Insouciance of circumstance
Zugausfall. Train cancelled.
Dammit, there's nothing like a cancelled train to get your nerves on edge. All you want is to get home to your dog, your boyfriend, your supper and your beer. You had a nice reserved seat on an air-conditioned ICE (the sleek and comfortable German high-speed train). You had a reasonable expectation of uneventful travel and maybe some hot chocolate from the Bordbistro, and now all you know is that it's swelteringly hot and loudspeakers are shouting in German at you and your two hundred fellow passengers to cram your sweaty selves into a tiny electric scooter-train to somewhere you've never heard of.
So you get scooted out of Switzerland and over the river into Germany, where you decamp into an even hotter (but considerably roomier) old rattletrap of a train, barely younger than the days of steam, which they've obviously dug out of its peacefully rusting retirement in the arse end of some siding somewhere, and off you go again, communally grouchy because you still don't have a clue where you're going or how you'll get there.
Meanwhile the window is wide open and there's a warm summer wind blowing and you can see for miles and miles out across the verdant German plain. Rest your forearms on the window's edge, out in the rushing breeze, and you can take a hundred glimpses into the secret lushness of fertile woodland and muddy river, and vicariously dream of going for walkies there with your dog, and watch the sun drifting behind the distant hills as it sets into an ever deeper evening of rose and amber and gold.
And suddenly you remember the long-forgotten sense of it being all about the journey, and how it felt to live with the eternal uncertainty and anticipation of travel without a destination.
There's a certain part of your soul that was made to be elsewhere.
If you don't go anywhere then it gets left behind.
If you go somewhere then it stays firmly put.
And if you go away to nowhere, you find it there waiting.
That was meant to sound kinda Zen and profound. Cut me some slack plz.
Dammit, there's nothing like a cancelled train to get your nerves on edge. All you want is to get home to your dog, your boyfriend, your supper and your beer. You had a nice reserved seat on an air-conditioned ICE (the sleek and comfortable German high-speed train). You had a reasonable expectation of uneventful travel and maybe some hot chocolate from the Bordbistro, and now all you know is that it's swelteringly hot and loudspeakers are shouting in German at you and your two hundred fellow passengers to cram your sweaty selves into a tiny electric scooter-train to somewhere you've never heard of.
So you get scooted out of Switzerland and over the river into Germany, where you decamp into an even hotter (but considerably roomier) old rattletrap of a train, barely younger than the days of steam, which they've obviously dug out of its peacefully rusting retirement in the arse end of some siding somewhere, and off you go again, communally grouchy because you still don't have a clue where you're going or how you'll get there.
Meanwhile the window is wide open and there's a warm summer wind blowing and you can see for miles and miles out across the verdant German plain. Rest your forearms on the window's edge, out in the rushing breeze, and you can take a hundred glimpses into the secret lushness of fertile woodland and muddy river, and vicariously dream of going for walkies there with your dog, and watch the sun drifting behind the distant hills as it sets into an ever deeper evening of rose and amber and gold.
And suddenly you remember the long-forgotten sense of it being all about the journey, and how it felt to live with the eternal uncertainty and anticipation of travel without a destination.
There's a certain part of your soul that was made to be elsewhere.
If you don't go anywhere then it gets left behind.
If you go somewhere then it stays firmly put.
And if you go away to nowhere, you find it there waiting.
That was meant to sound kinda Zen and profound. Cut me some slack plz.