LEARNING THE LINES

The unseeing eye of the dead yellowhammer stared up into the heavens as I crossed the railway bridge at Drem. It had careered into the electric wires and ended up on its back on the footbridge as a result. I thought about picking it up and giving it a decent burial, but I was toting a heavy case and I carried no utensil useful enough for grave-digging, except maybe a six-inch ruler and a propelling pencil. I decided against any precipitate action and left it there.

It was six-thirty on a glorious early summer morning. Drem is a pretty station, a throwback to the days when the railway companies built cosy buildings of slate and stone, and not prefabricated bus shelters overflowing with litter and stinking of urine. I was to catch the 06:50 slow stopper to Edinburgh and from there the 07:30 to Inverurie. I would disembark at Dundee. In Edinburgh, I wondered why the powers-that-be were flying a Union flag from the castle ramparts. The train guard had a soothing Edinburgh voice, mellifluous and soothing. He even made reading out the safety instructions calming. I sat in a twin seat at the back of the middle carriage, on the left-hand side, facing the leading car. I had about as much kneeroom as in the back of a Goggomobil, but that was deliberate. No-one would conceivably sit next to me.

I watched a young girl on the Glasgow train applying her makeup and looking into a tiny mirror. She expressed silent dissatisfaction with her face as she drifted into the Mound Tunnel. My train seemed mainly to be filled with young executives without ties – earnest eager beavers willing to impress somebody, anybody. The man in the table seat in front was young and bald, with a fringe of ginger hair round his scalp. He wore a brown herringbone tweed jacket and was on his way to Aberdeen. I learned that much from his reservation ticket, stuck in the squab of the seat behind him. Outside, the hedgerows were bursting with furze and hawthorn blossom. At Carricknowe, an elderly couple were up and about and playing golf, even at that early hour.

I was wearing a cheap watch bought from Asda for eight pounds about a year ago and the alarm started to bleep every five minutes. I had no idea how to turn it off, so I put my watch in my case, which muffled the sound somewhat. Traffic was already slowing to a crawl on the Fife side of the Forth Road Bridge. In a farmer’s field just north of Inverkeithing, a sandwich-board advertised ‘Unlimited swim and gym for £4.95 per week.’

I felt pain from my damaged ankle, mainly because of the lack of foot-room, but also because Ginger insisted on tucking his feet in behind him, so every time I stretched out my feet, I kicked his heel. I bought a cup of coffee. A French chap served it. It tasted faintly of gravy. He gave me just a single sachet of sweeteners. I didn’t have the energy to ask him for any more. I don’t have the lingo. There was a fair on the green at Burntisland. On one of the rides was the legend ‘Get ready to rock.’ The carriage was dead silent, apart from the thrum of the engines. At Kircaldy, the trio of rusty saddle-tanks was still mouldering away in the factory yard. They must have been there almost forty years. What was to become of them? I would have bought one if I could have got it home.

A mobile phone rang, shattering the silence. I almost had a heart-attack. I thought it was mine, except no-one ever rings me. It turned out to be one of the tie-less executives, a man who looked very like the Lib-Dem MP for somewhere in middle England that I couldn’t quite place. I began the fraught business of cleaning up after my coffee and putting the waste into the empty cup. The remnants of the sachet of sweetener spilled all over my navy-blue suit trousers and the milk tubes wouldn’t fold in half – they kept springing back as if made of india-rubber. Then I couldn’t break the stirring stick – I had to twist and wind it till the wood fibres eventually reluctantly parted. Finally, I forgot to put in the used serviette, so when I removed the top of the carton again, the milk tubes sprang out like jacks-in-the-box. The Frenchman took pity on me and came along with his rubbish bag shortly after. At least he didn’t shout ‘your rubbish’ and make it sound like ‘you’re rubbish,’ which one chap took pleasure in doing on a Virgin Cross-Country train I was on once.

North of Markinch, in open fields, carrion crows were promenading stiffly about in their usual solitary fashion. Beside them stood another sandwich-board advertising Tulloch Homes – ‘now building four- and –five bedroomed homes’ – nine bedrooms? In another field were endless rows of Brussels-sprouts plants, a miniature green army guarding a massive heap of manure. Just outside Cupar, a big brown buzzard stared balefully at the train from its position on the ground, its wickedly curved beak just itching to be employed on the moist and protuberant eye of a nearby baby rabbit. A trio of donkeys reposed contentedly in another field, their days of heavy labour at an end. Near Leuchars, three Sheldrakes, fed up with cruising on a man-nade pond nearby, sat in the middle of a dirt track, their pretty brown collars reflecting the rays of the sun.

‘Next stop, Dundee,’ crooned the mellifluous guard and very soon we were crossing that immense stretch of choppy grey water. I reflected as I disembarked that, if I had driven, I would have seen nothing, learned nothing, experienced nothing, felt in tune with nothing. That is the beauty of travelling by train, except in and around London. In addition, my plan worked. No-one sat next to me.