ON A LATE SUMMER RAILWAY JOURNEY

The sky is a weak blue. Dawn gathers ground, the sun casting feeble shadows, orange rather than yellow. It is too early on late summer morning. My brain is tired and my eyes are as heavy as candlesticks. Sleep is a tempting mistress.
The chap opposite is in an attitude of prayer, listening to his i-pod, eyes closed, hands folded neatly across his lap. He is middle-aged, like me, and he has no business listening to a contraption like that.
The fields are bare and brown. The harvest is over – there is nothing left to be drawn from the soil. We have little to look forward to this autumn. Pools of water lie on the broken ground. Rain has ravaged the surface.
I am mesmerised by the hedges flashing by at speed. I am wall-eyed trying to focus on them. Parts of the rocky embankment threaten to break free and cascade down onto the roof of the train. The rocks are held back by wire netting. It does not seem to be very secure. Rolling fields, a few icing-sugar cottages, then rolling fields again.
Occasional clumps of red-brick housing spread out from the permanent way like the fingers of a giant hand. Despite it being so early in the morning, this train is going to be packed very soon. A man sits next to me at the next halt. He is old, he is shrewish, he is worn, he is done. He wears a sort of cagoule and an shabby pair of corduroy trousers.
A few hay-ricks have been bundled into circles and left dotted around the fields to be collected later and disposed of or used as winter feed, for the animals, not the farmer. Most of the countryside hereabouts is drab, uninteresting.
Several passengers see great virtue in sneezing, and practice their art assiduously. The engine-driver sounds his horn as we drift through a short tunnel and emerge into narrow sunlight.
Rows of mean new houses remind me of Pete Seeger’s song lyric: ‘Little boxes, on a hillside, and they’re all made out of ticky-tacky….’ More people alight at another drowsy and damp station. Businessmen rub shoulders with labourers, demotivated housewives and little schoolboys off to private school. Closed circuit television cameras, those all-seeing eyes that rule our lives, frown down on all of their activities, their menialities, their venalities.
A large town spreads out below, the halt being at the town’s highest point. The buildings are all of a-jumble, and the grey, put-upon streets are dominated by several high-rise dwelling-houses in which people grind out their meagre lives in a three-act play.
A few clouds build up in the distance. Are they going to spoil the day? I have no overcoat, no umbrella. My mood is one of resignation. I can think, but I cannot do. I can write, but I cannot change. I am waiting for something to happen, like the goalkeeper lined up to face a penalty-kick or a tail-end batsman readying himself to face a leg-spin bowler on a ‘sticky-dog’ of a wicket. I have no say over what will happen next. I feel like Christopher Marlowe, who wrote: “Now thou hast but one bare hour to live,/ And then thou must be damned perpetually. / Stand still you ever-moving sphere of heaven, /That time may cease, and midnight never come.”
I feel that it is so close to midnight, despite the early hour of the morning.