Ignoring the Shadow

5:55pm.
Back home in Brighton, sat in my room (got the internet working again - touch wood) and listening to Ministry's 'Land of Rape and Honey' album. Bright blue skies outside, a few white wisps of refreshing cloud. It's hot and it feels like summer. Pale yellow streets of Hove, an afternoon of trains and stations, passengers and expensive coffee in plastic cups.
Em and myself left Worcester at 11:30 this morning. We had coffee with my parents (in the process of moving to the near-Worcestershire village of Cleobury Mortimer, a name from a Thomas Hardy novel or a ghost story perhaps).
Strange to think I shall not be seeing Perranporth again.
There is little more pleasant than a train ride on a sunny morning through the Worcestershire countryside, except perhaps one at the beginning of a holiday and not the end. The landscape is so much more absorbing than Sussex, so much greener, and deeper, and somehow more ancient. Shadowy clumps of trees, meadows that seemed full of hidden paths, winding brooks, and from the train window, it all looked unreal. A dream of a countryside perhaps. A glimpse of something perfect; a winding stream through a cluster of trees on the rise of a field, and amongst the trees a hut. I thought that I would like to sleep here, and then the hut and trees and stream were gone forever.
As we drew south the colour of the landscape changed, from the deep greens of Worcestershire to the pale dusty yellows of Sussex. Even the colour of the stones of buildings changed; from sandstone - red to the somehow lacking white - yellow of down here.
There was some kind of delay at Oxford and we had to change trains. I continued reading Bolano's 'The Savage Detectives' throughout the journey.
Home now. Summer is here, the sun is out. I try to ignore the thought of the alarm in the morning, or of returning to work, or of that shadow of that always comes on the final evening of a week off from work.