When I was a boy I thought life was like this railway station in Switzerland: a bell rings, giving everyone a polite warning; the crossing guard comes down, the train draws up safely to the platform. We board and leave. All is orderly and controlled, laid out without drama or disaster, always working, the lights blinking in time.
The scene out of the window is of an immaculate hillside of deliberately placed chalets, the train track snacking like a brush-stroked filament through the greenery. A background of immovable majesty and in the foreground a toy town immerges with all the ingredients in place, in the right place without complaint or complication. As a boy I loved Babbacombe Model Village in Torbay, Devon. I would stride amongst the miniature world woven together by steaming trains. Cities made manageable and intimidating landmarks reduced to a size that compliments us onlooking gods. I hoped the whole world would look like this - me staring down while holding the hand of parents above me. Always trains are the best part and still a fascination. Why trains, I wonder, looking at a model of the Gotthard railway in the Lucern Transport museum – the trains sneaking up, over, through and around the massif. Is that raw machinery, the substance of heaving iron and gas and sweat? Is it the visible complexity of all the moving parts? Is it the innate democratic intent of dedicated people working together to move masses of people to places of wonder in some kind of comfort? Is it an inherited cultural joy of something glorious but lost when the cars crept into our familiarity? The train remains my favourite form of transport. Looking out of the window at the fleeting imagery is still the best therapy, the most stimulating of day dreams. Out there is the real world fixed in place for a few flashing seconds. The imagination bubbles up and the train can take me anywhere, back to boyhood and the model villages or into dreams of worlds of my own making, ever the tiny human playing at being a demi-god, hoping to fix everything into its rightful, undying, satisfying place.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorA poetic-essay style blog with a limit of 365 words. 365 like the days of the year - my name being one of those days! Archives
March 2020
Categories |