Posted by Tania Kindersley.
Northumberland slides past my window. It is very wide and green and stately. At any moment now there will be the first glimpse of the North Sea and I shall know that I am on the last leg.
Excellent sheep in Northumberland, I notice. Really almost as good as Scottish sheep. (I may be chauvinist about this, but I deny anyone to produce sheep as lovely as does my friend and neighbour The Farmer.) The cornfields are high and yellow and there is a faint castle in the distance.
AND THERE IS THE SEA.
Oh, the North Sea; it has such a dull, dour name, and it is such a glorious body of water. The sun is out, for once in its life, and it turns the sea a bright silver blue, with violet streaks and shafts of indigo. The tide is out and there are chestnut cattle grazing by the long brown sands.
When England looks like this there is hardly anywhere in the world more delightful.
I was going to tell you many more things about my week away but my brain is fried like a small cooked thing and is really not working at all. I frown and squint as I try to assemble any thought more than ten seconds long. This may be lucky, as I suspect some of you will have had enough racing stories for one week.
Ah, there is more sea now; all of it, not just a glimpse. White rollers, black Aberdeen Angus cows, fields the colour of greengages, and the sea a bright clear steely blue, the blue of certainty.
We are coming up to Berwick and there is a pretty squat lighthouse and the brown spires of the town and the resident seagulls guarding the harbour and the two arched bridges, and the end of England.
At any moment I shall be home, even though I still have four hours to go. I mean, I shall be back in Scotland, which is the thing that makes me idiotically happy.
I was born in England; I love England; I have English blood. But it is not home to me any more. I'm always interested in how that happens. I like thinking about sense of place, and blood and water, and all the mysteries in between.
But on account of the small, fried brain I really cannot contemplate that now. All I know is that in approximately 240 minutes I shall see my dog and my horse. (I don't mention my humans. I can speak to my humans on the telephone and on the Facebook; the canine and the equine must be seen in person, and so the missing is much, much greater. Also, I am clearly a freak. I miss my mare so badly that I am going to go up and see her tonight at ten o'clock, which is when I shall be at home, even though it will be quite dark, because I my idiot heart cannot wait until tomorrow. I attempted to assuage my withdrawal symptoms with The Auld Fella's polo ponies, but it was not the same.)
Really am stopping now, because I am aware I am making no sense at all. (I sometimes think I regard the Dear Readers a bit like my mum. I am convinced that I must write a blog or you shall think I am dead in a ditch.)
But oh oh oh, I wish you could see this sea. There is not a word for the blueness of it, or what it does to the spirit. Even tired as I am, I smile all over my face like a loon just at the sight of that magnificent water.
Edinburgh next. And then the sleek inter-city 125 turns into a milk train and stops at every damn station between there and Aberdeen, as I get more and more impatient and count the minutes go by.
Showing posts with label on the train. Show all posts
Showing posts with label on the train. Show all posts
Monday, 25 June 2012
Sunday, 23 August 2009
The view from the train
Posted by Tania Kindersley.
Back from doing an event at the Edinburgh Book Festival, of which more later, and too tired from that and the emotion of England winning The Ashes to do a proper post. But I thought you might like to see what I saw from my train window on Friday, as I travelled down the east coast from Aberdeen. Sometimes I think when the sun shines on Scotland there is nowhere else I would rather be. I felt very happy and lucky, anyhow.
Thursday, 5 March 2009
In which I contemplate the mystery of the 8.25 from Chippenham
Posted by Tania Kindersley.
8.25am. I am on the train. (You have to imagine me shouting that in the manner of a banker yelling into a mobile with a bad signal.) I am on the way to London to go on the wireless and talk about the book in an act of shameless self-promotion.
I did a little bit of this last week. I know that you are supposed to have your three things to say and then just say them, whatever the interviewer asks, but I have a fatal tendency to try and answer the question. Worst question last week, from an Irish disc jockey in Dublin: ‘Do we really need another book for women?’ And she was a woman.
Not very sisterly, I thought. I have been having manic ésprit d’éscalier ever since.
‘No one actually needs books,’ I said crossly, afterwards, to my cousin, who was trying to make a chicken. ‘I mean, no one needs War and Peace or Persuasion or The Great Gatsby. All a person needs is food and water and some shelter from the weather.’
(Afterwards I thought: I almost could say that I really do need Persuasion.)
Then, this morning, driving round a mini-roundabout in Chippenham, I stumbled upon the perfect answer to the question. This is how it should have gone:
Not Very Sisterly Irish Radio Host: ‘Do we actually need any more books for women?’
Me: ‘Yes.’
So now I am on the train getting ready for Radio Two and Radio Manchester, and I still can’t remember my Three Things. What I would really like to say to Claudia Winkleman, (for it is she) is: ‘Claudia, why do you suppose it is, that in the first decade of the twenty-first century, a hundred years after our great-grandmothers tied themselves to the railings so that we might be free, the first class carriage of the 8.25 from Chippenham to Paddington is colonised entirely by men in suits?’
Why is that? No, really. Why?
There is one other woman in the entire carriage, of a certain age, reading the TLS, wearing a bold scarlet scarf. She looks like a critic or an academic. For the rest, it is entirely men with laptops. One of them has daringly worn a sage green ensemble with a pale pink rose in his lapel in the manner of absent-minded professors or the slightly odd teacher whom everyone adored at school, but for the rest it is blue or grey suit, black or brown shoes, and tap tap tap on the computer.
The lady who brings the drinks trolley (any more teas or coffees at all?) calls them sweetheart, as in ‘Anything else, sweetheart?’ They try not to look at me with disapproval, since I have broken the uniform code. I am wearing: black leather boots with stitching up the side, blue jeans, a dark purple jacket in very soft velvet which has been my favourite article of clothing for the last fifteen years, and a large red flower on my lapel. (I like a corsage; I would like to point out that I was wearing them long before Carrie Bradshaw had her floral moment.) My hair is the purple side of red, and my nail varnish, which I bought supposing it to be a classic rouge, has turned out to be more magenta in colour and has glittery sparkles mixed into it, so now I have disco nails. I think Claude Winkleman is going to appreciate this tremendously. The men on the 8.25? Not so much.
8.25am. I am on the train. (You have to imagine me shouting that in the manner of a banker yelling into a mobile with a bad signal.) I am on the way to London to go on the wireless and talk about the book in an act of shameless self-promotion.
I did a little bit of this last week. I know that you are supposed to have your three things to say and then just say them, whatever the interviewer asks, but I have a fatal tendency to try and answer the question. Worst question last week, from an Irish disc jockey in Dublin: ‘Do we really need another book for women?’ And she was a woman.
Not very sisterly, I thought. I have been having manic ésprit d’éscalier ever since.
‘No one actually needs books,’ I said crossly, afterwards, to my cousin, who was trying to make a chicken. ‘I mean, no one needs War and Peace or Persuasion or The Great Gatsby. All a person needs is food and water and some shelter from the weather.’
(Afterwards I thought: I almost could say that I really do need Persuasion.)
Then, this morning, driving round a mini-roundabout in Chippenham, I stumbled upon the perfect answer to the question. This is how it should have gone:
Not Very Sisterly Irish Radio Host: ‘Do we actually need any more books for women?’
Me: ‘Yes.’
So now I am on the train getting ready for Radio Two and Radio Manchester, and I still can’t remember my Three Things. What I would really like to say to Claudia Winkleman, (for it is she) is: ‘Claudia, why do you suppose it is, that in the first decade of the twenty-first century, a hundred years after our great-grandmothers tied themselves to the railings so that we might be free, the first class carriage of the 8.25 from Chippenham to Paddington is colonised entirely by men in suits?’
Why is that? No, really. Why?
There is one other woman in the entire carriage, of a certain age, reading the TLS, wearing a bold scarlet scarf. She looks like a critic or an academic. For the rest, it is entirely men with laptops. One of them has daringly worn a sage green ensemble with a pale pink rose in his lapel in the manner of absent-minded professors or the slightly odd teacher whom everyone adored at school, but for the rest it is blue or grey suit, black or brown shoes, and tap tap tap on the computer.
The lady who brings the drinks trolley (any more teas or coffees at all?) calls them sweetheart, as in ‘Anything else, sweetheart?’ They try not to look at me with disapproval, since I have broken the uniform code. I am wearing: black leather boots with stitching up the side, blue jeans, a dark purple jacket in very soft velvet which has been my favourite article of clothing for the last fifteen years, and a large red flower on my lapel. (I like a corsage; I would like to point out that I was wearing them long before Carrie Bradshaw had her floral moment.) My hair is the purple side of red, and my nail varnish, which I bought supposing it to be a classic rouge, has turned out to be more magenta in colour and has glittery sparkles mixed into it, so now I have disco nails. I think Claude Winkleman is going to appreciate this tremendously. The men on the 8.25? Not so much.
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