I like trains, actually I like traveling, but trains, especially fast trains, not the milk train that shuffles between Brighton and Winchester, which is a nightmare, but Winchester to Waterloo (on the 7.42); Brighton to Victoria and so on, love them. I snapped this picture just outside of Winchester Station the other day after I had returned from Waterloo, and there is something quintessentially English about it, a growing up Englishness, like watching the Railway Children - which is better as nostalgia than as a real film. Well I think so, anyway. What I like about travel is the unknowingness of it. I have always felt this - even as a sixteen-year-old when I decided to hitch-hike to various parts of Scotland, grabbing a bag, sticking out a thumb and going. 'Life is impoverished,' said Freud, 'it loses in interest, when the highest staple in the game of living, life itself, may not be risked... 'and the atmosphere of unknown terror and mystery,' emanates from nowhere but ourselves. - well that'll do for me. I am teaching Gothic this morning and I will be concentrating on that unknown terror and mystery - God is in the house - and our kittens are white, so we can see them in the night.
