peace train

Oh peace train sounding louder

Glide on the peace train

Was it only a week ago I was sitting on a train from Ranthambore back to Delhi?  Somehow it seems almost like another lifetime ago. After touring Northern India for most of November and experiencing the clamour and chaos, Ranthambore seemed like an oasis. We'd had to get up early for the safaris to see tigers - which we were lucky enough to -  but the excitement and thrill still seemed a lot less chaotic than the rest of our encounter with such a lively bustling country. The evenings relaxing in a sunny garden with a swimming pool and bar prepared us for the long journey home. 

However, back to the train. During our tour we travelled on coaches, in taxis, internal flights and a fair few trains. Ah, the trains . . .

Quite a few people mention various rail journey programmes on tv, particularly the Portillo ones. In fact, we even met fellow travellers who were on a Great Train Journeys package tour. We, of course, had never watched any of these televisual feasts so were generally bemused. We actually did travel on the narrow gauge Toy Train from Shimla down to Chandigarh, much as the irritating ex-Tory MP had. That was quite pleasant, just a bit more cramped. But it is the noise of train journeys that made an impact on me. 

The opportunity to look out of the windows and take in the huge landscapes we were travelling through was quite stimulating. Once we were out of the environs of the main cities I could observe the comings and goings of daily life. Yes, the huge amount of garbage, particularly plastic bottles, was astonishing. There were posters at the stations proclaiming an end of plastic waste by July 2022. I'm guessing that's a target that will forever remain out of reach. Given the fact that every time we got in a taxi, hotel room, coach and train, we were handed a plastic bottle of water. As it really isn't safe to drink water for Westerners other than bottled water, there is a huge problem of waste creating a huge elephant in the room for their government.  As we travelled along I observed small towns and rural areas strewn with litter. The Edgelands are an area of interest to me and I will return to the subject soon.

The bustling stations and streets often gave way to massive fields, many of which reminded me of much of the UK. Yes, really. There were several large towns with tower blocks of flats that reminded me of Stevenage New Town in the1970s: High Plash, Brent Court transposed to the rural edgelands of the sub continent. Flooded fields, rivers, pylons strewn across the landscape, random solitary trees, hedges used as field borders all often seemed familiar. Except the scale, of course.

Then there was the excitement of watching black kites over the towns, the common mynas, hundreds of egrets and occasionally various storks flying over or standing idly in fields Black storks, white storks, black-necked or yellow-billed storks. All very exciting indeed.

Ours is the blue one!

Meanwhile, during these lengthy train journeys, often between four to eight hours, there was the noise. The carriages were usually packed - train travel is very popular in India. The ubiquity of noise on the trains astonished me to be honest. Everyone appeared to be on their phones. The world domination of personal phones has a lot to answer for! Hundreds of different ring tones, so many people all shouting in to them, pinging, ringing, humming buzzing constantly. On top of that is the perpetual chanting up and down the carriage, "Chai, chai, coffee, chai! Lamb cutlet, lamb cutlet. . . tomato soup, tomato soup, chai, chai!" There were many other delicacies on offer but spoken, belted out in Hindu too. My head was ringing too from all the noise. Some people seemed to be playing videos and songs -  no headphones in sight at all. Just a constant cacophony.

My mind travelled back in time to when I used to travel a lot on trains. I used to love going on long train journeys. Growing up in Stevenage and being so close to major rail routes, especially into London, and as a non-driver for many years, allowed a rather romantic notion of train travel to develop. I travelled to St Ives in Cornwall a few memorable times, Edinburgh and beyond, and London itself was a regular trip. When I had friends who lived in London, I could often be back home before them so short was the train journey (25 minutes). But that was in the age before the ubiquity of mobile phones.

Travelling in the past seems to me now to have been a much quieter and calmer experience. Peaceful, almost. Thinking back to, say, a journey down to St Ives in 1973, people sat on the train reading newspapers or books (that was me), doing the crossword, occasionally talking quietly so as not to disturb fellow travellers. There were no portable methods of music beyond transistor radios then. Nobody ever seemed to play them. Earphones were available of course, so maybe some people did listen to them. I never did or noticed others doing so. Sometimes a conversation could be struck up between strangers. I still remember a few conversations (I used such an experience in a song not long ago). Occasionally the ticket inspector came along and politely, quietly, asked to check your ticket. When we pulled in to a station there was a little bit of kerfuffle and disturbance as travellers got on or off. Cases were placed in the rack and a newspaper was rustled to find the crossword. A harrumph here and there if a baby cried or a toddler spoke out of turn. But the general ambience of a train journey was of a calm atmosphere. There was a politeness and general feeling of almost tranquillity; a time to think and get totally lost in your own thoughts. Or fall asleep and miss your stop. That happened too! I remember travelling back from a gig at the Marquee with my mate Andy late one night (yes, a school night) and we espied our dreaded headmaster on the same train. He fell asleep before Stevenage. We got off quietly and closed the door as silently as we could. We watched the train depart - next stop Peterborough. Despite what he told Andy, he didn't get off the train at Stevenage. A well-deserved payback.

Anyway, calm travelling, what we would call Slow Travel nowadays I guess, seems to be a thing of the past. Even so-called "quiet carriages" appear to be a misnomer, evidently. Modern train journeying in the UK may not be quite as raucous and chaotic as my experience in India but I think long gone are the days of calm reflective excursions where one felt whole books could have been written on those long tranquil journeys. Little noise; and just the gentle rhythmical movement of the train to lull you gently into a reverie.

The train goes running along the line,

Jicketty-can, jicketty-can,

I wish it were mine, I wish it were mine,

Jicketty-can, jicketty-can.

The Engine Driver stands in front - 

He makes it run, he makes it shunt;

Out of the town,

Out of the town,

Over the hill,

Over the down,

Under the bridges,

Across the lea,

Over the bridges And down to the sea,

With a jicketty-can, jicketty-can,

Jicketty-jicketty-jicketty-can,

Jicketty-can, jicketty-can . . .*

* Clive Sansom (1965) A poem my children loved at bedtimes.

strange town

Found myself in a strange town

Though I've only been here for three weeks now
I've got blisters on my feet
Trying to find a friend in Oxford Street

Growing up a half hour's journey outside of London often means you grow up with a fascination for the place. During my childhood visits to museums, galleries and the zoo were commonplace. By the time I was fifteen I was regularly going up there by myself. Trains were quick and easy and life was different and, yes, exciting. However, I never really wanted to move there.

I stayed there often enough with friends that had moved there, often for extended periods. A good friend of mine from school mostly lived in Kensington at his girlfriend's house. Why wouldn't you? Her parents were loaded and had a huge house. They were always away on their island in Scotland or in America sorting things out for the family oil business.

As I've often written about before, my main area of operation was around Charing Cross Road, Denmark Street and the pubs around Soho Square. The Marquee Club was in Wardour Street and I spent much of my time there. I loved eating cheaply in Greek restaurants and drinking in the Nelly Dean in the next road along. By the time I had some money to spare in my late teens early twenties, guitar shops become as important a haunt as the record shops I frequented.

However, back at home in Stevenage I often prefered to be out in the woods and fields walking for miles through Hertfordshire's gentle landscape. Mind you, the amount of chalk and mud in those fields meant you came home about six inches taller and it took forever to clean the stuff off of your boots. Oh, I enjoyed the pubs in the High Street and the one guitar shop (owned by Chris Barber's guitarist John Slaughter) but these were later joy. In my youth if you ventured out particularly on Friday and Saturday nights you needed to be able to either run fast or have the gift of the gab to stop being beaten up by the marauding gangs of skinheads. The violent underbelly of the urban landscape has always driven me out towards clean air and vast fields. You can see who's coming and from what direction much easier.

My thoughts these past few days have drifted back to those times but not through any nostalgia particularly. Talking to old friends via the phone or email has made me start to think much less of my home town. I still go back occasionally to see a few of our best friends who still live there. But when we're there we go to their houses and very occasionally a pub in the High Street. I never go to the town centre but we do often walk out to some of the rural areas that have survived into this century. These are some of the same places I used to walk myself.

Also, another old friend from the old place invited me into a Facebook group of old memories of the town. I took a look around there, posted a thing or two about some gigs I put on at the College and now feel that I have little interest in what's being posted there. It's a long time ago. Maybe the worrying amount of adult illiteracy in what I read there has put me off, I'm not sure. I don't really give a toss about, "who remembers the chinese restaurant/cinema/tramp?" etc that goes with the territory. Or maybe, finally after thirty five years living away from the place, I've finally got it out of my system. I'm not sure which.

Still, I started by talking about London. Another thing that has definitely prompted me to think about my home town is the book I'm reading. I'm reading Paul Du Noyer's In The City which is brief history of the music of London and how that city has helped shape much of the music that we all know and love. It's a book where Elizabethan ballads, Gilbert and Sullivan and the Music Hall are as important as Carnaby Street and the Kinks and Small Faces. Typically, of such a book covering such a subject, there are parts that are much more interesting than others. That is to say that by three quarters of the way though when punk rears its spotty Art School face and he starts to write about Wham! and Dizzee Rascal, my interest has totally waned. It's not an exhaustive history but I feel there is a lot missed out. Still, there have been some intriguing points made along the way.

One thing that struck me is that whilst much modern music, like punk, is a product of urban environments, I fell in love with more acoustic based music at an early age. Genesis being the first band I really took to in the early 1970s lead me to enjoying Prog music for a while. But the 12 string guitars, flutes and more pastoral sounds juxtaposed against the electric guitars and drums eventually lead me towards more Elysian fields and into folk. The acoustic/electric mix of folk-rock also fuelled my rural/urban upbringing. Like many in the early seventies, a semi-rusticated childhood through the 1960s had fuelled a love for the types of music Fairport Convention, Traffic and Nick Drake were producing.

The main prompt to my thinking, though, was a quote from Paul Weller. Now, he was from outside of London too. Hailing from Woking, which is twenty six miles and half an hour outside of Waterloo, Weller also had a desire for London. Weller worked hard and has several changes of direction musically. He desperately wanted London but needed also to remember where he came from and use his influences. Town and country. What he says to Du Noyer is probably in essence how I feel about the past too. However, before I end with the full quote, I'd like to just point out that most towns are like this. If you're lucky enough to live near open fields, woods, hills and/or the sea then you too probably feel that pull. You need the services available, you need community but you also need to escape the fumes and noise. I do feel blessed in some ways for having the rural location of my youth with the ease of getting to London too:

"It's funny to look at those paces," he says of his childhood. "Everywhere looks tiny and run down. It's all the reasons I wanted to get the fuck out of there. I've still got family there but my main link with Woking is the area where I used to play as a kid, the woods around there, the rural side. The actual town's a dump, like most satellite towns. They've got a big mall but no one's got any bread and the shops are empty . . . "

summer is in

summer is in
everyone sing
aah! let us begin . . .*

It seems that for a day or two we are able to enjoy some warm seasonal weather down here on the east coast.  It's about time.  The weather has been awful. During half term week I was marking - the annual festival of AS Film Studies exam marking that takes up several weeks of my time.  As the weather was so bad this year I just got on with it and didn't feel that I should be out and about in it.  Or worse still, off on holiday somewhere.  It has been ridiculously cold so far in this neck of the woods.  The poppies pictured are in a field on the road that became infamous a few years ago where several prostitutes were found murdered by the "Suffolk Ripper" or whatever naff name they gave him.  Beauty and calm have returned to a lovely stretch of countryside by the A14.

Still, back to the matter at hand, I did manage to visit friends in my old home town.  We walked in what is now called "Forster Country".  Forster wrote Howards End about a house that is nearby to my old parish church, St Nicholas in Stevenage. The house is actually called Rooks Nest and a friend of mine from schooldays used to be the gardener there. He's a taxi driver now.

We walked up through the churchyard where many of us have seen ghosts - for another time perhaps.  It's quite overgrown in places.  An area of importance for some rare species of plant my friend informed me. The solitude of church graveyards is a wonderful thing in daylight.  The amount of wildlife that lives in them is phenomenal - I hoped to see a jay as there are so many oak trees there. No jays, but we stumbled onto this small mark of Forster's importance to the area.  As you walk past this into the field behind I had a rush of what? Nostalgia? No, but a memory of those long cross country runs we had to undertake from school.  Our school was just down the avenue from the church.

In those days we had to do a real cross country run.  In these days of risk assessments and a paedophile in every hedgerow (nature deficit disorder!!) kids just have to run around the school field a few times.  That's in those schools that haven't sold off their school fields.  Still, hardly a "cross country" run, is it? Running around the school field was a punishment that the science teacher used to excel in when I were a lad. In those days come rain, mud, snow, hail, whatever - rarely sunshine, though - we had to run through the avenue, churchyard, fields. Sunshine was only for those long hot summers we had in those days. After the run, covered in caked mud and feet clogged with chalk, we were forced to go into the communal shower. It was always a bit disconcerting that the P.E. teacher was in there with you, but hey! it was a boy's school.:
"Pass the soap, lad."
"Yes sir." Thing is, he never went on the run with us.

With several skylarks twittering away high over the fields and my friend's dog startling the partridges, it was a great feeling to walk through the years and dredge up some memories.  On the way home a jay flew out of a tree and plonked itself onto the side of the A14.  I knew I was going to see one that day.

Thinking back to the walk through the churchyard and how it is becoming as immaculately unkempt as Francis Rossi's hairdo, there seems to be a synchronicity at large here.  I have become fascinated by the way the the real world - that's nature you know, weeds and foxes and stuff - has begun to encroach into our world more and more.  The urban world if left alone will always be colonised: weeds, after all, were the first things to grow on the bombsites after WW2. So, "only connect" indeed. I get interested in this stuff just as the BBC decides to show a programme about the unnatural wildlife of London. I missed it, of course, but thanks to iPlayer I can sit and watch it in bed with a cup of tea later tonight.  I missed it because I went to see Prometheus last night: a film that concerns itself very much about the nature of life itself. I'll leave it to others to judge its shortcomings but it's an interesting film.  Eric Von Daniken where are you now?

So reading about small wildernesses and the way the natural world finds a way of constantly surviving seems to be cropping up (no pun intended) all over the place.  Here we have a little jungle - a whole ecosystem - sitting happily outside a house with a usually immaculate garden at the end of my road. I find this sort of patch far more interesting - actually, far more beautiful - than an unnatural garden.  I like the poppies and nettles colonising anywhere and everywhere. More on this another time.

When the sun comes out and we start to feel a bit better about ourselves, I enjoy cooking more and more.  Winter's fine with its stews and heavy meals but the summer starts me thinking about more interesting things to do.  Last Sunday I smoked some mackerel. I had hell of a job getting the Rizlas around it but to be absolutely honest, I am very impressed with the results.  We ate it last night and there were no side effects, just the genuine taste of lightly smoked mackerel.  Mind you, the house stinks but what the hey? Next time I'm going up to the local fishmongers and get some really fresh fish off the boat, maybe some prawns too. Home smoked fish, eh? Whatever next?

* Summer Is In by Anne Briggs - recorded in the early 1970s just down the road from here in Little Bealings with Steve Ashley and his short-lived band Ragged Robin.