It is ages since I blogged from the train. Usually I'm prevented from reflection by travelling everywhere on shanks' pony, which leaves me pink palmed, breathless, practising the tendons and trying to feel alert to the muscles that are warming up - trying in fact to feel anything other than the cold rain on my nose, and the blister forming beneath the callouses on my sole. Walking's a more solitary activity - your interaction limited to shrugged greetings, fleetingly awkward manoeuvres which rarely progress beyond 'shall I catch her eye', 'has he seen me' or 'shall I overtake yet'.

Train travel, and I'm bombarded by other's phone calls home, excited conversations, wild clothing combinations, faces both animated and bored.
In two minutes I've been treated to four SE London fight narratives, enthusiastically mimed in replay, and a host of tips on how to avoid paying the fare (apparently saying 'sorry, me fohh-ren' to the ticket inspecter yields least success.)

Safe in my seat I can stare out at a dramatic, lowering blue sunset, Canary Wharf in granite blue and silver outlined on the cold pink horizon as wash after wash of navy thunderheads gloom threateningly above.
I can listen to the rails' repeated rumbling energy, trying to decipher a rhythm, a tune, words, from its weighty creaking rattle.
Or look the other way, avoiding the picturesque sunset, and see greenish flickering gold window reflections jewelling against the dried blood coloured boxes of inner city tenements.
Peer into the still lit offices, emptied of their usual occupants, each tenth window revealing a thin moving figure who looks like me.
Or watch the sky in the oily gun metal platform puddles as the train slows to a judder, the surface calm but cold, the bridge platform frozen in space, the Thames churning below.