Remembering the Terminal Lands of the Metropolitan Line

The Coblers Thumb last night was full of people dressed as pirates and fairies, some kind of theme night whose origins were uncetain, but a tall goth girl was wearing a birthday badge, which was probably the nominal reason.
Sat in the crowded smokng area while the rest of the pub was empty. Brick walls covered with graffiti paintings, and in the corner, a box like a miniature shed hummed away to itself. Warm to the touch, I tried to lift the lid to view the generator (or whatever) inside but it was nailed shut, a forbidden industry. Mr Flo and his friend Kate, her father an actor known mostly for a part in the old television series 'Butterflies'. Sunday nights when I was a kid, that theme tune reminding me of school approaching fast the next day. Oddly, of summer too. Long Scottish days where I would go to sleep before nigtfall and wake long after the sun had risen, a season without darkness, summer in an imagined Arctic.
As I grow older I find that I drink less and less when I go out. Last night I had three pints and a Jack Daniels and couldn't drink any more.
Despite this, Em and myself finally got up as it neared 1:00pm today. A day full of cold wind and rumoured sun. There was talk of going for a walk into the Shoreham Industrial Zone, but after a full English breakfast in a cafe, where loud Chinese men who looked like fishermen talked in Cantonese or Mandarin, we settled for a film at her flat.
We watched 'Metroland', based on the film by Julian Barnes. I think I had tried to watch the film before -I have certainly read the book- but it had been on too late and I had had work the next day, a 'Butterflies' for my thirties. This was over the petrol station years when I would regularly get up for work at 5:00am. A film basically about suburbia, 'Metroland' was full of shots of commuters, train windows looking out onto shaggy, half-untidy gardens, tennis clubs in tidy parks and autumn paths littered with leaves. I felt a strange nostalgia for Ickenham, for those adolescent years spent in the terminus lands of the Metropolitan tube line. I suppose 'Meroland' was actually set in the area.
Suburbia.
I find something oddly comforting and fascinating about suburban landscapes; long hidden gardens nestled behind detached red brick houses, and those secret gardens, tiny strips of countryside, that are known only by the people who live in the house.
By the time the film had finished twilight had fallen, surprisingly early, about 7:00pm. We left Em's house, she to the shops, and myself back here.
I find myself thinking abut those tube rides back from London. Station names like an arcana of mundanity; Ruislip, Northolt, Hillingdon, Harrow-on-the-Hill, Northwick Park... A litany of places I knew most intimately from the Metropolitan and Central line carriage windows. Hidden, unthought-of country etched briefly on glass.
Sometimes, I imagine myself living there, commuting to London and back. The sound of starlings kissing the electric rail in sunset-raw mornings. The platforms like long islands in a sea of railway lines, and coming into Baker Street that one building that was so labyrinthine and ragged and vast, I was convinced it had grown rather than been built.