They didn't come

[topum]

We were on a train crossing Romania from east to west (don't do this it really sucks, drive instead). The train stopped in this bleak small town only for three minutes very early in the morning. It was cold, wet and grey and the station was really run down, depressing and almost empty. This old guy was standing there, his head and hands shaking, scanning the train from the front to the end and back anxiously trying to see if anybody was getting off the train. Nobody did and as soon the train started moving he walked away with his two walking sticks, dragging his left foot a bit every third step or so.



I called granddad in a couple of hours and got "What is it about? I can't really talk now, we are driving to Gothenburg today and had to leave the house two hours ago but your grandmother is not being easy about this as usual so I am going through some intense stuff here now so that we can bloody leave already." That was great to hear.

Comments

[topum.livejournal.com]

I like to visit them too. But I bet you wouldn't want to live in a place like this?

[bunn.livejournal.com]

You know, inching through crowded, busy incredibly-prosperous Britain, I have been known to feel a certain nostalgia for tired, worn, poor 70's Britain where there was no money to repair things or build things, and half the buildings were run-down Victorian or hastily-patched-up second World War.


The space and freedom. Wildflowers cracking through old cement. Striped cheerful caterpillars on old bomb-site rubble. Real clouds of butterflies, the kind yrelenou just don't get here now (and my mother tells me that the clouds of butterflies of the 70's were nothing on those of the 40's...) Empty roads and no signs on everything telling you what you can't do.

I wouldn't really go back, but none the less there is a sense of something lost...

[topum.livejournal.com]

I know what you mean but those towns would not bring that something lost back. One cannot help but have a constant feeling that everything is lost walking through them. Very few people left, no kids, closed and crumbling schools that were once full of kids, shops boarded up, everything is boarded up and crumbling. I think in Britain in the 70s there was no sense of being irrelevant and forgotten and that life was happening somewhere else but it would never be happening here anymore.