tracks

10 Jan 2017

Wake, the alarm on the mobile 'phone, pet the cat which is purring loudly now, maybe happy to receive the attention... After the shower, cannot find the keys. Search high and low, in the end feel that they are in pocket of the trousers. That was silly.

The alley has piles of snow in the gutter, about knee high. This is the snow cleared from the pavement, by all of those law abiding citizens of the small town.

At the bus stop there are

: The bog cotton man
: Dolores.
: Teachermann
A muffled" good morning". Check the fare money and look out after the still water of the river to the brightly lit hotel breakfast rooms on the other side. There are heaps of icy snow everywhere, the national passion for the clearing of footpaths being the cause for this..

On the bus, the usual people.The girl with the Rasta- farian 'hair, she is There, huddled in a jacket.

At the station, get a large coffee and take the usual place in the waiting room. Look at the coffee, there is a tightness around the chest, a shortness of breath. Maybe the remains of last weeks chest infection. The Televisa is showing film of tornado-like weather formations, a storm in a teacup, waterspout, something with flames. The sound is off, that is good. This means that ah the experts spouting their explanations with much hand waving are not to be heard either.

There is a commotion outside in the station hall, a crowd staring at the huge Timetable on the wall over the passageway to the tracks ->

Take a look, and see that the train is delayed.
Twenty minutes, who knows why. Return to the writing room, and then, after a moments Thought, proceed to platform number eight. There is a small train there,
- a local train, a slow train. It will leave in four minutes, and even if it it takes ten minutes longer for the joumey, it will arrive in Freising earlier than
- the delayed trains.

Later, watch all the brightly lit industrial buildings on the way. Warehouses, short term storage. Carefully placed industrial lighting, all in perfect straight lines, each light source illuminating the corrugated warehouse wall behind it, creating a triangular pattern on the wall. As it is dark, only the light source and the triangle are to be seen with the illuminated forecourt and it's the mesh wire fencing.. All with German regularity and precision, in the snow.

- One warehouse after the next, maybe four or five, BMW, a fan maker for computer cooling, warehouses everywhere. Beside the tracks.

And now, after a slightly longer journey, The little train arrives in Freising.