ON TO DUNDEE

Freezing fog cloaked the frosty landscape. You couldn’t see the Firth of Forth from the rail bridge. The fog stayed with me all the journey, an ephemeral thing, shards of it appearing and disappearing all the way along the iron road to Inverurie. The sun played hide and seek with the fog, now appearing with a faint golden glow, now disappearing behind a curtain of mist. I had been up since six a.m. and the temperature had shown -5 degrees Celsius, though the train carriage was warm enough. A bearded geezer with a nose like the relief map of the moon got on at Kircaldy, sat next to me, impinged on my precious space, and promptly fell asleep, his nascent snoring ruffling the tip of his frazzled moustache. The train was full. Many of the younger people looked like back-packers, living on the cheap and buying cut-price tickets whilst I paid the full whack. The woman pulling the drinks trolley was beautiful – thimble-slim with blonde hair and a winning smile. She made divesting me of £1.60 for a beverage loosely described as coffee almost a pleasure. I decided that I must buy a laptop with wireless access, like the grey-haired bicyclist who sat in front of me watching a film of tower-blocks being blown up. When the sun was visible, it hung like a huge orange sponge, low in a transparent sky. As we passed the frozen fields before Leuchars, the mist drifted in and out like a wraith, giving the landscape a hollow, twilit look. The skeleton trees were white with hoar-frost and the sun reflected the ice crystals and lit the branches like Christmas trees. It was as if the landscape was a giant oil painting and the artist had decided to wash all the colour from it, apart from some bold flashes of yellow as the sun sought to break through. All of a sudden, a deer flashed into my vision – a handsome, snorting, rollicking buck with an eye out for the ladies. He sported a full and glorious set of antlers and he pranced nobly away across the tufted grass in search of adventure. I envied him his freedom, and the relative simplicity of his life. He envied my seat on the train.