Categories: uncategorized
Date: 06 December 2007 15:26:59
I found myself repeating myself.
I was walking home from the railway station late in the evening having had a long day mostly spent travelling. Walking through deserted city streets late at night I feel mostly safe but am aware that there is a risk, and that it's not, fundamentally, something that normal, sensible people do. Which is perhaps what reminded me very much of a similar walk, albeit in a completely different city, almost exactly two decades before. Then I'd spent a weekend travelling home and back, including buying my first proper guitar, so the weekend was a good one, but still left me with a long walk home from the station very late in the evening. Doing such things is fine as a student; it's almost compulsory to do slightly silly things like that. But twenty years later, oughtn't I to have got out of the habit?
But what are the alternatives? I suppose I should have driven myself home (because sensible people don't walk anywhere do they - they drive and then wonder why they get fat or have to go to the gym to get the exercise they otherwise avoid). Failing that I should have got a taxi. But both of those are troublesome to my mind and, at heart, I just like walking. I'd say that I prefer to walk and chose that of my own free will. But I'm also aware that I've inherited a penny-pinching genetic legacy; my upbringing tells me I should go hungry rather than pay for food, and walk rather than pay for a taxi, and maybe I need to accept that I'm not making any decisions of my own free will - all my choices are decided for me by my genes.
Whatever the reasons, there I was walking home. At least, now, I was not overloaded with ill-packed luggage, not carrying a box with precious cassette tapes spilling out. Some things improve. And it occurred to me that I'm in a kind of spiral. Round and round, repeating myself, but with subtle changes and, hopefully, improvements. Like the fact that while sat on the train, speeding through the blacked-out countryside, I was listening to Orgone Accumulator, just like twenty years before, but this time on CD instead of tape. Then again, I was now listening to something 35 years remote in time, as opposed to 15 years remote. And I was listening with rather more jaded ears than I did before. In fact I'm not really sure I was listening much at all. I suspect I was just thinking back. For a long time it was a ritual for me to listen to that stuff while travelling through the space-like dark. So many memories are overlaid on each other, but all of them good. And I suppose the music isn't actually essential - nocturnal train-travelling is quite evocative in itself. Or perhaps that just me - I have done probably more than my fair share of it. I still remember, like it was yesterday, the lime green carriage in which I discussed the delights of Motherwell at maybe 3 in the morning with a young couple who were amazed at someone half their age off on his own doing essentially the same stuff as them. (And they were nowhere near as amazed as I was). And I remember the trip with my dad where we had to change trains at 4 in the morning, waiting for one of these odd trains at the crack of dawn that delivers the newspapers and post along its route. And I remember the chill a few years later when that same train crossed a bridge that had been washed away, killing the people sitting exactly where I had been. Statistically I suppose that sort of thing is likely to happen if you travel enough, but it was chilling all the same.