The Way Back

I started to make a list of what I saw out of the train window to make a map of the route.
1. Grey stone houses, white windows
2. Cold green hills and cloud puffs
3. Pale stone pointy churches lancing up out of each village
4. Gorse
5. Wires, wires, wires
6. Greeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeen!
7. Black churned soil striped by ploughs
8. Distance
9. New. Houses. All. Lined. Up
10. Tall spindly hooked-over street lamps
11. Tumbledown outbuildings
12. Tiny moving cars and vans
BASH! train goes past
BASH! again
13. Vapour trails, white scars against the sky....
'Stand Up!', barked the tourist to the hapless man sitting in her reserved seat. It worked! He was up in a shot and off down the corridor, embarrassed and shamed. Wow! That's the last time I bother with apologetic excuse-mes!
14. Hedges, clothed and hedges, naked
15. Little grey game birds in the middle of fields, next to BIG IMPORTANT STATELY HOMES
16. Flat grey station platforms
17. Crows nests studding the silhouettes of leafless trees, their branches delicate black fans against the blue sky
18. A scarecrow! I had forgotten about scarecrows!
19. A spectacular upward-spiralling pink and gold vapour trail at sunset, like a tight corkscrew, bright and shining, glowing solo where all the other clouds were flat, leaden dark grey streaks; a point of light etched it further and further into the lilac sky
20. Flushed children inside the train, fed up after four hours cooped up in a metal tube, kicking their mother in desperation, their eyes dulled and slitted by tiredness and a half-hour delay.

There was so much more: the beautiful Northumbrian coastline; the flat fields of Lincolnshire; the huge coloured industrial sheds; the streams and rivers and bridges; more, more, more............