I Like Birds: Things don’t always quite go to Plan

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I was having a perfectly nice dream. I sat there, drinking tea, listening to nothing but birdsong. No traffic, no scrap man looking for a legitimate living out of begging, no van outside the house blasting Portugese hip-hop from his stereo. Just tea and birdsong. Then it was destroyed by a big, shiny robot with a vaguely female, but mostly robotic sounding voice. “The time is four. Forty-five. Ayyyyy Emmmm”. In one move, which I was possibly taught in one of my short-lived karate lessons at the age of eight, I woke, swung round and struck the robot right on the snooze button. Then I took in the surroundings and noticed something didn’t seem right. It was the light. It was, after all, 4.45 in the morning, a time I have as little experience with as possible, it was meant to be raining according to the forecast, and my bedroom curtains keep out the brightest sunshine. Even so, the light creeping in around the corners of the curtains was unmistakeable. Convinced that my alarm was accidentally set to mid-morning, I jumped out of bed and into the second bedroom, which has two clocks in it. One said 10.00, the other 5.30. Neither were working. Thankfully, I had been awake for almost 30 seconds now and remembered that we were virtually at midsummer. A quick calculation in my head based on the current axis of the planet revealed that the sun was indeed due to rise at 4.44AM, so had been up for almost a minute when my normal sleep patterns were so rudely interrupted. Oddly enough for the hour, I was wide awake and ready to face the world. This would never happen on a work day.

By 5.30 I was in the car and on my way to pick up Faith and John. What astounded me was how quiet everywhere was; barring the occasional early-morning jogger there was not a soul around. At this time in the morning the birds were unafraid to wander around and I had to keep an eye out as I traversed the speed-bumps of Wednesfield to make sure no collared doves where re-enacting the Beatles’ ‘Abbey Road’ cover on the other side. At this time of day, that dream of more birdsong, less human noise was very much a reality. It’s unlikely I will find the energy to get out of bed early enough to see it very often, but it is most certainly there. It was ironic, in many ways, that we had planned to take ourselves to a completely different country with the intention of spotting birds, then discovered that they were all on the doorstep as we left. I picked John and Faith up then headed for my mom’s house, where we would meet Lyndsey and where mom would give us a lift to the train station. By 6.30, we were in the station, ready to take the early morning train that would have us in Edinburgh in time to grab a late morning breakfast.

For the benefit of those not used to the train services of Britain, they can quickly be summed up by two words: Expensive and late. With this in mind, I was pleasantly surprised that, as long as we got out of bed early enough, we could get to Edinburgh for £25, and even more surprised when we were leaving Wolverhampton as scheduled at 6.36. Deep down, we knew it wouldn’t last, and before long the loudspeaker told us, in a slightly coded message so as not to upset the children, that there was a body on the line just north of Preston and we may experience some delays. As we were heading to Scotland, we took this as a cue to repeat that well known Scottish phrase, ‘there’s bin a muhrrderrr’ for the rest of the day. As the driver pointed out, if someone had been hit by a train, they would have just cleaned up the mess and everyone would be on their way without too much hassle. I had experienced this in Hungary, ten years and a day before this latest incident by coincidence, when the train we were travelling on took out a local, leaving the army to pick up his body from the side of the train and the driver to wipe his face from the windscreen. Within an hour we were moving once more and the victim’s legacy was nothing more than leaving a driver probably needing counselling and a passing mention in a travel journal 10 years later. Back to the present though, and the victim had not been hit by a train, but found on the line. Police forensic teams were in, and by the time we hit Preston, we were going nowhere.

When it became clear that nothing was going to happen in the near future, our train turned back and headed to Birmingham, and we got off with the intention of either discovering the delights of Preston, or finding out how we could carry on to Edinburgh. As it happened, we were confident Preston had nothing exciting to offer, and the train company had arranged coach services taking us to another train station just past the incident where we could carry on our journey. We rushed out of the station to the coach pick up point and found a coach ready and waiting for us. There were also several hundred people in a queue in front, so we were probably in for a long wait. Things could have been worse though; ahead of us was a man dressed, head to foot, as a Roman soldier, which probably seemed like a great idea when he was planning to jump off the train at Carlisle and straight onto Hadrian’s Wall, but seemed less so now that he had to stand in a queue opposite Preston’s shopping centre, sit on a coach for an hour and trudge around a random village in the Lake District before he could get back on the train. As the queue slowly edged towards the reserve coaches that were coming in to ferry us on, I looked up and noticed a look in John’s eye that told me he had a confession to make. We were surrounded by strangers with nowhere to run and he had wind. “You could have waited until we were in Edinburgh”, I muttered under my breath.

The Roman left us behind and we had to turn to the panicking Virgin Trains manager, whose red suit and headless chicken running made the place look more like a Butlins holiday camp than a train station, for entertainment until we were on board the coach and moving once more. The coach took us around the highlights of Preston, which appeared to be a pub called The Old Black Bull and the road to the M6, then onwards and upwards until we stopped at Oxenholme, somewhere in the middle of the Lake District. From here we could get the next train and be on our way. As we trudged up to platform one we could distinctly make out the sandalled feet of the Roman once more, and this time we could see a dozen or so children dressed similarly. I’m not sure if this would have made him feel more or less comfortable in his current situation, so we left them to their own devices and headed for the station shop for a hot chocolate while we waited for the train. Oxenholme station looks like the kind of place that, on a busy day, would see about four people pass through, and so the descent of every northward bound traveller and twenty Romans seemed to have tipped the lady running the cafe over the edge, but she did manage to serve us our drink-and-a-muffin combination before the stress left her crumpled in a heap behind the microwave. At just after 11.00, four and a half hours into the journey, we were back on the train. The train came in from Preston, as the line had now reopened, so we could have just waited, but life is much more enjoyable if you go and find the unknown rather than waiting for it to find you.

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