Postcard from Cleobury Mortimer

First post on my new lap top. No humming of ancient hard-drives, and  I have an 'i' key I can actually type with. White keyboard, all new and under the keys, the turquoise blue of the background panel, all sci-fi blue and gleaming, a summer pool made of metal and alien sky...
Got soaked walking to Brighton Station this morning. A deceptively fine rain in the mild air. I wished I had caught the bus.
The train ride up here went immensely quick (still what wouldn't be quick after the epic fourteen hour coach journey from Inverness to Brighton three weeks ago today?) No hitches, no delays, even the tube ride was smooth... The most annoying thing was a French man who sat next to me on the train from London to Worcester (he kept shifting and squirming in his seat like some recalcitrant child) and the man who sat behind me on the train from Brighton to London, whose voice resonated at a particular timbre that seemed uncannily precise in its ability to irritate...
Always nice watching the landscape shift, from the sparse dullness of the Sussex Downs to the tangled luxuriance of Worcestershire, the latter a landscape of poplar trees and chimneys, crumbling red brick walls and tangled clusters of trees scattered about the yellowing October fields. Autumn had cast all this with a light from a dream, full of something pensive, as if the train were passing through a landscape where something had just happened. The journey was also marked by an incredible tiredness, an inexplicable exhaustion pushing me into the tempations of sleep, of train-sleep, lulled into dreams by the rhythm of the carriages, the wheels on the tracks, the passing of station names Moreton-in-Marsh, Kingham, Evesham, Honeybourne, Pershore...
I had ten minutes to spare at Worcester, waiting outside Foregate Street station for my parents to pick me up. Leant against the time table sign, watching all the teenagers passing by (why is Worcester full of so many teenagers? - I never noticed it when I lived here). Here I was, yet another Worcester - not the Worcester I travel to with Em, nor the one I went to college at, nor the one even before that, day-trips from my parents then bungalow in Bretforton, winter days, and long summer sighs, car and train-rides through that endless midlands landscape... and yet it was the same Worcester. If I turned right, then cut behind the station I would find Em's parents house, if I turned left, I would find the upward slope to London Road, where the ghosts of old summers and older autumns might wait... There was something strangely melancholy about waiting there, and I was glad when my parents arrived to pick me up.
A twenty minute car journey, and we were in Cleobury Mortimer, a name from an And Also The Trees song surely. A new house, a new town, a new landscape that seems familiar at the same time.
Ten past midnight, an Armstrong and Miller repeat on the television, and now I can sleep, that incredible exhaustion of the train journey has gone, and it feels I might stay awake forever...