maybe there’s more to notice? you certainly have more time to noice. journeying back from my weekend in the New Forest I notice al kinds of noticeable things;
1) the golden light of the lowering sun against the turning colours of autumn;
2) the poshly spoken lady who got on after me wit her companion. I thought they had been shopping in Salisbury an were on the way home – she had a fashionable carrier-bag containing a shoe box from an exclusive boutique. In fact they seemed to be off to London for a night out and dressed in their ‘best’ – the coat, she remars was actually many years old for it has, she gasped, padding in the shoulders. From the shoebo she had bits of sparkly and frilly fabric and cotton. She proceeded in making fairies for the christmas tree, just like, she tells her companion, her mother used to.
3) at the next station, waiting for my connection, a message comes across the tanoy asking the owner of a blue bag to return to platform 3 and collect it. I looked up, and immediately opposite, on the next platform I see a small, scruffy blue hold-all on its own at the end of one of the benches. Standing around it are three members of staff. No one comes to collect it. A freight train passes between me and the bag – and once it has passed – the bag is gone. So are the staff.
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i had a good weekend – it was nice having the extra day. the weather was good, and the Hound of the Baskervilles was terrific – please, remind me to review it – and with the train service that we have in this country who needs a car (mine, nicely tucked away in the garage over the weekend)? i just wish the local busses lived up to the same service…
There is an out-of-print book, ‘Notes From Overground’ written by someone commuting on the Oxford-London line that has a number of amusing ‘overheard’ things in it. I like to imagine that one of them was a conversation between me and a friend, as I remember having the conversation on a train about the right year (mid 80s). Then again, conversations between male students about their female contemporaries older girlfriends are probably not wildly unusual 🙂
Last time I went to London there were a couple of guys in suits opposite me having the sort of private business conversation (well, what sounded to me like District Council business) I would be disinclined to have on trains, they also were talking rather knowledgeably about trains, and one of them was talking about how they had a church trip to some preserved railway. God, business, Conservatism, trains!