SUMMER JOURNEY

I dozed from Berwick to Stobswood. I snuffled and slobbered and whistled. I awoke with a start, not knowing where I was. I saw the cricket ground where I once made 48, batting at seven and wearing a khaki bush-hat. I was about 24 at the time. The ground was surrounded by new houses all along one side, but the pavilion was new.

Widdrington looks desperate, with many boarded-up and bulldozed houses, but Newcastle is pleasing, as usual. I no longer feel pain behind my eyes when I draw into it, past the ghost of Wills’s cricket ground.

The air conditioning was lazy, a feeble stream of whispered air playing with my caterpillar eyebrows.

York’s gallant train shed is satisfying. Thereafter, the landscape grows featureless, flat as a curling-stone, save for a few copses of stunted trees, ant-like sheep and haystacks turned into golden swiss-rolls.

The sun dipped in and out of silvery clouds, making a magic-lantern show of the landscape. A combine-harvester, choking dust, threshing the fertile land, turning it into a food factory, coughed its way across fields of wheat.

The concrete towers of two huge power stations south of York look like something that have been thrown up on a giant potter’s wheel. It is as if the International Concrete Corporation is re-enacting HG Wells’s ‘War of the Worlds,’ the cooling towers representing martians lumbering across the Yorkshire wolds.

Doncaster looks shabby, all chimneys and metal pipes. The railway is much wider here, with many more tracks. You can tell that this is still an industrial centre of some importance.

Here a hefty class 92 electric slumbered in the sunshine next to a tiny class 08 diesel shunter.

South of Doncaster lies a pleasant little town of new houses, half-buried in an explosion of trees of every shape and size. I find myself wondering what the people are doing, where they are working, and whether they share my bleak and sardonic view of the world. I decide that they probably did not. For them, life is merely a means of making the calendar three-dimensional till they shuffle off this mortal coil, finally caught by the giant wicket-keeper in the sky, who never needs the third umpire to verify a decision. Such orderly rows of houses, asymmetrical, identical, respectable, bourgeois, an object lesson in modesty, a statement of British reserve and phlegm, long live Britannia and let the sun never set over the British Empire. Occasionally, the view is spoiled by a mobile phone mast, the Meccano legacy of the telecommunications revolution, a latticed reminder of people’s incessant need to be heard but never to listen, the medium for crooning inane dribblings to the educationally deranged. We plummet towards ordinariness and dreariness at a breathless rate, incapable of speech or thought, driven not by any philosophy but by these vacuous devices and the coruscating drivel that pours from them day after day after day. Slack-jawed with the tedium of it all, we abandon etiqutte and social graces and prepare for the twilight world in which someone else will do everything for you, as espoused in that otherwise silly and pretentious song by Messrs Zager and Evans.

In the carriage a man was sleeping, his pendulous lower lip twitching, his huge belly wobbling like jelly behind his folded hands. A chap with a pony-tail stared at his book. Another listened to an I-pod and mouthed the lyrics of some harsh, tinny and entirely meretricious song. The young fellow in seat 22 regaled the young girl in seat 23 with funny stories that were anything but funny. She giggled desperately. Perhaps they exchanged telephone numbers, but that is as far as that nascent romance would have progressed. She eventually arose from her seat and slid off towards the buffet car. She was pretty in a Romany way, rail-thin, dark, lithe and swarthy. He looked like most young men do, scruffy, unshaven and unkempt.

Grantham rolls by, its splendid church surrounded by streets of cheerful terraced brick houses. It is a handsome place, in a restrained way, although spoiled by a massive supermarket development in the front of the town. That is inexcusable. Councillors everywhere have so much to answer for.

Peterborough hove into view, like some harsh and disconcerting red-brick liner, so I packed away all my writing materials and consigned yet another piece to the archive, whence it will be disinterred by a member of my family long after I have gone, and then disposed of discreetly and without fuss. All that needs to be said is that I journeyed from Edinburgh to Peterborough and these were my observations as the countryside slipped by at some 100 miles per hour.