A man in the training station waiting room blows his nose with a handkerchief. He's trying to think of the name of the film starring Jim Carey in which everything is artificial. I want to say The Truman Show. The man he's speaking to says he doesn't think it's the sort of film he'd watch. Maybe it's a trick question because every film is artificial. He uses the word salubrious to describe Oxford Station. I have to look the word up. I've never been so I'm looking forward to a fully salubrious experience. If I ever used that word in a conversation, I think I would take my time over it. Spend at least three times longer saying the word salubrious than I would another word of the same length. Sal-uuuuu-bri-ooous. It seems correct to say it like that. Like saying Wales in a Welsh accent. Way-ells. Or Newcastle with the castle spoken quickly and given much more emphasis than a southerner would give it: new-CASTLE. A woman is warming her face in the rising sun. She faces east. I work out that the train will arrive from the other direction because I'm catching an eastbound train. Oxford will be our vicar who always faces west as his passengers/parishioners all face east. A church congregation always faces a rising sun. Cloisters to their left/north, main entrance to their right (south). When I'm working out my compass points, I always imagine myself in a church. I've boarded the train. The lady sat across from me is reading What a Hazard a Letter is by Caroline Atkins. She's underlining things. I Google the book. The title comes from an Emily Dickinson poem. My copy of her complete works spans 770 pages. The book is over two inches thick and yet there are only two known photographs of the great American poet. I often wonder how many people got to see Dickinson smile.
It was a few weeks into autumn and I hadn’t had a hair cut since before the summer solstice. My beard, long and straggly and in desperate need of trimming, was a week away from having birds nest in it. I unpolished my boots and wore some old jeans that were ripped at the knees and dirty from digging a deep hole on a particularly wet day in Highgate Cemetery. Hanging loosely over the top of those was a baggy grey jumper I spilt half a bottle of bleach over about three years ago. I looked a bit of a state, but there was a method to my madness. Today was the day I was going to ask Moon for a pay rise and I wanted to look as if I’d been trod on. On the morning I was due to ask him, my bike got a puncture not twenty yards down the road from my house. It wasn’t a polite slow puncture so that I might finish my journey on a squidgy but rideable front tyre; the thorn tore through that poor inner tube like a javelin through jelly and it had me riding on a stee...
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