Coasting Home

A journey between London and Dumfries. A one way ticket aboard the National Express 920 service. Strung out and skint after 2 years working and travelling abroad.

A grey-yellow hue ebbed between pink cloud and morning London fog. An almost ethereal sunburst beamed directly onto the saloon window. The light, sliced by venetian-blinds, ploughed illusory ‘run-rigs’ in the languid smog inside. He thought of farmland and the rural setting of Galloway as yet another cigarette helped pace his pint. He marvelled at sinews of smoke snaking their sooty and bloody embers, envisaging the same colour scheme furnishing his insides.

 

Musing on the determined soda stream battling in his lager detracted somewhat from such internecine introspection. The undulating urgency and the nicotine nonchalance : Rampant City v Impotent Coast he pondered and grinned euphorically like a madman, unconcerned about the sideward grimaces and leers from his fellow drinkers. Lamenting the ever decreasing diffusions from last nights’ MDMA frenzy in the club.

Intrepidly navigating the stoic steel seating at Victoria Station he is again reminded of home. Specifically the interior of the brutalist DSS building that sits at odds between the Georgian town houses of Irish Street and Dumfries High Street.  Sliding somnambulantly onto the 920 he succours sleep from warm  wanton wine secreted in his hip pocket. ‘ Get on the National express……when your life’s in a mess…..’

and it feels like mere seconds before he jolts awake as the coach approaches Birmingham. He’s had a few scrapes here too, getting accidentally pished in the Dubliner when changing at Digbeth. Not today though. He exhales a sullen thank f**k in  silent solemn  gratitude and succumbs to the first diazepam dream of this leg of the prodigal son’s ever incessant migration the bus continues’ up the road’

 

It’s  'Grim Up North'?! F**k, not these days pal!. Cranes everywhere Sandblasted red brick terracing. Now housing commuters from everywhere between Manchester and Sheffield. The black crust of industrial revolution ejaculations purged by the blood sweat and tears of the miners’ that these terraces were designed for.  Viscerally reminded of his own vocational and cultural famine and fantasies of amelioration from

 

this transient life, this domestic drought, an impending comedown scored by the Righteous Brothers and marked by a calendar of unturned up to family dinners, birthdays, funerals, even…..’Why yes, I have indeed lost that loving feeling’ …Blinking chevrons imitate a strobe effect. Tyres tattoo truculent rhythms intermittently over the asphalt. The buzz has peaked and troughed but meditations on a saccharine Utopia persist, until

suddenly….under a Parma Violet and Nougat Bar sky of dusk, those familiar road signs appear sporting the forlorn Celtic Cross a baby blue Thistle and that skullish silhouette of Burns. Both welcoming and warning. He now regrets leaving London yet Sanguine thought begins to stir his soul as he sees Criffel slouch and mourns its reflection on the Solway, forever watchful over its’ faithful coast...