Morning
Trains are awfully democratic. You finally come to realise this when your head is catastrophically close to the conductor’s postérieur.
I suppose what really concerns me is that any group (however large) that fights for acceptance through positioning itself vis-à-vis other groups ends up being less tolerant and more narrow-minded than its once “oppressors”.
I really like travelling by train. It must be the motion that I enjoy so much. It relaxes me. At the same time, there’s always enough people around to remind you by their presence that in you hermitage you’re yet not alone.
Evening
A guy who sits next to me across the aisle (later on it turns out he is Greek) is wearing, apart from the actual clothes, a baseball cap and earphones. The music in his earphones is loud enough for me to hear those “zdub-zdub-zdub” beats. He moves his head ecstatically a few times to the music’s rhythm before picking up the phone, exchanging a few phrases with someone, then getting up and going away. By the time he comes back (although I thought he’d left), another guy has taken his place. The Greek is undeterred, sits right next to the guy and rests his feet on the opposite seat. Then he begins to talk to me. He lives in Liverpool and wants to know which is Manchester’s main train station. When the train stops and I’m getting up to leave I receive a friendly, if somewhat masculine in gesture as in strength, pat on the back, between my shoulder blades.
At Birchwood, a guy sits on the bench in the pose of Copenhagen’s Mermaid.
We arrive at Manchester via Castlefield. Every time the train goes past the houses, I wonder what it’s like to live in such house. Anyone on the train can see directly into some of the flats. I know I wouldn’t care in the slightest and certainly wouldn’t keep my curtains shut at all times, but it still puzzles me. I always think of the scene in Les Triplettes de Belleville, when a train stops opposite the house, and the dog looks inquisitively out of the window at the dull passengers before exploding into hysterical barking, as the train moves on. Of course, of course, we’re not supposed to look into private flats and thus into private lives, but this is what we’re always doing in one way or another, aren’t we? And in the city that is constantly growing and expanding, you can’t walk starring at the ground. Tall buildings are there for us to raise our heads and stretch our necks, and while doing so you may, by pure chance, end up looking into someone’s flat, as it happened to me a few times in Northern Quarter.
Off the topic
Speaking about Les Triplettes, this is one of the most original animated films on my memory. As its director, Sylvain Chomet explains in his BBC interview, he’s always liked the circular motion of cycling and thus chose the Tour de France as the film’s subject. If you’re a fan of French language and music, you can enjoy both the film and any of its musical themes. As for me, I really like Attila Marcel composed by Sylvain Chomet and performed by Béatrice Bonifassi. Many thanks to the Imeem user for sharing their love for Les Triplettes with all of us.