fire, wood-stoves and children and dogs and bread. I spend a lot of time in trains, and every train represents a phase-change in my existence, a wormhole between different social contexts, a transition in my way of being. With this train, I quantum-tunnel from the rowdy heart of my family to the sardonic human mode of work in Switzerland; in a few days, another train shall translate me home to the warm hearts of  akeela and mischamute. For this I am quietly glad.Sometimes I wish I had just one state of being, and no trains switching me between them, but I suppose I'd eventually find it monotonous, like the ongoing steady-state whoosh of a modern train. |