Trains. When I came over there were no such things, but they did not surprise me at all. That has a lot to do with the way we perceive time and what we see in it. Desperately erratic; it comes in pulses, sometimes pulled into a pinpoint where all is pure present – your sinful self, your twig, the waiting, and every single moment in the wind and the rain experienced minute by minute to the full, hours after days after weeks after months after years, and you know that you are getting your penance well and truly done as it should be, cold and miserable and grimly sequential, no cutting corners. Then at other times it opens out hugely like a frightening umbrella, and you are hovering over the centre of a vast lake of time with the past and the future lapping round the edges, so that you get a sense, somewhat blurry, of what has been and what is to come. It makes you feel very sick at first, your mind spins horribly. I thought at the beginning that it was part of the punishment, but I prefer to think of it now more as compensation for the long stints perching. A penitential perk.
So yes, trains, I could see them coming, as it were. I even thought briefly they might get me off early, with such a frantic clearing of scrubland and forest for the new tracks, but, realistically, even at the height of the nation’s passion for public transport, my little patch was never going to be on the way to anywhere. And there are some, even round here, who believe that clearance isn’t good enough; it’s not precise enough, it doesn’t count as ‘tools’, and that those whose trees and bushes are merely destroyed in the name of progress simply move on, dispossessed, to cluster in the next available place. I say to them sod that, bring on the machines: I believe they are released.
And I have seen, close now, really quite close, a time when thousands of us anaon will come home on these very trains, clinging pathetically to knapsacks, perched on exhausted uniformed shoulders. Thousands. Cursing the day they were born Breton and compelled to trek home across the breadth of bleeding France in the company of the wounded to find their bespoke perches. I cannot think that they will have to spend long on their twigs, poor buggers, poor children, after what they have already done out there. Even taking into account original sin and the inherent naughtiness of small boys, some of these lads, including his, should be in credit.