With Australia now in full and temporarily forever lockdown, this means that not only international travel bans have come into force but domestic and local travel bans have also come into force. In other words, the government has decided that nobody is allowed to go outside and travel anywhere.
That doesn't mean that we can't create entire worlds in our minds and run around in those. Pretty much every book written before about 1930 has entered the public domain; so if you want to run around inside the world of someone else's mind, it is really easy. We all now have loads of time for Uninterrupted Sustained Silent Reading (USSR); so why not run around inside the mind of someone else? However, since you are here, why not run around inside my mind? I promise that it will be a different place to the real world.
You can imprison me in my house but you'll never imprison me inside my own mind!¹
Day 1
I hope that the cab that I sent was fancy enough for you. I apologise for the smell of strawberries but it's just that the chap who was in the cab before you wanted to go to the Imaginary Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club at Imaginary Wimbledon. Imaginary Wimbledon is a lot like real Wimbledon except for the persistent infestation of Wombles and the fact that they play Imaginary Tennis as opposed to Real Tennis there.
I asked the porter to take your bags and put them in the cargo van of the train because even here in an imaginary land, I still couldn't book a private compartment on the train. First though, let me give you a tour of Grand Hallworth Station.
Grand Hallworth Station was originally just a single island platform when the railway first arrived here in 1858. By 1870, when Hallworth had swelled to just over 8 million people, people's incomes had reached high enough and the price of train travel fallen far enough, that they could travel around the country. John Hill who was a showman, a shyster, a shill, and a shilling-raiser, originally raised ₱30m as seed capital. The original station buildings were finished in 1871 but only that wall by the pastry kiosk remains.
The current building which we are currently in, with 8 steel and glass arched awnings which extend the full length of the platforms and which cover four tracks each, was finished at a cost of ₱4bn and was opened on February 30th 1889.
If you look upwards, you can see that there are rivets which hold the various pieces of steel together and at 25 support arches per awning, that works out to just over 55,000 rivets which keep the roof up.
The engine at the front of the train that we'll be getting on today, is a Horace B6 Pacific class (4-6-2) nuclear steam train. Yes, we are perfectly aware of the danger that poses, after the accident last year when that train derailed and crashed at Wappin Forest but the police did put up a 'Do Not Cross' line; so as long as nobody enters the exclusion zone at Wappin Forest until the year 26020, we should be all right. This particular engine is No.66005 and is called 'The Spirit Of Panda²'.
I have booked us into the Second Class carriage because the irony is that as the First Class carriage has nicer and cushier seats, it is not as fun to ride in. You will also note that towards the back of the train is the Saloon carriage (although the little swinging hinged doors at either end are daft), which is followed by a Nightclub carriage, a Kebab Van carriage and then a Regret carriage. I do not advise going back there.
Have you ever noticed the moquettes on train and bus seats? Do you know what a moquette is? It is the pattern of the king of cloth which has a very biased weft.
The black and white pattern on these seats which I imagine is a derivative of houndstooth, is pretty neat, I think. The Great Northern Imaginary Railway (GNIR) inherited a whole bunch of railway assets when it took over from the Southern Lowlands Overland and Wappin Co. (SLOW Co.). Given that Wappin is now off limits for the next 24,000 years, there's not really a lot of point sending imaginary trains there anymore. We could just try imagining that Wappin never existed but that's now a level of unreality within another world of unreality. Be careful or the world that we've built for ourselves might collapse in on itself.
A nuclear stream train is great because we do not need to burn coal to generate steam. It also means that because of the fantastic pressure inside the boiler, nuclear steam engines are built stronger than coal fired engines but they do not need to be as large. It also means that we will be travelling at an average speed of more than 200mph; which makes Mallard look like a bit of a lame duck.
You will have noticed that once we moved out beyond the centre of town and the skyscrapers gave way to factories and then red tiled houses and then tin shacks, that there's not a lot out here except for farms and fields, rocks, hills and plains. Not that that matters very much because once it is completely dark outside, the only thing that will be visible is the ghostly galleon of the moon tossed upon a cloudy sea. Once we move out into the unimaginatively named Flat Desert (which seems strangely appropriate considering that once you move outside of the realms of imagination there's diddly-squat out here) then at some point the guards will turn out the lights and everyone will go to sleep.
I'm sorry that this is going to be a bit boring for the next few hours but that's the way it is. You can have a read of my Modern Lion magazine³ if you like. There's a good article in there about stabling your lions for your cabriolet. I can only afford one lion and so I have a single lion chariot⁴.
The scrub out here isn't very tall and it's a good thing that we're going through here on the train. Most of the vegetation for the next 1200 miles is no taller than four feet
It's all kind of pretty in its own way. Just because there's nothing much out there and we're confined to staring out of the windows for a while as the world hurtles past, you can still quietly ponder the sereneness of it all.
¹Although it could be argued that since we all suffer from existential cosmic loneliness and can only ever experience the world from our own perspective, that we always were imprisoned within our own minds; which also helps to explain why mental health should be taken extremely seriously and as a properly funded healthcare issue.
²Which is apt as everyone who is mad enough to ride on a train which is pulled by a nuclear steam engine is an endangered species.
³Modern Lion magazine: only ₱5.95
⁴That is, a chariot with only one lion pulling it; as opposed to a chariot being pulled by an unmarried lion. I do not wish to comment on the marital status of lions.
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