The countryside is best taken at high speed, through a train window in my opinion. From that vantage point, on a warm day like today, the green fields, small hamlets and woodland copses take on an idyllic blur, that makes semi-urbanites like myself feel like we might be wasting our time, tap tap tapping keyboards all day in cubicle land. We should be out there sitting on a tree stump smoking a pipe with the land rover sitting in the background and the dogs running free in the yard.
Well, yes, all that may well be true, but equally I should probably be ruling over a hareem of fine women somewhere in the south american jungle or playing pro Baseball for the Harlem JobDodgers. These are the kind of thoughts that run through my mind when I’m sitting on a train. I like the sensation of the land speeding away and that’s why I sit facing backwards. I don’t care about the land rushing up in front of me, but I’m pleased to see it moving out behind. I like the looks of sheep and factories and I like the fact they go past and I don’t have to see them again.
Am not going to try and over-analyse that, just chucking it in for context really. Just wanted to make the observation that if we did slow down (tilt train stops tilting, drop the contents of the lavatories and the smokers step off for a cigarette). If I was to take the opportunity to get off at one of these impromptu stops I probably wouldn’t wander into what had appeared to be a rural replication of the garden of Eden. Most likely close up I’d find it was a hot-bed of racial violence against immigration, headed up by some BNP style Mosely lookalike with those moustaches that you apply wax to. The village shop would have last week’s papers in it and last year’s magazines, the locals in the pub would stare at you and if you stayed long enough might treat you to a kicking or spot of buggery in the car park. Country villages are hot-beds of hatred, intolerance and bigotry and even the fields, which look so healthy green from so far away are riddled with chemicals, illegal landfills and seven-foot inbred farmers when you get up close.
Best to stay on your train, carry on thinking, carry on drinking (in my case) and look forward to getting back to a city whose all prevalent dirt doesn’t attempt to hide the degeneracy of the humans that live there unlike these dishonest disney town pestilent villagers who make their houses out of thatch and try and claim a lottery grant when they get burnt down.
