An empty stretch of road. A very straight road. Middle of England nowhere country. A car approaches from the distance. I cross over to the other side. I lean on a fence overlooking a patchwork of fields that stretch northwards. Miles of it. It is the middle of winter. The Sun struggles through the quick descending haze over the fields. A refuse collection truck: the driver's curious glance meets my eyes for a fleeting moment. Two strangers caught in a 'singular -eternity' of time.
I suddenly remember walking across woodlands and a shallow stream to watch a steam train go by, forty summers back. It was an afternoon of quiet sunshine. A little boy crouching amidst a field of bluegrass enchanted by the huff of the histrionic diesel engine tugging carriages laden with coal. He shivers in the ownership of a spectacularly secret moment. Later that night, in deepest pre-dawn dark listening to the dripping water from a tap on a tin mug, wonders: “who am I? Where am I?”
Fast-forward 40 years! I am in that moment by that winter-road in nowhere England again. The darkening grey of the skies turns the green of the fields to a dark, darker green. Almost a black green. What am I and where am I? Why am I?
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