Ramblings and connections

I went to London on Thursday and came back on Friday. Here are a few rambling thoughts and recollections…

… standing on the platform at Wellingborough station I had a phone call briefing me about an item that was going to come up on the agenda of the World Land Trust meeting that I was going to attend that afternoon. I still sometimes think about how amazing it is that I can talk to someone miles away through a small box that I carry around with me. And I have not the faintest idea how any of that works – not really. Progress maybe entails disconnection.

… Wellingborough station is being developed with new road links to it from the east, a new car park and other things happening. They seem to be taking quite a long time to happen but that again is progress, I guess. A consequence of that progress is that a line of bushes and brambles across the railway line from a platform, and bordering a field, has been uprooted. It’s a couple of cricket pitches in length so it’s not a massive loss of habitat but it is where I often see Dunnocks, tits, Robins etc as I wait for a train and in summer I hear the song of a Whitethroat. I probably won’t hear Whitethroats from Wellingborough station again, and future rail passengers won’t know that they are missing out. But most of them won’t be missing out anyway as I’m sure that the number of Whitethroat-listeners at that site in the last decade could be counted on the fingers of two hands, maybe one hand. I wonder whether the Rev Richard Coles has ever noticed the Whitethroats singing there as he gets the train into London?

…on the train I ask someone to vacate my reserved seat – he was a young man and seemed to have seen it coming and scurried off very politely. If there had been an older man or woman in my seat I would probably not have bothered but it’s one of those small, in fact tiny, ethical decisions to be made regularly by the frequent train traveller. I ended up sitting next to a man who divulged his rough age and he was about 20 years older than I am and was very chatty. He knew a lot about railways but I don’t think he would be remotely classed as a train-spotter as his knowledge seemed to be immense but mostly about connections – why and when were certain railway lines built, for what? and what we should be doing these days. For the most part his long exposition was very interesting and all I had to do was make an appreciative noise now and again and ask a question for more information to emerge. It didn’t really surprise me that two places that came up in our conversation were familiar to me. The first was Sandy, where of course I worked (and played) for many years. There are plans, of which I am vaguely aware, to reconnect Bedford and Cambridge by rail, in principle a good idea, and one which is being fairly fiercely debated by locals. Future RSPB staff may be able to commute to work by train from the east and west, as many do now from the south and some from the north. The second location was the village of Pensford, south of Bristol, where I once lived as a boy – not a place that is often mentioned in conversations. I left the train thanking my companion for his knowledge, thinking that I would have missed an interesting conversation if I had not decided to ask for my seat, thinking that railways and their connections through time and space are more interesting than I would have credited and musing on the connectedness of human lives too.

…going down into the underground is both a familiar and a weird thing to do. And it’s where many forms of humanity are thrown together on more or less equal terms, from the party of German school children to the slightly smelly beggar to the blinged-up women, to the two men in suits talking loudly about nothing that interested me but I couldn’t help hearing. I’d just missed one tube train but the next was only two minutes away, and then one minute away and then the ‘one minute’ on the illuminated sign disappeared but the ‘train approaching’ had not yet replaced it. As I looked around I saw a man a few paces away peer down towards the track and I wondered whether he was looking for House Mice as I sometimes do, but the Piccadilly line at Kings Cross/St Pancras is not a good spot for them, but as he did so his spectacles fell out of his top shirt pocket, fell on the platform and then bounced down onto the rail track. ‘That’s a tricky problem’ I thought but as I thought it the man moved as though to climb down and retrieve his glasses so I shouted, or at least said quite loudly ‘No!’ and reached out my hand (although he was maybe twelve feet away). Anyway, that was enough to grab his attention and I said ‘There’s a train coming’ and others gathered around him and pointed him in the direction of an Underground staff member. And then then the tube train arrived and I got on and stood at the end of a carriage where a group of us speculated on what on earth he had been thinking, or not thinking, and how we had been close to a messy tragedy. And then we reverted to British lack of conversation and gradually departed at our selected stops, going our own ways, joined together for just a few moments but never, probably, to interact gain. If I passed that man, the dropped-glasses man, in the street tomorrow I would not recognise him (probably). If he were sitting in my reserved seat on a train next week I would not know him from Adam. Connectedness.

…the World Land Trust trustees’ meeting was a very good one. Some are, some aren’t, like all regular meetings. This one marked a changing of the guard as the founder and chief executive’s, John Burton’s, last trustee meeting (although I bet it won’t be) and the first of his successor Jonathan Barnard. Every time I have close contact with the WLT I admire and appreciate it all the more, and feel slightly guilty that I don’t do more for it (so you’ll probably see a spasm of tweets about it over the next 10 days if you are on that brand of social media).

…I still find the idea of being in a pub before 6pm quite unusual and being there before 5pm as somewhat dissolute, but that’s how WLT meetings usually shed their organisational shape and morph back into our personal lives. And the small pub was full and overflowing as the screens showed English wickets falling regularly.

… I dined alone and enjoyed the first red meat I’ve had for nearly three week – a couple of sausages. And so to bed.

…I made a speculative phone call at around 0830 to someone I don’t know but who wanted to pick my brains about environmental lawyers, wondering whether the call would be welcome at that hour. But it was, and the conversation went on for 40 minutes or so. I was one of a large (I guess) number being asked about the role of legal action in environmental matters and what environmental lawyers of the future needed to be like. Whether the person asking the questions got much from me is for her to say but I was interested to hear that others had commented on how timid the wildlife NGOs were these days to take legal action against the government. And we discovered that a former boss of mine has once been a lodger of the person at the other end of my phone call. Connectedness.

…a consequence of the long phone conversation was that instead of getting my ‘steps’ up, I got a taxi to my next meeting with Wild Justice’s lawyers (or some of them). And a consequence of that meeting was that money will be changing hands and that I have some homework for this weekend in case there is a new case that we can take, which needs a little investigation by Wild Justice on the science and by the lawyers on the law.

… I had to get another taxi to my next meeting in another pub but I was still a few minutes late greeting Henry Morris in his lunch break. We talked about the details of how Wild Justice would spend the money he raised on his amazing run and talked about what he might well do next year. Henry is amazing – since running across the moors of northern England he has produced a Shakespeare play which got excellent reviews and organised a music festival! Great guy and a new connection (we first met in that same pub in the spring) who is now a firm friend.

…and then I went home.

Connections fascinate me. Connections between people fascinate me. How many readers of this blog may I have passed in the street in London without either of us knowing? How many people with skills or knowledge that I would love to learn were on the same train carriage as I went home? What opportunities were missed by not striking up a conversation?

[registration_form]