Ramblings on my mobile through a late night train journey

Quiet small-town station. Very late night... Stationary trains. Sleepy passengers waiting. Waiting for the white cliffs of Dover where they are going. Waiting with a single-minded aim of getting into the train - the first step to Dover. A ghostly voice shrieking out names of hot beverages fills the station.

Wee Willie Winkie walks down the station...

Are all the children now in bed, for now it is 3 AM...

Mosquitoes, coffee, train announcements, bedraggled people, drowsy faces, a million reasons for going, a million reasons not to go, a million hopes, a million worries, a million white cliffs of Dover. Me a part of the whole... Waiting for my own Dover. Me a microcosm representative of the macrocosm. Here comes my train. Here I come…

The white cliffs of Dover - a scrap of memory wedged between gusts of life, refusing to be blown away.

Somerset Maugham is where I read it many moons ago when I was in school. That creation of hope and longing and wishful thinking for a desired object that cannot be attained – an object imbued with all the aspirational qualities mostly imagined. Maugham used it with reference to the British expatriate in South-East Asia yearning for retirement and seeing the white cliffs of Dover before reaching the mainland.

A doomed yearning, for the place would not be as imagined and yearned for, the people wouldn't be the same, the customs neither... And most of all, the person returning wouldn't be the same. He went out as a wide-eyed man eagerly anticipating adventure and change. He returns a much changed man, pockmarked by experiences and the death of idealism. Thus he is fated to live his life out, in the midst of his ruined cliffs. The less resilient succumb to bitterness and despair. The survivors build other white cliffs of Dover, this time around the place left behind – haven’t we all met retired career army-men and the like who love to recount tales from the barracks?

Dark night. Trees, water, interspersed with dark shapes of houses, some unlit, some lit by a bulb outside, streetlights at places, through it all the train hurtling through, cutting the fabric of the night with a shrieking clattering... Constant wind in my face, a bite in the wind, hand gripping a clammy metal bar, the smell of metal in the hand, thoughts of countless houses, people in them sleeping, myriad dreams being dreamt... What might they be dreaming of? Dover tomorrow?Each one's life tomorrow will be different, thoughts different, priorities different...

Unknown to them, there is one commonality to their lives - I have passed through all of them while they slept...