5/30/2004 Heathrow to Dublin

Customs at Heathrow: a rotund (as are most of the British!) matron with short bangs (she somehow brought to mind the female cleric portrait from Baldur’s Gate) trails behind me and gently asks to see my passport. I turn around and let her see the goods. . . “That’s not a lot of baggage for three weeks,” she asks suspiciously while examining my two small backpacks. I’m suddenly self-conscious. “Uh, yeah. I’m going to have to wash my clothes pretty often.” I’m on my way after she gives the barest of aknowledgments.
--
10:00AM @ St. Pancras (kind of a vile sounding name) drinking the same kind of thick coffee that I had in Amsterdam, brewed from espresso beans with a light brown film on top. Refreshingly chilly out. I’m pleased to think that I packed appropriately. I’ll be needing my jacket soon.
--
Names of stops on the Underground are strangely familiar: Earle’s Court, Hyde Park, Hammersmith, Vaux Hall. . .
--
10:30AM on the Midland Mainline to Sheffield, the cup of prickly caffeine churning in my stomach, thinking once again that “great ideas” never make any difference in this world. They never saved anyone, and this perhaps is the failure of our ‘history’ because ideas come and go but the logic of power and self-preservation operates just the same. Grandiose philosophy is merely a convenient tool to manipulate the more sensitive among us, to force us into compliance with Power and Capital. Is philosophy nothing more than ‘super-structure’?
--
Feeling like l’étranger. But I’m intriguied by the racial diversity of the UK.
Watching from the train I see tightly packed redbrick homes, each two or three stories tall. They remind me of the music video for ‘Our House’ (by Madness).

--
How long has it been since I last slept? I didn’t expect England to be this sunny. Are there 秘境の駅 fanatics in the UK as well? There are so many desolate train stations along the way to Derby. . .

--
I need a watch. I need to communicate. There’s something about a solitary journey that makes me want to exhaustively document every moment.
--
3:30PM, stuck at Crewe, and will be here for at least another hour. “bus left eight minutes early it did, but ‘ats alroight, it was full anyways,” says the sarcastic woman next to me on her cellphone. We’re stuck because the train line ends here due to construction and there are not enough shuttle buses to get us to the next station. So, I’m stuck in this rusted trainstation in a town I’ve never heard of. I need to get to Chester or I’m going to miss my ferry.


--
6:30PM, train at Chester came late lucky for us, because the shuttle bus didn’t get us there until five minutes after it was scheduled to depart. We’re finally speeding westward on the north coast of Wales along some spectacular salt-flats and pasture-land. Derelict ships and sheep . I just may make the ferry and get to Dublin tonight. Haven’t eaten anything since 11:00AM. . .
--
8:10PM on the Irish Ferry ( the M.V. Jonathon Swift, no less) with some young hooligans. Initial impression of the Irish: boors compared to the British. On the bus to the ferry terminal a band of young (but remarkably grizzled-looking) lads start razzing this greying gentleman traveling with a dog. “Hey! No dogs allowed in Ireland!” “What’s ‘is name? Rabies?” The old man only returned a smirk tinged with a grimace, and kept silent.
The Irish Ferry reminds me somewhat of a Carnival Cruise ship, especially its choice of interior colors and its slot-machines. The wind on deck was so strong that I had to hold on tight or be blown off.