Train of Thought

A couple of Christmases ago Fester bought me an mp3 player, onto which I download radio podcasts to listen to whilst doing housework or when bored travelling.  Before this gift, if I was on a train and bored with reading I would either write letters to a friend or jot down thoughts or feelings in my little red book, or journal.

(If I’d been on a river I’d have called this "Stream of Consciousness” – it does burble on a bit.)

1 October 2009

It’s a lovely autumn day.

Still a bit of green about, but lots of gold and red and yellow in the trees.

Very flat around Peterborough.

Scarlet berries on bushes and trees.

Train full of people on computers and mobile phones.

Behind me a couple conversing in some eastern European language.

Now we’re out in the fields again.

Huge, cropped short and yellowing,

Some already ploughed and fudge brown.

Rough emerald rows of brassicas, possibly Brussels sprouts waiting for Christmas.

Lonely farmsteads islands in a sea of agriculture.

180⁰ wide skies make a Welsh valley girl feel very exposed.

Bigger islands of trees.

I can’t get into the magazines I’ve bought to read and I’m not sleepy.

Fat cotton reel bales flung about a field.

A solitary grazing pasture of brown store cattle.

Ear popping night time tunnel.

Another pasture now with some Friesians,

Black and white in the dun brown mix.

A spire, a town, a carpark but no station stop – where was that?

Sheep almost the same shade as the field they stand in the grass is so sere.

Dusty lanes and shining drains.

Slowing down for Newark.

Nearly one o’clock – time for lunch.

Finally – the White Horse on the hill

Landmark that says I’m in the North

And heading for the North East

Almost out of the indian territory that is Yorkshire

And into the pale of County Durham.

Soon there’ll be the lift of the heart

That comes with crossing the Tyne.

Home – or at least my motherland.

My first home in my heart

Is the land of my fathers,

Or at least a small patch of it

Near Cwmifor where Boyds lived for eighty years or more,

But now are all flown,

Except for those nestled in the churchyard of St Paul’s Manordeilo

Together with friends and extended family

Aunties, uncles and cousins

From Grandma’s Thomas side of the family.

“This place has a comfortable smell to it” said Dad 

The last time we took him there to see Mum’s grave.

When he joins her

There will be no excuse to go home again.