Now incorporating The Sudbury Hill Harrow and Wherever End Times

Wednesday, June 22, 2005

Cardiff night train

I started making notes about the view on the 9:25 p.m. (Tuesday) train from Cardiff to London, Paddington. I sat facing in the direction the train was going.

A wig of cloud on the mountain head
A cloud embryo in the belly of the horizon
A goldscape cave and coral clawscrape
Shockhaired fogey in a tunneled blackout
[illegible] of [?] striplight switchback [?] [illegible]

Then we were diverted after some station, and the train sped backwards the way it came, and I saw the same things again. Weird.

I'd worked late after Sunday midnight, caught the 7:45 a.m. train from Paddington to Cardiff on Monday morning, and worked continuously on software at a new customer site and afterwards in a hotel through till dawn on Tuesday, then skipped breakfast and back on-site again from 8 a.m. till 9:10 p.m. jumping into a taxi that had been waiting since 9:05 p.m. and pell-mell back to Cardiff Central station.



I'm telling you this to give you some idea how I felt on the train. I'd had to skip breakfast though I nipped out for a sandwich and Starbucks soy-latte. Thanks to Great Western and a charming young lady in the buffet car, my dinner on the train was a heated ciabatta mushroom omelette sandwich, and two cold tins of Stella Artois. The effect on me was something like a tranquiliser dart meant for a hippo.

I read a bit (Martin Amis's 'Money') then I fell asleep writing (Carmencita Aikenhead).



The last line instead of being horizontal veers upwards back over the previous lines. I'd conked out mid-sentence. I've no idea what the last two lines are supposed to mean.

I got into London after midnight and shambled onto the last Central Line train to Baker Street, where there were still trains running on the Jubilee line to Willesden Green. I was stocious.

Ossian

No comments: