The train now arriving....

Travelling sitting facing backwards on a train feels like being fired from a rifle without ever leaving the barrel.
You get the sense of moving, of the great amount of speed but you can see where you're moving from more than where you're moving to. Lift your feet off the floor and it's as though you're being pushed by some unseen mighty hand, holding you up and literally thrusting you into your future.

Bring it back to reality and it's seats and aisles that are just a bit too narrow, the clicky click of laptops and The World's biggest selection of ring tones. The conversations that people have with those they work and live with, overheard by everyone. The important things that keep us all on the right track and let us continue with the everyday so that we don't fall off the edge of sensible and into the dark chasm of the unknown and uncertain. All this hurtling towards one decaying city centre after the other on a daily basis.

Stations that look like outposts of some post disaster world where things stopped around the mid eighties. Pebble dash, looking more like rotting bone now, and faded paint declaring the names of cities that have the same looking centre but with different shop names. Ideas of the planner and the architect, constructed when new meant ripping down the old and rebuilding it without any acknowledgement of where things came from, what people might of felt. Now these places echo with the sounds of the discontented and the displaced. Each one has, somewhere, an unsteady and unkempt figure who lurches around a karaoke system set on instrumental, sending out tremulous and heartfelt words of longing to some forgotten love, hoping that this will pull the heartstrings of  those around him enough, the fellow lost, the lonely,so they'll put their hands in their pockets and give him enough so he can afford to forget what ever he wants to forget for just long enough.

It's no surprise when we really look at the way some of the people have been crammed together and just left to become a stain on society. Left to become the scape goats of the system we love so much. Left to their cigarettes, their shit diets ,their low expectations and their lives we can scorn them for living. We do this partly because they don't make any money and mostly because they just don't give a shit which, as  we all know, is something you just have to give. Add this to miserable grey cafes, too many charity shops and the overwhelming feeling that it's all just holding on through sheer willpower, you get to see why people just give up on moving at all and surrender to living as they do.

The trains keep moving, we all keep queueing. We all sit staring at the small screens and tapping, we all keep talking into the little boxes or we stare at others doing it or we
just stare out of the window as the future becomes the past.

We all stick on our own side of the tracks but some of us will always be on the wrong side....

until we switch the signals.