The first freezing day of winter. The windows of the bedroom have condensed water drops around the frames. I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing. Does it mean our windows are working well or not?I wipe the water away with an old tea towel I keep in the bedroom specifically for this purpose. Despite the cold, I open the windows a crack to let in some fresh air and make a note to myself again that the windows need cleaning.
No sun – no moon!
It’s cold as I walk to the station. Twenty minutes through the suburban streets, some green and leafy, some grubby and dirty. I see a cat I don’t know and stop to say hello. The cat is friendly, and takes some head rubs from me before running off back to his own morning agenda.
I’m wearing my fluffy earmuffs but my head is cold. Maybe I should have worn a hat. The earmuffs push my earphones tighter an into my ears. I’m listening to a meditation on joy this morning. The teacher’s voice is warm and friendly and wise. She sounds like someone you would like spending time with. Sometimes she chuckles. Sometimes she repeats a phrase and I focus more when she does this, knowing this point must be important. At one point she says something and I instinctively place my hands on my heart. I’m sending myself a message but it m not sure what it is.
No morn – no noon –
On the Tube, i swipe my card and make my way down the escalator to the platform. It’s much warmer down here. I take off my gloves and the fingers of my left hand start to tingle with a faint kind of burning sensation in the warmth. Why the left hand only and not the right?
No dawn – no dusk – no proper time of day.
As I leave the Tube to change to the train, the cluster of station staff in their red coats by the ticket barriers makes me think about colour. Sometimes on my commute I see a colour – a yellow scarf, a pink bag, someone with hair coloured like a tropical sea – and then I keep seeing that colour for the rest of my journey.
I know part of it is fashion – if mustard yellow is in fashion it’s going to be everywhere.
I know part of it is me noticing, and liking, and then looking for that colour again and again.
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
On the train platform I walk up and down, trying to keep warm. There’s no sun here. The high rise apartment buildings that have sprung up around the station on the past 10 years block the early low winter sun. I can see the sun reflecting on windows but I can’t feel it.
No comfortable feel in any member
I see a woman in a red bobble hat on the station. She is wearing a checked scarf that looks like my old flannel pyjamas, the ones that wore thin and ended up being cut into pieces for cleaning cloths, the kind of cloth I’d use to wipe condensation off the windows in winter.
The train before mine arrives and leaves a I see there is a person standing alone at end of platform. My train is the next train and it’s only five carriages. He’s standing up where carriages nine and ten might be. I wonder what he’s doing up there. Is he a jumper? Something tells me no, he’s not suicidal, he just doesn’t know the Stratford train is a short one.
Sure enough, when the Stratford train pulls in and swishes past him, he breaks into an ungainly run down the platform towards the last carriage.
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
I take a seat on the train and look down at the empty Budweiser bottle standing upright next to my feet. Has this been there since last night, I wonder, or did someone drink
this on their way to work this morning?
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds! –
I get off the train and make the slow painful route through Stratford station from the train to the DLR platform. When I get there I see the train I want leaving the platform. This means I have to take the Canary Wharf train and change one more time to get to Heron Quays.
I sit next to a woman who is on the phone to her friend but is playing the conversation through the speaker so the whole carriage can hear the conversation. She pulls a huge makeup bag out of her handbag and starts doing her makeup, continuing the conversation until the train starts. She gets off at the first stop, where the ABBA arena is. I wonder if she’s a singer working in the ABBA Voyage show. Why else would she be getting off at this station?
November !
Tales from Tobhamhor 