Train-Sleep and Polar Lamps

Despite some great intention to walk up the Old Shoreham Road in the pre-dawn darkness of this morning on the way to Brighton train station, I ended up catching the bus from halfway down Cromwell Road. This was due mainly to the iciness of the ground, thanks to an overnight frost. Each step painfully measured and slow. A fear of losing my balance and falling. This will be my fear when I am elderly. My old age will be shadowed with the fear of broken bones. The thought of descending the hill from Seven Dials to the train station was not one I relished. Anyway, if I caught the bus, I would have time for a coffee at the station.
The early morning streets were surprisingly busy, and the station even more so. It was only about 6:45am when I arrived. I queued up for a 'large coffee' while a cross Irish man behind the counter shouted at people behind me to 'use the down till!' (whatever that meant) as the one I was at was closing.
With my (very large) coffee I wandered back onto the concourse, listening to some ridiculous death metal album on my headphones ('Horrorhammer' by Abscess). There certainly were a lot of people about.
I looked up at the board at the 'cancelled train' and the 'severe delays' notices, and listened to the message about a 'broken train at Haywards Heath', which meant no trains going to where I wanted to be until it was removed. My heart sank.
As happened I made it to Reading with five minutes before my connection to Cornwall - but with no time to look for old horror comics in junk shops.
I spent most of my time on the four hour train journey to Cornwall drifting through train-sleep. Jarring dream-jags falling in line with the carriage rhythm, glimpses of grey countryside passing by, an anonymous landscape of brown fields and sheep and winding icy rivers...
When I alighted from the train at Truro it was raining, the kind of rain that only Cornwall can do; bleak and despairing, freezing and exhausting. The sky was the grey of prisons on January afternoons. The air tasted downtrodden.
Spent most of the afternoon sleeping.
As night fell, which seems later than in Brighton, I noticed that the bulbs in the streetlamp on my parents street had changed. Instead of the classic orange, they were now bars of spectral, icy blue, street lamps in an imagined Scandinavian country. Out of the kitchen window I looked down onto the rest of Perranporth - icy blue street lights everywhere. It seems all the orange ones have been replaced. The colour of these new lamps seem almost arctic, all snow-blindness and sharpness like polar bears distilled into fatal jewels.
Makes it seem like a slightly different town.