Travelling and travelling

If I catch this train again I should remember that it is too early to get a bus to the station, and that M&S and WHSmiths will be closed when I get there! The train is standing room only, I'm glad of my reservation (I wouldn't risk a journey of this length without one) though it is a bit unnerving watching the standing passengers look at me hungrily at each station in case I should leave and they could pounce. No food here either - the trolley can't get through the carriages and neither can I to the buffet car. I leapt out of the house and strode along the road for a mile before I remembered I should have brought my walking stick. Hope I'm not too dead. Hello, Darlington station! You look just like Preston. Are you sure you're not just Preston with a paint-job a la Windscale?


I've been reading Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. Marco Polo describes to the Kubla Khan the many cities he has visited. Is it my imagination, or does it read a lot like Christopher Priest's The Affirmation, and the islands of the Dream Archipelago? The almost-conceivably-within-reach places, slightly fantastical (or at least not running in quite the same rhythm or flavour as the places we know), seen through the eyes of a fellow traveller. In both books the islands/cities can be seen as analogies, but of slightly different things. And both books play with truth and reality and the reliability of the narrator. Nom nom nom.

When I first picked up the Calvino I saw the title faintly through a blankish page in the front matter and thought it said Invisible Otters.