Snaps

In the end of last week I found myself on the train from Glasgow to London. Initially my carriage was almost empty so I indulged in some quiet time and changed a few seats till I found an unreserved spot that I liked. That seat was part of a four seat arrangement around a table; all other three seats were empty and unreserved. At Carlisle the carriage was suddenly full and people were struggling to find a free seat. A company of three came and occupied the unreserved seats around my table. There were two men and a lady, all past the age of sixty as far as I could guess and all three seemed to be friends or in any case they knew each other already. They each had a fat bundle of Sunday newspapers which they dropped with a thud on the table and started to ferociously read without exchanging a word for a good part of an hour. That suited me very fine, as the increasingly loud background noise was giving me a nauseous headache. After an hour or so, the three people started to converse with each other and I soon worked out that two of them were a couple and the other man knew them relatively well.

I initially tried to not listen to their conversation, but by doing that their talking became just a noise which joined the other loud background noise, only to make my head worse. But if I concentrated and focused on their talk, then the background noise slowly faded away and my hearing cleared. I have had a long time to study their faces and clothes undisturbed already, so I had now the chance to match a voice to each person. The next two hours or so, were a very similar experience to getting to know a new lover. They were quite posh people; the couple seemed to own a large estate off Carlisle which was very close to the other man's farm. They talked about the different ways they had tried to raise money to keep it going and the land and things they had to sell and auction in order to save it from bankruptcy. The other man had a very memorably typical "English" face to me and was talking about being a farmer and his trials during the "mad cow" times. They all had children and grandchildren and houses in France and Northern Italy and by the next hour I felt I had already been to the house in France and met the man's newborn grandson. Next they talked about travelling and where they had gone in the past three years. The couple had done one of my dream trips, the Trans Siberian rail journey through Russia and China, which I was only able to partly complete. Their description of it to the man was as good as being on that train.

It was a very funny, yet oddly familiar feeling. The strangeness of it all in the beginning. New faces and new voices talking about a completely different way of life. Then as you relax and listen and let yourself go, you feel you are suddenly being sucked in, drawn into a completely alien place. At that point you can almost see yourself living like that, like those new people, being a part of this other life. And if at that point you don't get scared of letting go or of the feeling of losing yourself, you have suddenly found yourself joined with this new life, lost in a whirlpool of an otherness. And before you know it that otherness becomes familiar and becomes your reality and you are caught in and living in it, with all its details. I felt I knew their common friend Mary and I felt I knew all the people they were talking about, I could almost smell them at that very point. If you narrowly escape getting sucked in with this new "love", then you probably feel a great sense of relief, of what it could have been, a relief from having avoided entering an alien place. But if you have been drawn in, then what else is there for you than that very thing?

And so there I was, vulnerable by my tiredness and my hearing ache, a complete stranger to them but totally living in their world for almost three hours. The trolley came to our table twice and as if by plan, both times the tea had just finished as the trolley reached our table. The man joked with me about it, how we were never going to get our tea before we reached London, and I felt like my uncle was joking with me at that point and not a total stranger. The three people left very abruptly as the train stopped, I barely had time to say bye or smile at them. I did not think of them again until now, of the "snap" I got into their lives. Today I saw a photo of the Prince of Wales in the newspaper and I suddenly realised that was who that man on the train reminded me of. And then I thought of all the "snaps" people get in their lifetimes and what could determine when they allow themselves to be taken along or resist. It is probably a very fine line between the two, maybe even sometimes a bit of a chance, like when we never got the tea on the train.

Some of the images I am working on for the children's book, include partly obscured views of things. I tried out here some ways of partly hiding images based on the faces of those three people.