Roll and Fall in Green.

I love the cartoon Englishness of the train journey from Basingstoke to Clapham Junction. The redbrick Victorian houses, the allotments, the green fields and neat little suburbs. The squat, jolly white-washed pubs. A cricket match played on a village green (On a Thursday! At lunchtime!) Elegant Georgian viaducts and blistered-paint, prefabricated train stations. The endless green. As we glide on through Surrey there are flower boxes of licorice all-sorts blooms, and proper high streets, full of small shops you haven't heard of, still clinging on, tenacious as weeds. Stockbroker Tudor is still seen, and more green, invincible yeoman green, the deep, deep green of England. It rolls past, improbably English, undulating like a tongue over soft southern vowels. The small c village green preservation society, jammin' on Jerusalem. From a train window it's beautiful. From a train window it all still works. See England by train, but never alight from it. 

But we get off at Clapham Junction. I used to occasionally take the train from Basingstoke to Clapham Junction before, years ago when I had a girlfriend living in Farnham. There was no direct train, and Clapham Junction is basically London, so the journey time, with changes, was about an hour and a half. I felt like Sir Fuckin' Galahad when I stepped onto the platform at Farnham station, though I don't think I made that epic journey more than three times the entire time we were going out. I didn't have any money for train fare, and she had a car, and I was lazy, so it made far more sense for her to drive the forty miles to see me, even though when she did, I still didn't have any money. I WAS QUITE THE CATCH.* 

I've just realised that I might have been able to catch a direct bus from Basingstoke to Farnham - it would have been cheaper and quicker. But Farnham is in Surrey, and I doubt they have buses there. Perhaps a coach and pair, with liveried footmen. 

*Still am.