footpad, posts by tag: trains - LiveJournal (original) (raw)

Trainsitions	[Apr. 10th, 2012|10:54 am]Footpad
[Tags**|children, cornwall, dogs, easter, family, holidays, trains] [Current Mood**	partly fulfilled] [Current Location	a train in England]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.
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Rambling off the tracks	[Jul. 3rd, 2010|12:37 am]Footpad
[Tags**|depression, dog, happiness, life, trains] [Current Music**	Julee Cruise, _The World Spins_]One of the things I really appreciate about German long-distance trains, which make them qualitatively more pleasant to travel in than their English counterparts, is that they have special sealed small-children compartments in each wagon.¹ One of those compartments is earning its keep right now: I can just faintly hear the sounds of irate screaming, just loud enough to be on the cusp of hearing and remind me that I don't have to suffer from it.Dusk is falling and the air is cooling after a sultry summer's day. A heat-wave is rolling in across Europe; tomorrow it'll be 34°C (that's hot, by Yurpeen standards). We'll spend the weekend grilling meat, celebrating nerkitt's birthday, and figuring out how to keep poor mischamute from broiling in his own beautiful pelt. Short walks only, with a quick wash in the river meanwhile, and an air-conditioning unit set up in the living-room.I've given up coffee again, maybe for the final time. Reading more of Peter Kramer's Against Depression, I've realised that there may be good (or, more accurately, very bad) physiological reasons why caffeine lowers my mood, making me hectic and sharp and sour. Anatomically speaking, long-term depression appears to be a self-reinforcing pattern of permanent and cumulative damage to the parts of the brain that deal with stressful emotions. Having had two bouts of major depression, I am probably already vulnerable and handicapped in my ability to deal with persistent stress, so those who've seen how I react to caffeine won't be at all surprised by the mechanism that makes it bad for me.And tomorrow Germany plays... uh, Argentina, I think? in the football. 'Schlaaand!
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The final insanity	[Mar. 9th, 2008|10:37 am]Footpad
[Tags**|grr, heathrow, public transport, trains] [Current Mood**	dumbstruck]I'm in England on an assignment which I won't be detailing here. Fortunately it had the fringe benefit of taking me close by megadog's home in the genteel little town of Witley Scrotum. So I stopped off with Dog for twenty-four hours to go for walkies (including, as Dog points out, the location of a certain trashy KLF video), and to get fed three or four sizeable meals, useful career advice, and a crash-course on the peculiarities of helminths.The only problem was that I had to get there by public transport from Heathrow. And as anybody will attest who's ever been within screaming distance of the place, Heathrow is the cloaca of England. Heathrow is the distillation of all that's worst about our country: it is frenetic, irrational, bureaucratic, apoplectic, tortuous, ugly, unfriendly, badly maintained and full of insecurity cameras. It is a national disgrace, especially since it is the first and worst impression most foreigners get of the country. Its only saving grace is that, by the time the tourist or immigrant has escaped Heathrow, the rest of the country will have come to seem positively attractive by comparison—which is possibly why hordes of rednecks, skinheads and sans-culottes have not yet descended on England to annihilate it. When they do, Heathrow is where they'll stick the dynamite.Heathrow is not the subject of this rant, but now you know why I was in such a hurry to get away from it.Now, I'm a public-transport kind of guy. While I don't mind driving per se, I find cars tiresome and expensive, and I'd rather be on a train where I have more space, time to read or sleep, and maybe a chap coming by selling ludicrously-priced cocoa and sandwiches. The whole arrangement suits my type-B personality. The catch, of course, is that you have to know where the public transport is.**( The pathological disarray of English trains and buses.Collapse )**At that point, after a full hour of being bounced around by well-meaning but hopelessly ill-equipped and uninformed staff, I realised that the privatisation of British public transport services has reached its apotheosis of madness: we now have utterly fragmented, dissasociated services, whose only remaining coordination is the ability _to form cartels._And I went and I hired a car for the weekend. It just seemed less painful.PS: it turns out that there's a perfectly convenient route from Heathrow to Hoggingdon, with half an hour on the bus to Reading and then a hop on the train; services are frequent and often even fairly punctual. But damned if anybody could have told me that at Heathrow...
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