Train Journeys and General Elections

Can you guess why I've paired the two elements of my post title? Go on, think about it for a few seconds.

One....two...three...

Well, it's not necessarily anything that anybody could reasonably guess, but here it is: only on train journeys, and during general elections (or, more specifically, the reporting of their results), does the reality of national life present itself to me.

Why a train journey, rather than a long bus or car journey? Well, I guess it has to do with stopping at every station, and hearing the name of every station announced. Trains also slow down as they come into the station, which seems to give each arrival more of a sense of event.

With general election results, it's the television (or radio) reports from every individual constituency, I stop thinking of a nation as an abstraction and I realize that life is going on simultaneously in all these different places. They each have their own life and their own identities. The nation is a composite of them all. That reality suddenly strikes me with a certain grandeur.

In particular, it's the dwellings close to a station that draw my interest-- the houses or apartments you see as the train is pulling in. What's going on in those places, day in, day out? Somehow it's the fact that they're so close to the station-- a place of departures, or transit and transience-- and yet they're not a part of its life, that makes their rootedness and solidity so strking to me.

This is one of those impressions that seems so elusive and evanescent when I describe them-- hardly anything at all-- but that are so powerful as I experience them, that seem as real as the sky or the mountains.