Tuesday, April 05, 2005

Postcard from the train

There's a strange feeling of Godliness (is that a word?) riding a train over suburbia, looking down at the tiny houses, and the tiny people, cleaning their tiny cars. And it doesn't seem real somehow. More like Legoland, or those miniture model villages (which are incidentally popular amongst megalomaniacs).

It also allows a rare viewing into the lives that people close away. Fences that keep neighbours from peering in are, from this height, redundant and look more like a grid, or a repeat pattern, that suggests that people's lives are roughly the same. Some have inflatible paddling pools, some rock gardens, some, for the idle green fingered, fence to fence concrete patio. But they all share the same postcode and look up at the same patch of sky.

My excitement, the reason I am shaking my leg, is because I am about to embark on a tour of North America and, periodically, look up at different skies, roam 'zip code' zones (oh yeah) and, if only for three weeks, live a life less ordinary.

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