Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Monday, 29 March 2004

# 6:15 PM (GMT+1)

At ten-thirty today I boarded a train at King's Cross Station, London, bound for Edinburgh where I am visiting my friends TJ and Jane for the next few days. The train itself doesn't have a name, but the company running it is the Great North Eastern Railway Company, which is so wonderful and so very British a name. The train is not so fast, so modern, or so quiet as the German trains, but it is pleasant enough and I'm not in a hurry. They do provide electrical outlets at each seat, which is awfully nice.

I have never been to Scotland before; in fact, the last time I was in Great Britain I was eight years old and we never left London. The terrain has varied quite dramatically as the train moved north. Around London it was flat and rather dreary, but as the suburbs thinned out it got less dreary, while remaining quite flat. There were lots of bright green grassy fields, many with sheep; I believe I also saw cabbages and the like. Around Newcastle the hills got serious. North of Newcastle the train runs along the coast for awhile; there are steep red cliffs down to the ocean. There continue to be lots of grassy fields, some with sheep in them. Some are bounded by hedgerows, some fences, and even some by stone walls; all in various stages of disrepair. (I mind me a passage in James Herriot's veterinary stories where one of the farmers observes that the art of building and mending stone walls around pastures is dying out... that was 1938.)

You can tell that this is land that's been occupied by humans since the last ice age, and farmed at least since the Normans. You can also tell that the entire island used to be covered with forest, and would be again if the humans let it. The way the train goes, trees are few and mostly in straight lines along boundaries or small spinneys on the tops of hills; but there are wilder bits here and there, and those are all trees, except the ones that are all gorse-bushes. Curiously enough, as I was writing this paragraph the train moved from the farmland into a region that is heavily forested, although it's too uniform to be very old, and then right back to the farmland. And there's the ocean again on the right.

Oddly, the track has had an electrical catenary the whole way, but the train has a diesel engine. Maybe I missed a dark segment, or maybe there's one up ahead (the train continues all the way to Aberdeen).