Photo: Taken by David Horgan - me on a train in Finland hence the ensemble! I’m eating a vegan hot-dog BTW.
Dear Reader,
Good-day! Modern-day philosopher Alain de Botton calls train journeys ‘midwives of thought’. I agree. I can't drive and love travelling by train. I don't watch anything and don't listen to music - even on the train all the way down to Penzance! - I look out the window, birth some thoughts (gross), read and take notes. I also, evidently, eavesdrop. All of these were heard on recent train trips - whether crossing from one side of London to the other* or on journeys farther afield (Yorkshire, South Wales, Hampshire).
For more soundbites, both sublime and ridiculous, see here. And for something entirely different - here’s some fiction from the September 2023 archives. As always thank you for being here!
Love,
Emma x o x o
‘I'm not being competitive, I'm just telling you the facts.’
‘Cribbage? My scores aren't going to be very good though because I sometimes play drunk.’
‘Me, I try to do things that are a little bit different, a lot of people are focused on that, not me.’
‘That is pretty big in the old Methodist world - it ruffled some feathers.’
‘De Pop has so gone down the toilet now… it's made me rubbish at shopping.’
‘I don't understand how Suri loves pigs SO much when she always eats pigs.’
‘I was teaching the Portugese their own history and I'm from New York.’
‘His hair is so white he always gets offered seats, he walks up and down the carriage saying ‘no’.’
‘Literally, literally, literally, literally, literally, one hundred per cent.’
‘I've done a lot of South America, yeah, I want to do Africa next.’
‘All of these people on a train in the middle of the day - they might not look like it - but they are all losers.’
*note: only London trains/over-ground work, the tube/underground is terribly screechy and people don’t tend to talk much.
The "literally" choo-choo train LITERARILY made me think of sentence one of Joyce's "The Dead," where the author forever makes it impossible for intelligent people to use that word incorrectly ever again!
For some, trains are midwives of platitudes, alas. How lovely that Emma is a concert hall for all, the deft and the daft.
Literally literally literally literally literally brilliant :-)