Train Music

This summer has been one of the most anxiety ridden, purposeful summers of my life. In fact I would say in terms of sheer terror and ambitious drive it has been the very pinacle of summertime industry in all of my experience. I've spent hours and hours, a hundred now, in this small blue box of a room. I love this room. It is square, it is the same blue that makes you think of a baby boy's first jumpsuit, it has a fire place stacked with books and files, three windows and two doors, and four desks, each of which is laden with books and papers, laptops and mac computers. There is a white board, and this is an important point to make, that whiteboard is the greatest source of solace and encouragement any inanimate object has ever given me, but it is the simple fact of its location that encourages me most.This blue box has been my supposed Shangri-La, the hallowed place where the post graduates reside. In my undergraduate imaginings I pictured the clever Phd students alternating between furiously banging out witty tomes of great import and sitting about drinking coffee whilst debating the best foods for the hungry minds; authors, films, coffee, food, authors, blogs, websites... It is all true.

This old building stands at the edge of the world. Or at least it feels that way, though there are more buildings before the shore, and now the great hulk of the jutting entertainment centre. Then there is the harbour and the headland before the open ocean, and then nothing until the ice at the bottom of the world. Just miles and miles of ocean, sharks, whales, gulls and fish. Between this old fortress and the great distance lies the scar of industry: the railway. It carries the shuddering engines that convey the wealth of the west to the world at large, the engines shunt and shudder as they near the port; some say the noise is pollution, to me it is as comforting as the whispered sympathy of an old friend. With the windows of the blue box open to the world the noise rumbles through as a train rattles into the port, a wonderful cacophony of sound. We don't complain here in the blue box, we wait for the noise to pass, or we speak louder, or strain harder to listen, but we don't moan or whinge at the trains' music. Perhaps that is the nature of a port town, some people say it is the price we pay, and some remind us  that the trains and the ships gave our town life. I don't sleep without it. I've lived on the hill above the port long enough to know the sounds of my home. I've lived in other places, by London's motorways and in the English country side, but those nosies and silences seem empty to me. The yelping of foxes in the night would keep me awake during the British snows, and the rushing of cars on bitumen would haunt my sleep in the palid London summer. I'll leave, soon I think, and when I lay at night in the city I'll wish the whine of passenger trains was more gutsy, and I'll wish the tooting cars would boom like a ship's farewell. I'll teach my dreams to create the railway noises and I'll stretch my mind to remember the train music.

This summer will end soon, one day it will be the summer I spent in the blue box, learning to write and learning to read. It seems like such an elementary area of study but, essentially, that is what I do. It has been my launching pad, it is pointing me toward the road leading right out of Small Town South Coast, this summer has been making my future, and soon I will take to the road, but I think the train music will eventually call me home.