The Night Train Part 1 - The Language of Familiarity.

Like flying, it's a very poor nights sleep - but with the night train you never leave the runway. 

As you finally fall out the other end, dishevelled and fatigued you feel like an unpaid extra in Dr Chicago. Awful. They should change the livery from 'Sleeper' to something truthful. I had no idea that railway lines were designed to keep you awake and not lull you to sleep with that familiar repetition. 

At some point during the night the train changed direction - as I peered out the scenery seemed to be propelling me south - back to London. It was endless. A nightmare loop of horror. 

Totally confusing.

Am feeling like my eyes are still in London - but I'm very far north. It's not midday yet but it's already getting dark. Thankfully the hotelier makes reasonable coffee but the Muzak remains a toxic loop of those bloody awful life threatening seasonal songs that you love to loathe. Early darkness suggests warm and pleasant evenings in front of a fire. Meaningful conversation, good food and safety.

In these parts the locals only passion is being in the bar by 10am! 

A thunderous disco kept me awake all night.

I left this bizarre base camp early the following morning, now 36 hours without sleep and head north by 4 Wheel Drive. Into the unknown. A forbidding and mountainous horizon.

“Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies, for instance.” - John Ruskin

The least populated part of our island, the last great wilderness, the Celtic Fringe. A place where blood once flowed into impossibly bleak moors. Incredible beauty. Driving through incredible storms, clouds below and all around - through the village with more rainfall than the Amazon rain-forest. 

In spite of everything you have ever been told the local people are in fact rather unpleasant. Pissed off most likely with 14 months in every 12 being blasted by an incessant universal un-forgiveness. I felt I had left the last smile a long way behind.

Be careful who you sit next to - ever. Really. 

"No the wi-fi doesn't work. Ha Ha. I do miss the typewriter anyway. I love the sound of the keys. They send me back to my night school. We keep cats, lots of them. I commute – do you? Have you seen the Otters? Are you from London?"

Now literally hundreds of miles from anywhere how come I have to sit next to other people - especially those that I don't want to. And why are they within ear-shot. Within touching distance. It's wrong. I'm agitated. And increasingly. I paid a lot of money to be on my own. It's dinner for goodness sake. I'm not being unfair but these are the type of people I would happily sign documents to be kept from. To ensure I never met them. Ever.

"We've been here six times before. We get on the night train 45 minutes before it leaves, just so that we can eat. We love it so much. We know the crew. They know us really well. They change."

I ignore them. Outside the bleak house it's all kicking off. The storm - a truly amazing experience - immense power and noise. Yet inside the bleak house I'm somehow forced to hear the deluded ramblings of plankton. I can't switch them off. 

No I will not tell you what roads I came up here on. Fuck off! 

Incredible beauty, wet as hell. The sea and the sky are one - each alive with white spray. They are at one but also seem to hate each other. Impossible to part them - each a persistent and wholly diabolical force. Both so immense and awe inspiring that it took away any sense of anything. Time, selfishness, breath, balance, football results. The noise in incredible. Comparable only to the awful din next to me – ridiculous conversation carried out with incessant glee by horrible people who live, and should have stayed, way south of here. 

Nature is trying to speak to me but there are retards doing their best to break into my head. They are abusing me. They are now debating the best method of dispensing the ashes of their (most recent) cat. I could help there.

And so it goes. 

There's a really important conversation going on all around me and I'm processing it in my head. Stuff I really want to listen to. Stuff I came here to understand. Me. It's a mashup - a confusion of new voices. I haven't been properly introduced to them.  

Black clouds sit on top of blacker clouds. Everything is wet, even the horizontal rain is being poured on by more rain - and that is wetter yet. Incredible. Somehow, and miraculously, stupid sheep cling onto vertical rocks with their jaws. They are in search of bits of grass that are surely dissolving. Battered incessantly by raindrops the size of cricket balls shot out of medieval cannon. 

The security of the City, I convince myself, means I have control over my existence there. I've left the City. The soundtrack here is just plain bleak. Bleak Is the word. Insanely, beautifully bleak. Bleak - First Class.

My body and my multiple minds tell me conflicting things. I'm not ready to leave the City. I want wild open spaces, I don't want wild open spaces. I want the solitude and creativity of the wilderness, I want very high-speed broadband and home delivery. Crap. I'm torn. 

The Storm Of The Eye

The storm shouts out very loudly now, demanding the full attention from its audience. Earth, Wind & Fire is on stage and the show is in full flight. The guy on the lighting and effects mixer is sheer genius. The amplifiers are set to 11. Waves bigger than houses pound away at impossibly formed rocks - they are all stars. 

The roof of the shack stays firmly put. 5 days now. 4 days of 60-80 mph storms and I'm still entirely captivated by it. It's all so beautifully chaotic. At times it's impossible to separate the sky, the sea, the river or the land. Separated from it all only by plate glass and a shared language. The days are never light - this far north it's a permanent dusk fading to pitch black. The sounds remain gale force, the visuals are comprehensive both in their range of colours and their unexplainableness. All so intensely beautiful. A feast for the eyes.

As with any live orchestra - no recording can do justice.

The natural force of the storm is quite literally breathtaking. If there were words to describe it then language would be the more powerful for it but we have insufficient tools in words alone. The storm speaks in a voice that I recognise but can't really engage with - certainly not as I would want. I watch spellbound but would rather be fully integrated into it. Consumed.

It takes a while to translate voices in your head. In my case decades. Intense storms and the power of nature has a way of highlighting the ridiculousness of ones own thought processes. I've been privileged to be embedded inside the wrath of nature for days here and yet oddly juxtaposed with the kind of excruciating humanity I would seek to avoid at all costs normally. In the remotest part of the island thrown together with sidelined x-factor contestants. Out of control and in the extremes of natural events. 

I intensely dislike overhearing other peoples conversations. I know some people like it. I hate it. It takes me out of the spell of a reality I only just found.

Posted via email from Just Thinking!