rivers_bend

isweedan tweeted a link to this video this morning and I wasn't sure if I should watch it or if it would make me too homesick for England, but then I decided it would make me too homesick and I should watch it anyway.

"" (Watch on YouTube)

I first took that journey in 1992, and took it many more times between then and 2007 and then one more time in 2010, though it looked completely different that time, in the dark and snow. But watching that video, I was rushed right back to the sound of the wheels on the tracks, the slightly odd scent of the older carriages, one journey in particular where I was writing phone sex porn in my notebook and texting the friend I'd just been up to London to see, another journey where I was shaking because I'd just been to have my interview to get my UK residency sorted out, and another and another. Victoria station, with the inexplicable pairing of a cheese shop next to a Lush--how did the cheese not reek of that migraine-inducing mix of bath products?--the pay toilets, the Smiths where you could always get some chocolate and a banana if you'd time before your train, the tiles on the floor, the angle you took from the tube entrance to the Brighton platform... And Battersea, the fields, the stations that whipped by when you were lucky enough or planned well enough to get the express train, the sound of everyone crowding on and off at East Croydon, men in sharp suits and jewel-toned ties, women in amazing tailored coats, girls with their louis vuitton knock-offs and poison-green eyeshadow, boys in school jumpers, the sound of the announcer letting us know we'd have to get off at Hayward's Heath to get a bus due to work on the lines, the tea smell from the trolley that was never quite the same as tea smelled anywhere else, the way the air sucked out of your ears in the tunnels and you couldn't wait to get through, the last curve that wasn't quite the last one, and then the real last one that brought you to where you could see the end of the journey. The way it always seemed like you had to walk a million miles to the station from the platform because you'd never walked far enough down the train at Victoria, the clang of the train doors, the way the air in the station at Brighton was always frigid, even in summer, but especially in winter, the back route to the taxi rank and the way you promised to yourself next time you'd go farther up the train so you didn't have to wait as long in the queue.

It was all there. Every journey I took, and other times too, times I met friends at Brighton station, the time I stood on the platform at London Road for almost an hour listening to The Devil Really Does Wear Prada (which is a podfic), the time I drove my car to the station carpark and exchanged it for cash money with a midwife I had worked with a week before I left to move back to the states for good.

I miss a lot of things about England, including free-at-point-of-use health care, proper bangers and mash, seven paid weeks of annual leave and six months paid sick leave a year, and the way you can get a train to wherever you want to go. And I miss London and I miss Brighton, and I miss that journey in between, even the ones where I didn't catch the express and the journey was interminable.