Category: trains

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Tackling the Chaos: Memories Lost and Overwhelmed

Clicking through photos again to track down another one which came up on my desktop recently, I thought it was from Sête in Provence, but it was a little further east along the coast, at Le Grau du Roi in the Camargue, taken on a very grey and damp Spring Equinox in 2012 (of course). Which reminds me of my late friend Douglas Jeal, who, after hearing my tales, went to the south of France at around the same time the following year, then grumbled at me because the weather was horrible. What did he expect? Well, he had lived in Barcelona for a while, which has its own microclimate, so I suppose he can’t be blamed for thinking it might be similar  a few hundred miles along the Mediterranean coast.

What else does that remind me of? A few days ago the image on my desktop was of a map of that corner of the Med, a mural on the wall of Bordeaux station, where I was stranded for a couple of hours or so during a train strike when I was en route from Brittany to northern Spain. Something piqued my interest when I saw it again, but I couldn’t remember what it was, so I opened the file in Photoshop to check, and still can’t see why. It’s quite a poor quality photo – from an old, pre-Smart Nokia phone – so zooming in hasn’t helped. Maybe it will come to me.

I’ve mentioned before about the Magic Refilling Data pot, and how my efforts at clearing space on my google Drive by downloading photos from Google photos to my hard drive and then deleting them from Google photos were being thwarted because every morning my phone was being backed up to another file on Google Drive. Over several days (because it takes a long time to select and delete that many photos and my PC is four years old and quite creaky – and also it was refilling again every morning with the ones I hadn’t backed up and removed from my phone) I managed to get all the photos up to the end of 2020 from my phone, onto my hard drive, and removed from the backup file on Google drive. The day came when I logged on to my computer, opened my Gmail, and was informed that I had used 11 Gb of my 15Gb allocation. That lasted a couple of hours before the messages started to appear telling me that my Google Drive was full again.

I listed all files in descending file-size, and found that the photos I’d already deleted were still appearing on the list. By clicking on each file, I was given a side panel with details, including the folder where the file was located. Clicking on the name of the folder led me up the tree to the folder where it was, and so on until I reached a folder called ‘Desktop’, and above that, another one called ‘Computers’… tbc

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Trains of Thought

This morning I have quite a vivid memory of dreaming, which is awkward because I already had an idea of what I wanted to write about, which I’ll have to try and retain for another time.

I was at Bedford station, waiting for a train to London, only it wasn’t exactly the Bedford station I know, because it was much bigger, and a lot of renovation and construction was going on, in particular there was a large restaurant/lounge, as opposed to the ATM kiosk where I used to grab a Café Maya or chai latte in passing, or the Starbucks which is now in the place of the old newsagent. I had a special ticket which entitled me to a free drink and cake in the restaurant, but I realised I hadn’t got my rail card, and wondered if I should go ‘home’ (my old flat was only 15 minutes walk away) to get it. I got talking to an old friend, then I realised it was getting late, and I didn’t know what I was going to do in London, or whether I’d have time to do whatever it was, and if there was even any point in going anyway.

Running out of time requires no deep explanation, and train journeys are also very familiar. I always associate them with running away, and when the Eurostar terminal moved to St Pancras, I was very excited about the fact that I could go from Bedford to Brussels or Paris with only one change of train – and from there, of course, all the way to Istanbul or anywhere in Europe or Asia. At the station in Sofia, waiting on a very wet day (kind of like today) I saw on the timetable, and heard on the announcements, that there was a direct train to St Petersburg, and checking the ferry timetables in Istanbul, I discovered I could get one to Odessa (but not to Constanta in Romania, which is what I was hoping for).

But the thoughts I had yesterday, after I’d finished writing, were about fate, and destiny, and Taoism, and can I remember what that was, am I fated never to get to the end of that thought, or even to the point? I believed in fate when I was young, I remember a conversation in which I said this, and someone said: ‘I don’t because I could never have predicted that I’d end up doing this’. But that was the exact point that made me believe, because of the small chances that can have such a strong impact on life. However, I didn’t know how to explain myself, and since then I have come to believe the opposite, that fate and destiny are illusions, things aren’t set in stone, because we can never know what the alternative choices would have led to. Even if we can untangle all the chances, choices, causes and effects that led to a specific event, we still can’t say ‘this had to happen’.