Glass Half Empty

I quite enjoy train journeys.

You get on a train, and it takes you where you want to go, more or less. Assuming it's a long distance train, like those I mostly ride, it'll get up a fair bit of speed and give you something like a back massage as it rattles, sways and judders over tired old track. And then there's the view from the window.

When it was built, a hundred and fifty odd years ago, the railway sliced through empty space, leaping across country to join cities and towns and villages together. But as soon as the railway was built, people and their dwellings began to accrete against it, as if they were some kind of immune reaction and the railway was something...intrusive. Foreign. Alien.

Nowadays, you could believe that the railway cut through fully formed towns and villages and suburbs, the houses and roads and shops crowd up so close to the line. And it's that that I like the most, I think. Riding through the world in a fast metal tube, skimming the very ground, you pass over and through and past tens if not hundreds of neighbourhoods, getting a moment's insight into the lives of your fellow humans. The hutches of a guinea-pig breeder, the rusting hulk of a car they always meant to restore, the caravan with bumper stickers from every country in the EU. And moments later an industrial estate, or a park, or a cemetary, and then more people. Maybe some farmland or a river.

You are in a maze of twisty little vignettes, most almost alike. It's never dull.

State of the Dan: ARM are sending me a contract to sign (I have the job, now it's all admin). Now, I'm trying to sort out somewhere to live, and to that end I'm travelling to Cambridge again, hoping to get an application in on a particular place before someone else. The admin fees and deposit are going to push my bank account quite hard, but I think it will be worth it.

The Glass: full